The Fonda Blog

City’s junk becomes a cautionary artistic vision

By Victoria Dalkey, Bee Art Correspondent, Friday, Jan. 27, 2012

Gioia Fonda’s drawings begin as photos of street debris.

You would expect an exhibition at a college gallery to be educational. Gioia Fonda‘s show at the James Kaneko Gallery on the American River College campus is that in spades. Fonda documents every step of the labor-intensive process by which she creates her masterful drawings of piles of junk. This body of work, one of which won the best of show award at last year’s State Fair art show, is a poignant comment on a sad aspect of the economic downturn our city has been experiencing.

She begins with color photos of trash piled up on the street in front of houses in her neighborhood. “Most of the piles,” she writes, “seem to occur when an address has experienced an eviction, a foreclosure or sometimes a death: always some kind of transition.” Like canaries in coal mines, they are harbingers of worse things to come. For Fonda, they represent “not only a reflection of the lending crisis but also a comment on our rampant consumerism and the utter disposability of what we produce and what we buy.”

Gioia Fonda stands in front of her winning state fair art piece, “Pile, With Soccer Ball.” The acrylic on canvas art piece placed first in the 2011 California State Fair and is currently displayed in the Kondos Gallery. Tony Wallin wallintony@yahoo.com

That is scarcely a new idea, but Fonda treats it with a mixture of sadness and a formal integrity that lends the piles a kind of monumental grace. The giant pile with a soccer ball, a potted plant, an old bike and a wheelbarrow that was shown in the State Fair exhibition is on view here and is even more imposing in the smaller Kaneko gallery.

Surrounding it are other drawings, among them “Watering Can,” a triangular pile of trash in which a watering can plays a small but significant role. A trio of drawings on the wall across from it features tangles of netting, worn tires, plastic jugs, and a stuffed toy. These are not only commentaries on our throwaway culture but strong abstractions reminiscent at times of Bauhaus Constructivism.

As interesting as the finished drawings are, a series of works that demonstrate how Fonda arrives at her destinations. She begins with the color photos, then isolates the shapes of the objects in the piles, draws them on paper and cuts them out. These cuttings she piles up and arranges into collages from which she then makes Xerox prints. It’s a lengthy, exacting and time-consuming process, but it pays off with drawings that are both moving and formally elegant.

Accompanying Fonda’s works at the campus gallery is a series of mostly small bronze and ceramic sculptures by Garr Ugalde. Their imagery is both innocent and menacing. Combining childhood toys with instruments of war, they comment on “how quickly the world engages its children in war.” “Beehive Rocker” places a child on a crude rocking horse surrounded by alphabet blocks. A beehive placed over the child’s head adds a surreal note of danger. “Pecker” combines grenades and bird skulls. “Night Mother” gives us a pregnant woman with a birdhouse on her head.

Children’s toys and the use of bird imagery, Ugalde writes, “speak to the ideal of freedom, innocence, and the safety of home.” Though superficially, he notes, they seem to be innocuous, lurking among them are instruments of destruction, many derived from war toys. Ugalde’s small works made of bronze are intricate and imbued with a dark humor that turns disturbing as you note the details in them. A larger piece made of ceramic is blunter. Titled “I Used To Carry a Big Stick, Two,” it gives us a pit bull with a grenade in its mouth sitting on a block covered with an American flag. Small texts cite places in which confrontations have occurred, among them Wounded Knee, Guantánamo and Havana. Ugalde’s work is a nice complement to Fonda’s and the two visions result in a show that is both moving and thought-provoking. Curator Ramsey Harris has done a great job of installing the show.

GIOIA FONDA: THE PILE SERIES
GARR UGALDE: WAR STORIES
What: Gioia Fonda lends a monumental grace to piles of refuse that she sees as “a comment on our rampant consumerism and the utter disposability of what we produce and what we buy.” A complementary exhibit of small bronze and ceramic sculptures comes from Garr Ugalde. His imagery is both innocent and menacing, a comment on “how quickly the world engages its children in war.”
Where: James Kaneko Gallery, Room 503, American River College, 4700 College Oak Drive, Sacramento
When: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays, or by appointment, through Feb. 8
Cost: Free
Contact: (916) 484-8399

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Also see: Art instructor, Gioia Fonda wins State Fair competition

written by admin \\ tags: Art, Events, West Coast

The Prince Street House

“The Prince Street House,” located on Prince Street in Berkeley’s south end, is filled with messy-hair-sporting, big-glasses-wearing, thrift-store-junkie type kids drinking cheap wine. Milling around the collection of paintings, photographs and other mixed media, Anthony Fonda instructs the crowd to go ahead and listen to that music on the Ipod nailed to the wall. It works and yes, it’s art.

Fonda, an eccentric local artist from West Oakland, was showing at the Prince Street House art show Saturday night along with many other local artists. Fonda, with his piercing black eyes and the wild hand gestures he threw while speaking about just about anything, stood out amongst the other artists by his palpable passion for creating.  Desiree Dedolce, who has known Fonda since he moved to Oakland two years ago, gushes of the passion Fonda feels for things in his life. “He goes 100 percent for whatever he wants. He just manifests things, I wish I had that trait,” says Dedolce.

West Oakland Beat

Fonda, 24, originally from Santa Monica, California, moved up to the Bay Area in August 2007 to escape the dead-end road he was traveling on.  “I just worked two sh–ty jobs in restaurants, making no money and unable to make art from the hours,” said Fonda. “I just packed up and left trying to find an environment I fit into better.”  He could not have found a better place. Fonda lives in the Vulcan Lofts on West Oakland’s San Leandro Street. These lofts and others located in West Oakland’s warehouses are a popular place for young artists to take over.

Although Fonda says there is no “real apex” for the art scene in the East Bay, West Oakland seems to be one of them. The cheap rent and relative freedom an artist has to do what he or she wants with the property keeps the art scene strong in this part of Oakland. Young artists are able to live in the many warehouse lofts for rent hovering around $100 to $200 a person, if they decided to live with others.  Artists from West Oakland, and other parts of the Bay Area, will get together and hold events to showcase their budding talents. Interdisciplinary shows are mostly on the bill, which include an assortment of different media, music, painting, collage, performance art, and interactive art.

Fonda’s passion for art crosses many mediums, but his main focus is paint and collage. At the recent art show at “The Prince Street House,” Fonda showcased two huge oil paint portraits of a pelican and a zebra. Both, though dull in color mostly, had such detail and layering it looked as if the animals were alive within the canvas.  Swapping is a main factor Fonda focuses on in his interview. He speaks often of the “art world” and those who inhabit it with such distaste. “I’m into swaps because artists don’t have a bunch of money,” says Fonda. “The art world is full of elitists who use money to buy creativity, galleries are full of garbage.”

“People like to buy into that sh-t, the art scene, young people scene. It’s all about appealing to someone,” said Fonda.  Where does school fall into place with these kids, and even Fonda? Many of the young artists have been to some form of instruction yet most drop out after a few years. Elise Mahan, an art history major at San Francisco State University, says she can see where the mindset of these kids comes from.  “I think they see art as an extension of themselves and not necessarily as a career,” says Mahan, “When they are in school they feel like it is as if they are working towards a career, that takes the passion out of it, makes it mechanical.”  It’s not something Fonda has a choice in either. When asked if he ever thought about quitting art he said, “it’s not something you quit, it’s not an occupation.”  Fonda’s philosophy on life seems very Marxist in nature. The swapping of goods according to one’s ability, the communal living and the freedom of “chance operations” would suggest this.

Fonda hopes to perpetuate the environment he so craves and to keep the creative spirit alive in his neighborhood of Oakland. A steady art space and “maybe” an art buyer, someone to commission and sell his art for him, are two of his main dreams.  “I want a place where kids can come and just create,” says Fonda, “ trade pieces, just keep the flow of creative ideas out there.”  Every hello is triumphant, every good bye a heartbreak with Fonda. In his usual dominant manner he exclaims, “Here’s your theme, I’m looking to be successful as an anti-academic, which will probably fail, but I have a lot of fun.”

Posted by Jocie at 2:33 PM

written by admin \\ tags: Achievements, Art, Blogs, West Coast

Exhibits — Lorenzo Fonda: A Retrospective

Embassy of Italy - Washington DC - June 2007

(a past event… for the archives) The Embassy of Italy and the Italian Cultural Institute are cosponsoring an exhibition of artwork entitled “Lorenzo Fonda. A Retrospective.” The exhibit will be on display at the Italian Embassy until July 6, 2007. Maestro Fonda was born in Piran, Istria, in the former Yugoslavia in 1947. His family later moved to Trieste. He received a doctoral degree in medicine and surgery in 1976. His first personal show took place at the gallery “La Luna” in Perugia in 1969.

In 1984 Fonda had his first show in the United States at Andreas Galleries, in Washington D.C. His large canvas work “Trittico per la Pace” (1985) was presented to the town of Assisi, and is now permanently exhibited in the Sala della Conciliazione in Assisi’s Town Hall. In 1989, on the occasion of the USA / USSR Summit “Green Glasnost,” organized by actor Robert Redford, in Sundance, Utah, a large work of his became the symbol of that historical encounter. The work is now on display at the Institute for Resource Management. One of Fonda’s works is part of the permanent collection of the Michetti Museum in Francavilla al Mare, Italy. He has worked as set designer for Shakespeare in Jazz, with the direction of Giorgio Albertazzi, and, most recently, for the Teatro dell’Opera of Rome’s production of Richard Strauss Salomé.

written by admin \\ tags: Achievements, Art, Events

Ten Things I Have Learned About The Sea

Ten Things I Have Learned About The Sea

Italy – I crossed the Atlantic one a ship a few years ago and after it I knew I wasn’t the same anymore. Director Lorenzo Fonda has also felt the powerful insights that only the ocean can reveal, and in his beautiful short film “Ten Things I Have Learned About The Sea” he details them.

The visuals are stunning – a sort of transcendent combo of nature and the ships man has built to traverse across it. The industrial symmetry and mechanical serenity in the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky.

I also have to give props to Fonda for saying under the film “it is 104 mb, there’s no low res version and it is 10 minutes long. let it load. if you don’t have patience or don’t know me personally, you might not want to watch this.” The confidence of that speaks for itself.

Click here to watch “Ten Things I Have Learned About The Sea.”

written by admin \\ tags: Art, News