Ed Giardina and Devon Tsuno along with their student artists from Cypress College Art Department and CSU Dominguez Hills PRAXIS art engagement program + DHAC student art club are voluntarily working together (remotely) to construct, assemble, and distribute face shields to communities in need during the COVID-19 pandemic.
These southern California communities include healthcare and essential workers, such as hospitals and clinics, senior communities, grocery and delivery workers, public-transportation riders, and other under-funded non-profits. Their efforts have been funded by donations made by people across the globe via social media.
This is a flexible, temporary coalition of volunteers that will try and be responsive to the changing conditions of this pandemic. Selected participants have committed to using provided equipment and materials to only print PPE (personal protection equipment) for a minimum of 1-3 months, 8-12 hours per day, and 7 days a week to produce the maximum amount of PPE possible. PPE must only be donated FREE of charge through regional 3D PPE networks or to any groups or individuals who are healthcare or essential workers at risk. Participants do not accept payment or gifts for PPE.
All participants believe it is vital in this operation to maintain the utmost safety, working from home, following recommended guidelines from healthcare and science experts and not engage in direct contact with people. We believe in being safe as the number one priority. Upon completion of the project, all remaining printers and supplies will be kept by participants as a small token of gratitude for their service for creative purposes, and future efforts of good.
On May 15, 2020 at 6:30pm EST More Art’s Engaging Artists fellows will participate in a workshop via zoom with Ed Giardina and Devon Tsuno. The event is open to current and alumni Engaging Artists Fellows. If you are an EA fellow and would like to attend, please email info@moreart.org
Ed Giardina is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who lives and works in the Los Angeles area. His research interests include socially engaged art, old and new media, and design. He teaches full time at Cypress College. He is also a founding member of Finishing School. Established in 2001, Finishing School is a socially engaged artist collective that playfully explores an expansive range of subject and media territories at the many intersections of art, play, power, politics, praxis, participation, and the everyday. The collective has five members who represent a broad range of skills and research interests. Finishing School produces interdisciplinary actions, installations, workshops, design, publications, film, studio art, performance and new media.
Devon Tsuno: Los Angeles is always described as a city of sprawl. But it is also a massively layered city, growing amidst social stratification and an unsound ecology — people battling for space and an array of international horticulture left as evidence. Neighborhoods are populated, vacated and then repopulated. Communities united and communities restructured.
Working with spray paint and acrylic on handmade Japanese, Dutch and Indian papers, my most recent series of paintings focuses on the Los Angeles landscape’s non-native plants and bodies of water. These abstractions of densely layered water and plants are re-imagined from photographs taken on cycling, fly fishing and commuting sojourns on the streets of Los Angeles along the San Gabriel River, Ballona Creek, Los Angeles River, and the Mid-Wilshire area of the city. These paintings document the light, color, community, history and visual confrontations of pictorial and abstract space using color theory and hard edge abstraction analogous to the diversity of my neighbors.
Most recent experimentation has resulted in a series of prints created with a Risograph, a 1990s-era printing system using technology similar to fax machines, screen printing and designed for high-volume photocopying and printing. I am re-purposing this machine to create a series of artist’s books and prints in collaboration other artists, schools and community members. These prints and books are being distributed in the tens of thousands in the greater Los Angeles area to document the Los Angeles watershed and tributaries.
My practice recalls a city organism composed of intense color and beautifully controlled concrete with space and light well integrated, but often interdicted by violently unexpected layers of vegetation and water. These modes of observation, process, recollection, and criticism, dictate how I choose to work. It is living in the world of Los Angeles that interests me.