Jason Gomez: Novelty Breeding
November 14, 2024 - January 25, 2025
Opening Reception November 14, 5- 7 pm
Jason Gomez is 2024/2025 Artist-in-residence at the Department of Art and Art History at California State University, Bakersfield. While at the university Gomez developed an extensive intradisciplinary project, composed by irregular investigations between science workers and art workers, science thinkers and art thinkers.
These meetings further elements of Gomez’s research and practice which have not previously been exhibited outside of his greenhouse production space, Gomez Exotica, in Oxnard, CA. Gomez Exotica is a site where art and orchid production have hybridized into a boundless installation where cultivation becomes a metaphor beyond plants, insisting on a symbiotic relationship between art and biology.
On campus resources have enabled a technological advantage, giving new form to Gomez’s orchid collection of thousands of live specimens collected over the last ten years. The flowers are remade by a vision that sees in magnetic fields and particle maps. Their surface wears the evidence of their consumption by (in)human desire, matching the evidence born in them typographically because of line breeding and habitat. Gomez asks whether we can see past or through this totalizing vision, once vision has worked its way into the 'bones' of a thing, to reproduction in its future selves. Do we lose sight of our own interventions in the world around us? Or are we now reflected everywhere and always?
The results of Gomez’s residency will culminate into the exhibition, Novelty Breeding, which inhabits two sites on campus at CSUB; In the greenhouse (west) the contents of Gomez's greenhouse operation have been transposed en masse, where they will cohabit with a few remnants of the Biology departments regular discursions and will be subject of occasional close study. In the gallery image-objects predominate, plant forms digested by technology and reproduced as hybrid kin alongside ephemera of production. This includes three distinct but interrelated cartographic works; serially reproduced porcelain pottery, non-photographic SEM (scanning electron microscope) images, and three-dimensional printed representations of orchids from the collection. Viewers can expect a taxonomic island of endless columns, inverse castings, ouranic and chthonic forms. Contained, potable earth, proposes a horizon for the whole world.
Jason Gomez (b. 1986) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He has a BFA from California State University, Long Beach.
Gomez began his exploration of methods and meanings of plant cultivation while attending the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 2013-2014. He befriended a florist street vendor who connected him to a network of commercial hybridizers working with orchids uncommon in cultivation, and most importantly, to the tropical conservatory at De Hortus and Artis, the historic botanical gardens of Amsterdam. Immersion in this aesthetic space, on the boundaries of natural and cultural production, led him to consider the ways in which orchid cultivation parallels his sculpture practice.
Jason Gomez returned to California and received an MFA from UCLA in 2017. Solo exhibitions followed at Clima Gallery in Milan, IT, Escolar in Santa Rosa, CA, as well as exhibitions at Magazijn, Amsterdam and The Archaeology and Art Museum of Maremma, Grosseto, Italy, among others. As his art career has evolved, he has simultaneously worked to become a respected orchid breeder and hybridizer, running his own greenhouse, Gomez Exotica. He has delivered lectures, integrated orchids into landscaping projects, and located endangered orchid species in situ domestically and internationally. Gomez judges orchids for American Orchid Society, with whom he also contributes and edits descriptions of awarded flowers.
Special thanks to Brandon Pratt and Anna Jacobsen of the Department of Biology, David Coffey, and the students of ART 4020 for their support of this exhibition.
