Currently on view at Gallery V, located on the Pasadena City College campus, is “Xanadu,” a group show featuring the work of nine artists. Though tightly curated by Shelli Tollman, who is also in the show, each artist has enough breathing room to leave a real impact on viewers. Contributors were asked to respond to the idealized hallucinogenic place of “Xanadu” (referencing the 1980 musical fantasy film), and how it can be used as a starting point to escape from despair.

Highlights of the show include found detritus elevated and exalted in bronze, crystal and 24K gold plate by Texas-based artist Bale Creek Allen. Tollman’s paintings have always possessed flights of fancy and escape in pink, yet the environments she illustrates have transitioned from bedrooms to the dressing rooms, an environment of self-preparation and self-regard. A place where one can make themselves into whomever they want or need to be.

Elizabeth Tremante’s two oil paintings Handing It Down and One Day After School are visual works that unhallow the institutions that make the art world go round by making a connection between Western art history and the overall violence perpetrated by the Western world on the colonized, on children, on women. Tanya Haden’s installation titled Home Decor Ideas does not disappoint. Here, she has painted personifications of despair and resignation on home decor ads, juxtaposed against a backdrop of hand-painted, unapologetically inclusive natural female sensuality. 

Jenn Berger, “Chilly Willy,” 2023.

Also in the show, Jenn Berger trawls the internet for images of natural phenomena to elaborate with her pastel and pencil. Tami Demaree evokes tween whimsy in ceramic and woodcut. Steven Hull’s oil painting and wood sculpture seem to be in conversation with each other. Violet Treadwell Hull’s oil on canvas seems to almost be proto-editorial imagery for a fashion magazine.

An opening night highlight included a performance by Alice Clements titled “Coming Out of the Cave,” during which she used handmade props and scenery to humorously enact an allegory of returning from the pandemic. 

On the whole, the show is a provocative dive into viewpoints on utopia, how one gets there, and whether it be through brutal truth, shadow work or remaking one’s image from the ground up.