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RANDALL CABE
"Initiation"
"Vestibule"
Artist's Statement
Guardians of the Secret
I have been interested in Pompeian wall painting for some time, from its frieze-like frontality to its themes of ritual eroticism. I began to ask questions. What and where are our secret spaces? Where do our rites of passage take place? And what are the spaces that allow for their own mythic discourse?
When I was in High School some years ago, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the High School bathroom was one such place. Usually filled with tobacco or marijuana smoke, the High School bathroom existed as a place to defy authority within its boundaries.
Stories of what happened in certain bathrooms became legends. Often I would hear of boys and girls fighting in their respective lavatories. With no proof, one could depend on the braggadocio of those who were involved to get some form of the hypertrophied myth they wished to perpetuate. However, some stories about what happened in the bathrooms were so outlandish, they could only be the construction of a boy's imagination - or not. I would never know but I would certainly fixate on them. These were the stories of girls "practicing kissing" in their secret space.
These paintings are inspired by the secret goings-on in these places where youths would find their own language and create their own rituals -smoking, fighting, and discovering their nascent sexuality, away from the prying eyes of authority.
I wanted to create a non-explicit narrative, focusing on the moments "in between." Using only the traces of my boyhood imagination to fill-in the unanswerable enigma of the "mysteries of girls."
I want to leave "narrative certainty" to the viewer, much in the way I, as a subject of our cultural moment, find it hard to penetrate the narrative intent behind the rituals depicted in the wall paintings of the "Villa of the Mysteries."
JEFF GILLETTE
"Marina Del Rey"
"City Ruins"
"Irvine"
ARTIST'S INFORMATION
Jeff Gillette paints slums. Slums are a potent reality in much of the world, and his focus on this type of human settlement is based on his experiences traveling through parts of the world not many tourists get to see. Comfortably nestled in Orange County, CA, Gillette shows us how the other half lives, allowing the slum to intrude into our view.