Say “contemporary art show” and some people will run the other way.
Not Ngoc-Linh Dang. She’s an architectural designer who traveled from Los Angeles specifically for Art San Diego, an annual boutique art show with exhibitors from as near as Spring Valley and as far as Canada and Spain. Her jaunt paid off: an hour after the show’s doors opened Sunday at the San Diego Convention Center, Dang had picked up a collage by San Diego artist J.V. Aranda, who grew up here, studied in London and returned.
“It just stood out to me, graphically.” Dang said. “I was like, ‘Oh, that looks fun.’ ”
The content and theme spoke to her, too. The image shows a room inside a home in comical disarray . The piece is called “Independence,” she said.
Dang said she found it all very relatable. She recently moved into her own apartment, for the first time. “I’m going through a growth of independence, and so it speaks to me, ‘cause this is how it feels,” she said.
The art show, which ran Friday through Sunday, featured around 100 listed exhibitors, including artists, galleries and an immersive installation. It also had an artsy scavenger hunt and and works by students at Monarch School, which educates students impacted by homelessness.
Attendees — kids, grown-ups, tourists, other artists — got a window into the works being made by San Diego artists and, through those works, their lives, emotions and concerns. Some were focused on animals, some on pollution, some on storytelling and humor.
Guests and artists attend Art San Diego, an art and design fair, at the San Diego Convention Center on Sunday.
(Kristian Carreon/For The San Diego Union-Tribune)
For an abstract artist who gave her name as Lisa-E, the show was an opportunity to present her work outside its usual home at Liberty Station.
Lisa-E said her art translates the emotions she felt during her 26-year career as a search and rescue pilot for the Coast Guard: both the adrenaline of being a pilot and what she felt while “saving someone’s life on the high seas.”
“That intensity goes into my work,” she said. She won the Best Solo Exhibitor award.
Though her life informs her art, the titles she chooses invite viewers to make their own meaning. “I don’t want to be didactic,” she said. “The viewers are the ones that on a visceral level get something different — each person that looks at something like this.”
One such open-ended title, on an acrylic painting in shades of green: “Halcyon Burst.”
