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Butte County Art On Wheels

Butte County Art on Wheels is a mobile art studio that aligns displaced artists from the Campfire with positive community oriented projects for the betterment of physical, emotional, and mental health. Partnering with schools, companies, and community members!

Jessie Mercer is a local visual artist from Paradise. The 2018 Camp Fire claimed her art studio as well as her parents home. She has always wanted to help people and believes in the power of community. She's found her visual voice after many years of working in the field of foster care, youth counseling and special education, creating set design in collaboration with artists with developmental disabilities. Through her community passions, she received funding from the North Valley Community Foundation, with 501c3 affiliation with Chico Art Center and was loaned a utility vehicle from Phoenix Solar to produce her concept, Butte County Art on Wheels.

Jessie Mercer has been partnering with displaced artists and students to paint 11 murals at schools effected by the Camp Fire. Mercer also worked with the new Boys & Girls Club facility to create a mural with the children. She has also stationed Art on Wheels at local public events like Pioneer Day to offer art activities to one and all.

Jessie Mercer can be contacted at (530) 828-2960 or jessiemercer15@gmail.com

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PRESS

Featured Artist: Jessie Mercer brings Camp Fire community together through art, The Orion, May 10, 2009

Awarded "2019 Champion of the Arts" by Chico Arts & Culture, April 18, 2019

After Camp Fire, An Artist Helps Students In Hard-Hit Town Cope Through Color, Here & Now, WBUR April 3, 2019

Artist Jessie Mercer Paints Murals With Kids Who Are Camp Fire Survivors, NSPR MAR 21, 2019

#UnlockPossibilities – Paradise Arts Creates Town Memorial Out Of Keys, WNIN Dec 27, 2018

Paradise Artists Creates Piece for Town Made of Keys, Action News Dec 13, 2018

Paradise artist to make Phoenix from keys of Camp Fire victims, Dec 9, 2018

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DISCOVERY SERIES

UNCOVERING A RESISTANCE

May 3-31, 2019

Kyle Campbell | Oni Dakini | Gini Holmes | Ryan Ramos

Reception: Friday, May 3, 5-7 pm

The Discovery Show Series is a juried exhibition featuring bodies of work by artists that have had limited local exposure. Juried by Jacob Meders.

Juror's Statement

Uncovering a Resistance looks at art as resistance or as artists having critical conversations with their community. Some of these concepts can be an internal perspective or outwardly facing. Art has the power to bring abstract and not so abstract thoughts to the table for reasoning. Can objects or works of art drive a perceptual shift within our communities? How can we have conversations with civility, without words, and lean on the skills of making? These works of art were chosen because they have a voice with no sound and they ask to be heard and learned from.

This exhibition is generously sponsored by Ann & Tony Slocum

ONI DAKINI Mom majick ‘n what she never showed me, 2019 Mixed media on canvas $900 Work about my blood mom, her mom, me ‘n my daughter and how I taught my child. all but my real mom threw me away as a toddler. I wonder if her mom threw her away. We have majik though. I know things I never learned from an elder.

RYAN RAMOS Untitled, 2019 Acrylic on canvas $340 With this painting I wanted to take an irreverent look at the gender roles valued in traditional American culture. This antiquated perception is represented through over-the-top symbolism, with humorous representations of "man" and "woman”.

RYAN RAMOS Multiples, 2019 Colored pencil on paper $250 This drawing is an exploration in composition, and is essentially a study. I wanted to play with scale, space, and perspective in a way that references commercial poster art, particularly movie posters.

KYLE CAMPBELL Briefcase Full of Guts, 2014 cast lead crystal, case $600

GINI HOLMES Deluge, 2017 Heat transfer on handmade paper, embroidery, ink, flocking, puff paint, dinner plate $207 Quote: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” ~ (Pres. Bush) on “ Good Morning America,” Sept. 1 2005, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina. Image: After the Deluge

GINI HOLMES Parade, 2017 Heat transfer on handmade fabric, embroidery, beads $207 Quote: “The marching orders were: I want a parade like the one in France, “ said a military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the planning discussions are supposed to remain confidential. “This is being worked at the highest levels of the military.” Image: The Women’s March on Versailles

GINI HOLMES I am not a witch, 2017 Heat transfer on handmade paper, embroidery, ink, flocking, dinner plate $207 Quote: “I’m not a witch… I’m you.” ~ Christine O’Donnell, in a 30 second ad responding to a video clip from a 1999 appearance in Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect”, in which she said, “ dabbled into witchcraft I never joined a coven. But I did, I did… I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I’m not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do… One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s little blood there and stuff like that. We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.” Image: Hymn To The Creator

KYLE CAMPBELL Fortifying the American Dream (Gates), 2014 Powder coated cast iron $450 each I am starting my second year as a Wildland firefighter. The work that I am showing is a few years old, but was given new meaning by recent events locally and by events in my life as well. I live in Chico, but am grateful I was in a position at the time of the fire in Paradise to be able to do something about it. I created Fortifying the American Dream about a year after finishing college during an internship at the Kohler factory in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. At that time, I felt that working in an iron plant would crystallize the feeling I had towards hard work. It was the first time I spent a long time away from home; and that’s what I spent time thinking about. Home. Family. What is home? What is the American dream? Work really wasn’t that hard when I had something I felt that I was working towards. What I was working towards remains unclear. But having goals, however unclear makes hard days better. Often I think about place, security and ambition. I used the grenade image as a symbol of power. Making them made me feel powerful. I wanted to become a more efficient grenade maker. When I see the case of glass explosives now, I can think about how efficient I was at making them, but also how they were actually a symbol of cowardice. A briefcase full of guts is a cool mantra for someone who hates their job, and I use that to remind myself that I am in control. I’m happy with where I’m at.

KYLE CAMPBELL Fortifying the American Dream (Gates), 2014 Powder coated cast iron $450 each

KYLE CAMPBELL Briefcase Full of Guts, 2014 cast lead crystal, case $600

Ryan Ramos

RYAN RAMOS Amor, 2018 Colored pencil on paper $200 With this drawing I wanted to make an exaggerated romantic portrait that challenges the machismo prized in Mexican culture. This image intentionally crosses into camp as a way of taking a laugh at traditional perceptions.

RYAN RAMOS Moonlight, 2016 Acrylic on canvas $275 This painting is a reference to the Odalisque, a common subject in Western art. My take on this tradition is clearly queer, with a nude male replacing the oft-depicted nude female. I wanted to reference art history as a way to challenge traditional notions.

Ryan Ramos

Left:RYAN RAMOS Leather, 2018 Colored pencil on paper $95 Right: RYAN RAMOS Andrew, 2019 Colored pencil on paper NFS

Oni Dakini

ONI DAKINI Pacoima Etcetera, 2018 Mixed media on canvas $450 This is a work about life from the ghettos of Los Angeles county to Chico, how I see landscape and how it presents itself to me and my daughter.

ONI DAKINI Heroes, 2018 Mixed media on canvas $250 All woman. Heroes of the time, and how much better it’d be if we took the reigns.

ONI DAKINI Dakini Dance, 2019 Mixed media on canvas $499 Dakini meanings and all I think of when I see them in the modern times.

The fire inside

Flames literal and figurative burn in two new exhibits

By Saunthy Singh

[excerpt] "Over at the Chico Art Center, the recently opened Uncovering a Resistance exhibit features works by Kyle Campbell, Oni Dakini, Gini Holmes and Ryan Ramos, four local artists with “limited exposure” united under one theme. As juror Jacob Meders put it in his show statement, it’s “art as resistance or as artists having critical conversations with their community.”Through Dakini’s expressionist palette of mixed-media on canvas, a woman stares out from “Dakini Dances,” defiant and tough, with a poignant wariness and surrounded by flora, snakes, skulls and other female profiles. In the center, a collaged scrap with an explanation of the symbolic nature of the sacred dakini female spirit is juxtaposed with a plain scrap with a penciled rifle, offering a contradiction of color and imagery.

In “Briefcase Full of Guts,” Campbell has placed a dozen white lead-crystal hand grenades in a protective black case, deeming them a precious commodity despite their deathly impact. And in “Fortifying the American Dream (Gates),” he has four powder-coated cast-iron picket fences suspended by ceiling wires, raising this symbol of life’s success beyond the grasp of many.

Ramos’ finely drawn colored pencil on paper “Amor” offers a tongue-in-cheek rendering of a Mexican man whose come-hither look beckons from underneath a blue sombrero.

Lastly, Holmes voices her take on women’s issues and politics in “Three Jobs.” For the piece, she has embroidered over a heat-transferred image on handmade paper and then attached it to a dinner plate for a multi textured effect. The image is of a woman working in a field from an 1888 etching, “The Portionless Girl,” and it’s encircled with a quote from a comment former President George W. Bush once made to a divorced Nebraska mother of three: “You work three jobs? … [t]hat is fantastic that you’re doing that.”

Sarcastic? Oh, yes. And an effective example of pointed resistance."

This article was published on 05.16.19 in Chico News & Review

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