By With a camera in hand, Cal State Long Beach photography senior Mike Lewis treks through untamed brush searching to find his inspiration. Stumbling past an old hallowed tree, an abandoned cabin, he finds it: a dirty old sleeping bag.
Lewis’s first solo photography show is currently on exhibit in the Dennis W. Dutzi Gallery at CSULB through Sept 25. Lewis uses a mix of photography and sculptures made from items that he has found to showcase the untamed woods of his hometown, Simi Valley.
The exhibit is titled “Broken Container” because of the fixation Lewis found he had with all the broken containers littered throughout the woods.
“I started to think about broken containers as a metaphor for what the place represented to me, and maybe what I was doing with my work,” Lewis said.
Lewis said that growing up in Simi Valley, the woodlands out-skirting the suburbs hold a form of “surrealism and remarkable strangeness.”
“Art is like a conversation,” Lewis said. “We’re always looking for an answer, but I can never get to it… My art tries to capture the conversation [that] found items in [the woods] have with their surroundings.”
Lewis said that he wants to evoke confusion from viewers because his art mirrors his sentiments toward the woods when he goes into them. He hopes his work will spark conversation and interaction with one’s surroundings.
In his exhibit, Lewis creates a contrast between the unexpected and the expected. Lewis said that growing up in the suburbs, everything was mundane. Living now in Long Beach, where he is “everyday bombarded with something unexpected,” he sees the mysticism of the unknown woods compared to the “dream-like familiarity” of the suburbs.
Lewis has been working on this installation for a year and was approved for a solo show at the end of the spring 2014 semester. He said he has been interested in the arts ever since high school. Lewis said this is where he excelled, and was always fascinated with how “people deal with places.”
“I always seemed to want to be around the art teachers or students, or in the dark room… away from the fake, fluorescent lighting and dry textbooks,” Lewis said.
Once in community college, Lewis decided to peruse photography. However, he said his medium is not photography. He said that it is a main tool in creating his art, but it “cannot simply be categorized and still be its inherent self.”
Lewis said he found this exhibit “daunting” because it’s his first solo show. This project took a lot of planning in comparison with the group exhibits he is used to do. He said it was mentally exhausting, attempting something he had never done before.
Lewis said he felt more pressure doing a solo project because art is pre-selected by a jury to go into a group exhibit, whereas in a solo show, no one was there to tell hem “yes this is good” before putting it on display.
Lewis found himself seeking advice from professors and grad students, only adding to the conversational nature of his exhibit. Having to fill so much space alone, he often found himself asking whether a certain piece was “necessary or just a filler,” he said.
When asked whether he felt his exhibit was successful, he said that he cannot answer that because it insinuates a start and a finish. Lewis said he envisions this piece as never being finished; it is an ongoing conversation with the audience. He said that it is a success in the sense that it did what he wanted: spark conversation. Having a solo show gave him the “forum to [discuss] the work,” he said.
Lewis said that he is inspired by the “pop-up images” of Wallace Berman’s and John Divola’s interest in found space. For this exhibit in particular, Lewis found inspiration in a quote by Ed Templeton in the documentary film “Beautiful Losers:”
“Living in the suburbs is like a big, fake dream.”
