State Gallery + YI Shop First Thursday Art Walk

State Gallery and YI shop are excited about 2019! Join us for the first Art Walk of the year.

In the gallery is Texture. Process. Color. Celebrating the work of three Santa Barbara artists, Inga Guzyte, Dan Levin and Hugh Margerum.

State Gallery presents Texture. Process. Color.

On the walls of State Gallery is Texture. Color. Process. We are featuring the bright bold work of Inga Guzyte, Dan Levin and Hugh Margerum. Using recycled materials, skate decks and pigments to celebrate creativity, these three artists have impacted our senses with their imagination.

Ms. Inga Guzyte was born in Lithuania and raised in Germany where she also found her passion for skateboarding and art. At twenty-one she made her way to the United States to be closer to the skateboarding culture and it’s origin. Living in California, Inga learned her third language and broadened her horizons in art while attending SBCC and majoring in Art Studio Emphasis.

With a lot of passion for skateboarding and artistry, Inga started making sculptures from broken decks by cutting them apart and putting them back together in “out of the box” shapes that do not represent a skate board anymore, but instead, a new form of life. As her crafting skills continued to improve while working in a wood shop and heavy tool environment her ability to express herself improved as well. Her new pieces of work are a mix of realism and pop-art with a splash of abstract and design. In fact, her relief like sculptures are almost like paintings using the skateboard designs as her color pallet.

Inga’s biggest influence is the skateboarding culture as she made her way through several different cultures and learned to adapt. Some of her personal experiences are captured in her earlier work in a sarcastic kind of way. As a female artist, Inga Guzyte feels empowered working in the male dominated work environment and exercising the male dominated sport. She will continue to transform the old, the broken, and the forgotten into a new form of life.

Hugh Margerum is known as a Santa Barbara local and an internationally celebrated artist.
“My work is an abstract interpretation of things that happen in nature and everyday life. I find I’m often dealing with reconciling opposites and dealing with contradictions, in life, philosophy, and art. In the work, this process of reconciliation serves as a metaphor for things we deal with as humans. As with anyone involved in making serious art, I’m attempting to make something ‘real’, which in my case can be loosely defined as an attempt to find and re-present the poetry in the world around us. Making things by hand, painting with oils oftentimes seems to be an old-fashioned endeavor in this digital age. By utilizing the romantic nature of oil paint, exploiting the qualities unique to the medium; the lush color and two-dimensional plasticity — I’m able to express feelings, thoughts, and impressions that have arisen as a result of my ‘research’ in the field; the observation of nature and pondering the nature of human-ness.”

Dan Levin is an American found-object assemblage artist born in 1962, best-known for his Lonely hearts and Objects of curiosity body of work. Born in Los Angeles, the artist grew up in New York and returned to California where he got his degree in Graphic Design and Fine Art in 1984.

Working under a motto – one man’s trash is another man’s career, Dan Levin juxtaposes relationships between objects in interesting new ways, converting trash to treasure. In such way, he epitomizes the notion of viewing the world through a new lens, giving new perspective onto everyday objects that we pass by every day.