Elizabeth Bryant Selected Works opens Saturday, March 8th, with a reception for the artist from 6 - 8pm. This exhibition continues through April 19, 2008.

For Selected Works Elizabeth Bryant will present color photographs that use the floral art of ikebana as a framework for considering pop culture, photography and traditional Japanese aesthetics. Bryant gathers plants, arranges her own ikebana and then photographs these arrangements outdoors, in a setup that she fabricates using photo-wallpaper "windows" and scrim backdrops. The ceramic containers for these arrangements are selected from an assortment of student projects abandoned in the ceramics studios at CSULA where she teaches. The results are visually complex still-lifes that serve to revitalize both the reclaimed object and the ikebana aesthetic as well as draw attention to the perception of photographic information in the final print.

A collaborative book project titled Today's Forecast will accompany the exhibition. A selection of Bryant's still-life photographs is reproduced along with poetry written by fellow artist Eve Luckring. Although primarily a video artist, for the last several years Luckring has been writing and publishing haiku and tanka (a type of Japanese poem that is both older than haiku and longer in length). Independently, both artists have been using traditional Japanese formal structures and responding to their everyday surroundings to produce works of art related to contemporary life. The book format is especially pertinent for this collaboration since the ephemeral quality of ikebana means it is primarily shared through images in books and the chapbook is a common vehicle for distributing poetry.

Bryant and Luckring will also incorporate text of haiku and tanka into the gallery installation of the photographs to create a context that extends and enhances the content and possibilities of both their projects.