The Cerritos College Art Gallery, along with the Cerritos College Art & Design and Engineering Design Technology departments, is pleased to announce NATURAL HISTORY, a solo exhibition of work produced by Jeff Cain during his recent 2014 ART+TECH artist residency at Cerritos College opening on Tuesday, January 27th from 6-9PM.

During the November 2014 residency period, Cain worked with a cross-section of advanced students from both the Cerritos College Art Department’s 3D-Design program and the Engineering Design Technology program, collaborating to produce life-sized sculptures inspired by 3D scans of taxidermied animal specimens from local museum collections and private holdings.

These animals, native to the American West, and therefore loaded with semiotic significance in our collective imagination (coyotes, eagles, rabbits, bears, etc.), were scanned, manipulated, and printed using the 3D software and printers available in Cerritos College’s Engineering Design lab, as well as at USC’s Roski School of Design, and the corporate headquarters of this year’s exhibition sponsor, AirWolf 3D. Assembled from multiple tessellated print-chamber-sized polyhedral forms, inspired in part by the utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller, these semi-erased biological specimens literally fuse with modernist design tropes in order to reflect on the difficulty of reconciling California’s futurist and utopian impulses with the increasingly distant and endangered legacy of its wild past.