Nature of Inquiry

The Nature of Inquiry project includes 14 artists from San Pedro (Ellen Bay, Jan Govaerts, Dar Horn, Jon Nakamura, and Angelica Sotiriou), Long Beach (Susan Dampf, Joan Mueller, Hilary Norcliffe, Molly South, and Katie Stubblefield), Los Angeles (Sayon Syprasoeuth), Portland (Amerinda Alpern and Sabina Haque) and Dublin (Bronwen Casson). The show is curated by Victoria Bryan.

The project will span an eleven-month period. Nature of Inquiry, Part One, the September exhibit at The Loft Gallery, includes one piece from each artist. The artists chose the works to characterize the inquiry they will be pursuing through their art making for the next nine months. Members of the group will exhibit the results of their inquiries in Nature of Inquiry, Part Two, at The Loft Gallery for two months beginning in July, 2008.

For some artists, this process will be a continuation of a lifetime fascination with particular questions, concepts, or media; for others, the project is an opportunity to explore new materials and ideas that have been lurking in the back corners of their imaginations.

"The idea for the exhibition was sparked by the thought that the words that most usually attach themselves to the idea of inquiry are scientific: case studies, research proposals, testing, analysis, inductive, etc. This became clearer to me when I registered for a fall class at Claremont Graduate University called 'The Nature of Inquiry,'" explains curator, Victoria Bryan. "My goal for the exhibition is to understand more about artists' processes of inquiry, how they are similar to a scientific process and how the two are different if, indeed, they are. At this point, my guess is that the two approaches to investigation are irrevocably entwined. It will be interesting to compare "inquiry" along parallel tracks of academic research and artists' practice for the next nine months."