by Amie Rangel

An amazing two-day contemporary art event is coming to our foothill region on Saturday and Sunday, September 24 and 25 called The Hatchery: East of Fresno. From Visalia this event is just a forty-five minute drive up Dry Creek Drive and off Highway 245 into the small town of Badger.

At this same location last year a one-day event called The Hatchery: Free Range was the cooperative effort of twelve California artists who shared a vision to transform the former Synanon drug rehabilitation center (later a Muslim religious and community and charter school) into an arts venue. This year’s exhibition, The Hatchery: East of Fresno, has grown into a far more ambitious project featuring installations, paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints, video, and texts by forty artists living and working in Canada, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Germany, and the United States including several local artists.

Over the past month the 377-acre ruined compound has been taken over by artists working onsite. One of the curators and featured artists Anné M. Klint notes that “the site has been a veritable ghost town since it was last abandoned in 2001, and visiting it has become a fascinating experience. Ten years of human neglect have encouraged nesting birds, mushrooms and moss, and cattle seeking shade, overtaking structures intended for people. Human histories are physically layered throughout the space—schoolbooks, homework, lesson plans on walls, the remains of a recording studio and a commercial kitchen, carefully chosen design. It is an archeological dig, but the ruins are of our own time.”

For artists, the venue is unlike any other—ruined, huge, open for so many interpretations, no rules, no restrictions—to explore, exhibit in, and interact with. The social, physical, and natural layers become lenses through which art is made. The artists of East of Fresno are invited to confront and elucidate the lingering questions, and possibly invoke new ones. Provocative, disturbing, and eye-opening, it’s a sensory and psychic adventure for artist and viewer alike.

East of Fresno curators Bill Doherty (New York City), Bachrun LoMele (Pinehurst, California), Anné M. Klint (Oakland), and Tom McGlynn (New York City) hope that by pointing the way “east of Fresno” (or one could say north-east of Visalia) the compound can again become a significant site of experience as it was in its heyday.

Bill Doherty

For more information, contact Anné M. Klint (415) 269-0047 or Mahalia LoMele (559) 336-9383. Also check out The Hatchery: East of Fresno campaign on IndieGoGo.

The Hatchery: East of Fresno: an exhibition of contemporary art
12 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday, September 24
12 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday, September 25
50616 Hwy 245
Badger, California 93603
http://thehatcheryartspaces.org

Amie Rangel is originally from Dinuba. She attended COS in Visalia, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Drawing/Painting & Printmaking from Cal State University in Long Beach, & a Master of Fine Arts degree in Drawing and Intermedia from the University of Alberta. She is currently teaching Drawing and Color and Design at COS, Co-Gallery Director of the COS Art Gallery, and is involved in several art events throughout the community.