SANTA BARBARA
“Glass Love: Contemporary Art and Surf” at Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (SBCAF)

“Glass Love” was not your little brother’s surf art show. The work on view at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum was influenced, but not solely determined by, the iconography of surf culture. While the nine artists on view in “Glass Love” all responded in some way to the tropes of surf art, many of these familiar attitudes were subject to new scrutiny.
Joni Sternbach’s unique tintype portraits of surfers at water’s edge carried with them an air of the ethnographic, a nod to the days before Gidget (1959) when surfers were still a fascinatingly foreign species. Chris Ballantyne’s light washes of acrylic on panel conveyed the first hint of dystopia in “Glass Love.” His 2007 painting of surfers paddling in a burnt sienna ocean was strongly suggestive of the apocalyptic swell in the days following the Orange County and San Diego fires early this winter. Three of Amy Bird’s oil-on-canvas paintings featured precisely rendered silhouettes of surfers in the water and spectators milling on the beach. Squaring off against these were three other silhouette paintings on similarly gradated green backgrounds. This group, however, depicted the bowed backs of laborers at work in a field, as common a sight along coastal highways in Southern California as surfers. Taken together the two series delivered a resounding blow to the standard image of the California idyll. The hard-edged paintings of Aaron Parazette spelled out surf jargon like “Swell” and “Thruster” in strong colors. Warped, scrambled and layered into abstract compositions, the letters that formed these words created a puzzle unified by shape and line as much as meaning. Other artists on view included Libby Black, Brian Calvin, Cassandra C. Jones, Catherine Opie, and Bruno Peinado. Skillfully navigating the landscape of contemporary art and surf, “Glass Love” offered a celebration of surf culture as well as a subtle critique.