The Missing and The Found Exhibition

The Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts is pleased to present The Missing and The Found: The Art of Ray Gabaldon and Tona Wakefield, May 4 – June 30, 2024. The Carpenteria based artists creating works utilizing wood and other objects collected from the beach following the 2018 Thomas Fire and the resulting mudslides. 

Not considering himself an artist prior to these events, Ray Gabaldon has since had a clear creative vision – a compulsion to assemble sculptural tributes to the memory of lost individuals using wood and other objects lost in these natural disasters and collected on the beach. Each is an embodied character, while collectively his pieces almost appear to speak.

“Every time I make a sculpture, it takes me back to that day I came home from seeing the devastation in Montecito, first the fires, then the mudslides,” Gabaldon says. “Just thinking about all the people we lost, the houses that were burnt to ashes, or torn apart by floods, the destroyed properties and lives, the cars standing on end, the shoes that I saw just lying about, the people gone… It was really hard for me. Making these works, I am remembering somebody we lost, a person…the missing…”

Tona Wakefield, the eldest sibling of three in a family with mental health and addiction issues, learned responsibility at an early age, developing a lifelong calling to advocate and care for those suffering with mental illness. A deeply compassionate person, Tona served as a family advocate at the Mental Health Association, a discharge planner at the Santa Barbara County Jai,l and as an advocate at the Public Defender’s Office.

Always artistic, Tona was inspired by Ray’s recent sculptures and experienced a new surge of her own creativity. Using found elements, she assembles pieces with a very different tone — some whimsical, others disturbing, some even totemic.

“I see humor in things around me, what other people may not notice,” Wakefield says. “I enjoy putting these pieces together, though some are more serious — about the suffering in my family and in others whom I have met through my work. And some of my sculptures are about protection. They are all my people. They are the found…”

There will be an Opening Reception on Saturday, May 4^th from 2 – 4 pm and a panel discussion featuring Ray Gabaldon, Tona Wakefield and guest curator Stephen Huyler, moderated by the Center’s founding director Kevin Wallace will be presented on Saturday, May 18^th at 2 pm.

The Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts is located at 8585 Ojai-Santa Paula Road in Upper Ojai. They can be reached at 805-646-3381 or beatricewoodcenter@gmail.com