‘Playdemonium’ multicultural artists open gallery at local arts center – The Daily Barometer

Robin Kerr, a New Zealand-born artist and Coco Ma, a Chinese-born artist have come together in a collaborative exhibition titled “Playdemonium” at The Corvallis Arts Center.

The exhibition opened July 12 and will run until August 24. Students are invited to attend the exhibition as well as explore the work of local artists in Corvallis. The art in the exhibition can be purchased in order to support both the artists and The Arts Center. Visitors can drop by between noon and 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

“‘Playdemonium’, a fusion of play and pandemonium, underscores the profound energy and enduring impact of playful experimentation in art,” said The Arts Center website. “Both artists utilize playful and multifaceted abstraction to explore complex themes of identity and personal relationships.”

Ma is a New York based Chinese artist who works primarily in mixed-media installation, sculpture and sculptural painting.

“For me, visual language has lots of fluidity compared to other media or types of art,” Ma said. “I believe that artists cannot represent something other than their own life experiences, so my work is essentially about my own cultural experiences within my life.”

Ma spent her childhood in China and immigrated to the United States in order to attend university. Due to this contrast in cultures, Ma’s work focuses on this intercultural dialogue between the East and the West with a focus around the lives of women in the modern age.

“I’m interested, in a literal way, with ‘what is the female body?’ How that body experiences different emotions and experiences that are carried in the body. But also metaphorically, the scar, the wound, the mark of time,” Ma said.

Ma explores many of these questions through the ways in which “cheap and disposable materials carry psychological denotation related to the daily lives of women.”

Kerr is a self-taught artist inspired by everyday experiences, with much of her work exploring the certain “limbo state” that she and many other immigrants feel in not quite being home, while also not quite being away.

“A lot of what I do is subconscious, so when I approach the artwork it is very instinctive and then after the fact I’ll have a look at it and I can see that there are elements that have been included that reference New Zealand,” Kerr said. “I never approach a panel as if I’m going to create something specific, I don’t have a scene in my head, I don’t have an item in my head or a picture, it just happens.”

Kerr, as she describes it, became an immigrant “almost accidentally” having come from New Zealand roughly 30 years ago.

“Once you’ve immigrated, whether voluntarily or not … you end up not being of either place anymore,” Kerr said. “You’re not entirely ever from where you came from, you definitely change, there’s just a different culture that you land in.”

According to Kerr, growing up she was always attracted to art and creating artwork, but never thought or knew it to be something that could turn into a profession. Due to her upbringing and the nature of the market in New Zealand, Kerr ended up studying biochemistry. Kerr has spent most of her life in healthcare up until this point.

“I made a decision, I was in a position to stop working in healthcare, I decided I wanted to give this a go, creating artwork,” Kerr said.

Interested visitors can learn more about the Playdemonium exhibition on The Arts Center website.