Where Art and Culture Thrive

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The Galleries at PCC is home to two acclaimed art galleries —The Boone Family Art Gallery and Gallery V. Both galleries host multiple exhibitions each year that feature the work of our students, our faculty and of visiting professional artists.

Current Exhibition

Karen Lofgren - Love to Pain

In Love to Pain, artist Karen Lofgren speaks through her experience living within the “liminality of the disabled body”—taking a critical look at emotional, social, spiritual, and political aspects of pain, isolation, and in a broader sense, marginalization of vulnerable people and communities.  
Lofgren develops connections between suffering and the earth itself. Her work uses pain and sickness as a perspective to create immediate physical experience, and to form metaphors in the context of capitalist imperialism; social injustice; mass species extinction; encroachment; and climate change. Arriving in the wake of the fire disaster and with further existential threats by the federal administration, her ecofeminist framework employs materials that speak to extractive practices and encroachment that draw parallels between the treatment of marginalized bodies and treatment of the earth itself and all sentient life. She invites students and community into a space that can meet pain and difficulty with compassion and offers space to build solidarity and resistance—mobility and cultural evolution—between living and spirit realms.

Using research and movement meditation as part of her practice in the studio, the work uses information held in the body to access a “cellular” language to guide material navigation with the hands, which “remember” new, or perhaps ancient forms that speak through and to the body and form a painless projection of her own body. Through academic research and radical physical interpretations of this in the studio, Karen Lofgren looks to the animism she was raised in under Tibetan Buddhism. This practice of the sentience of all things runs counter to the capitalist outlook of the prioritization of human wealth in a world otherwise inanimate, waiting for “extraction” for profit.

The artist holds sincerest compassion and love for pain; for fear; for discomfort; for otherness, and brings these into conversation with the sensual, the erotic, and tactile, making them relatable and at times perhaps even beautiful. The experience of beauty with pain; beauty with horror, tactility and its language of the hands, may converse with us on a cellular level in a voice that seems familiar—because we share common roots. As a basic species expression, it makes sense that the language and voice of an art object is as common or familiar as breathing. We were already a part of this conversation before we knew it existed.

Lofgren has researched the history of ritual and plant medicine from ancient times through the present and making related sculptural works for the past decade, with her 2023 book, emBRUJAda: Charms for the Living, exploring this in detail. She asks how we can “pull through”, a phrase which refers to an ancient ritual of magical disease transference.

Through her disabilities and, perhaps, in spite of them, she has developed a deep, and powerful body of work that is formed through and about the liminal space of the disabled body as related to vulnerability of the earth and of our systems of life on the planet.

Karen Lofgren is a Los Angeles-based, Canadian visual artist, whose feminist and decolonial research centers on the living world: ritual, history, medicine, and how our cultural systems connect to other wild systems. Her monograph: emBRUJAda: Charms for the Living was published by Set Margins’ press in 2023. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, Pollock-Krasner Grantee, was Fulbright Core Scholar at UAL, Central St. Martins College, and receives support from Canada Council for the Arts. Exhibitions include The Americas Society; Palm Springs Art Museum; High Desert Test Sites; LACMA; Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz; OCAD University; Pitzer Art Galleries; RCA London; and LACE. 

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