Art About the Tri-Counties, in Annual, Juried Fashion

To get a taste of a rare survey and overview of our region’s varied artistic riches, one can head up Sycamore Canyon Road, turn right or left at Lotusland, and proceed to the small but mighty treasury that is the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art. Here, just after the academic year ends, the curatorial focus turns sharply to and eagerly awaited Tri-County Juried Exhibition, a valuable — and necessarily subjective — survey and overview of artists hailing from our general midst. 

This year’s model goes by the title On the Edge and was handpicked by San Diego–based artist Adam Belt. Enlisting a juror from outside the area and localized art circles is a critical component in the exhibition’s goal of bringing an objective “outsider’s” eye to the task. This time around, Belt considered a hefty 458 entries, whittling it down to a manageable 41 works, making it a reasonably scaled sampling that gives the eye margin to ponder.

The 2025 edition has a special employment resonance in that it is the last exhibition during the 17-year tenure of Judy Larson as the museum’s formidable executive director. Larson arrived at Westmont after work as curator in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., in 2008 and guided the transition into this important museum’s vibrant status as one of this area’s most bejeweled art institutions. A mid-July exhibition is currently being planned, showcasing many of the artworks that have been collected by the museum during Larson’s tenure there. 

Although each year’s exhibition is unique by nature, continuity comes in various ways, through familiar artists making the cut. In an unusual case, we encounter a “déjà vu all over again” appearance of Bruce Berlow’s painting “The Ojai Lions,” also part of last year’s show, a warm-spirited depiction of two men perched on a bench marked by the double-meaning title. 

Abstraction finds its way into the entryway gallery, in the form of Sol Hill’s explosive accretion of speckles concentrically leading to a central vortex in “The Center Cannon Hold” and Marlene Struss’s “Speck in the Universe.” Struss deploys a different abstract tack, conjuring anatomical and/or astronomical blob-like forms floating in light blue space — psychological, cosmic, or both.

The Best in Show award goes to Amy Armstrong’s painting “shine, shine,” a close-up and realistically detailed portrait of a young woman’s face, dense with makeup and casting an emotionally quizzical persona. Another memorable and appealingly enigmatic painting in the show is Pausha Foley’s “Amber Light II,” a dreamlike imagining involving a possible dance studio awash in yellow/amber — a rabbit/humanoid figure summons radiating echoes of yellow balls or bubbles, amping up the visual and conceptual temperature.

Among the sculptures on view are studies in contrasting gestures and materials. In Duane Dammeyer’s stone and limestone twofer “Just Hangin’ On,” one solid and largely rectangular foundation cradles another folded and furling shape in a symbiotic embrace. With Jack Mohr’s “Bound X,” a willful juxtaposition of ceramic and “rubber spines” plays off of the sharp distinctions of the white ceramic’s clean, hard-and-fast appearance in the binding, vertebrae-like rubber loops, conspiring toward a complex yet cleanly stated paradox. 

Drawings and print work have their day here, as well. A kind of semi-title piece for the show, Gregory Farrington’s pencil drawing “On the Edge of Despair” pictures a presumed family appearing vacant and forlorn in a fittingly gloomy living room. The artist cites the influence of Edward Hopper as an influence. Garrett Speirs’s chilling “Channel Keeper” is a damning “ode” to an oil platform in aptly tarry terms. Cynthia Stahl’s deceptively calm, almost-blue fields are offset by the subtle appearances of telephone lines and ephemeral jet streaks.

The photography contingent includes familiar favorites, with their own modes of expression. Nell Campbell’s “Eagle Float, New Orleans March 2006” contrasts the loudly colored red, white, and blue float and the squalid post-flood destruction of a post-Katrina urban setting. Kate Connell shows one of her intriguing diptychs, “Backstage,” with two colorful images from mundane peripheral zones in Japan, reflecting her sensation of alienation as a citizen in a strange land.

Ironically, one of the more minimalist and cool-seeming works on view is the brain teaser “Graphic Pixels,” a video projection by JD Brynn. We may find ourselves sinking into the shifting color dance of squares on the surface before learning that the title has a deeper meaning. The radical source material is a 20-second clip of the notorious — and “graphic” — porn film Deep Throat, pixelated and blown up to the point of becoming unrecognizable visual data, an abstraction dancing before our eyes.

Brynn heeds a sly, fool-the-brain conceptual tactic, transforming data, its context, and beholders’ perceptions. This may be the first time this museum has presented anything related to porn, as such, but with its sting and licentious tease factors removed. This is hardly representative or prominent trend in art of the Tri-Counties, but it’s one artist’s claim to stake.

On the Edge, the 2025 Tri-County Juried Exhibition at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, shows through June 14. See westmont.edu/museum/juriedshow2022.