El Camino College in Torrance will showcase collaborative efforts in its gallery’s exhibition “Cross Pollination” through Friday.

More than 30 artists specializing in various types of media worked in groups using pollination as a metaphor for the spread of ideas conveyed by art, gallery curator Susanna Meiers said. The pieces are intended to challenge and engage the audience.

Though the show opened Nov. 22, the gallery held its reception Dec. 2, featuring an interactive performance by Edith Abeyta, one of the artists in the show.

Abeyta dressed herself neck-to-toe in large hoop skirts and other various items of clothing, with a pair of scissors dangling from a ribbon. She painted her face white, silently directing the audience with signs attached to a fake head she wore atop her own.

People began to cut away pieces of the garments, creating their own eclectic attire. Some wore the items for the remainder of the reception, bringing them home as keepsakes.

Abeyta invoked the performance art genre, particularly Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece.”  In that performance, Ono asked the audience to cut clothing off of her body as she sat silently.

Meiers describes Abeyta’s performance as something that “brought a kind of audience participation that is rare and really fun. It created an atmosphere of fantasy and fun rather than just the usual socializing that people tend to do at receptions.  Performance in general seems to stir people in a very different way than work that is purely visual.”

This is the first time the gallery has housed an exclusively collaborative show, as they usually exhibit works done by individual artists.

"It seems that right now there is a lot of collaborative artwork being produced and this is an opportunity for students and the greater public to be exposed to the possibilities that lie in the work that comes from collaboration” Meiers said.

Though she is reluctant to name favorite pieces in the show, Meiers highlighted “Morality Play” by Nancy Romero with mechanization done by Marc Salazar, and “Las Mujeres de Juarez” (The Women of Juarez) by Los de Abajo (Kay Brown, Judith Duran, Antonio Escalante, Emelda Gutierrez, Jose Lozano, Poli Marichal, Don Newton, Marianne Sadowski).

“‘Morality Play’ is a complex mechanized painting humorously depicting the artist’s vision of [Dante's] levels of hell, complete with couch potato people, body modification, force feeding, atomic blasts, oil glut and man overburdened by his own materialism,” Meiers explained.

The piece by Los de Abajo, is shaped like a sleeveless shirt, reflecting on the plight of women in Juarez, Mexico. 

According to Meiers, she loves the work “for its passion, boldness and for the sort of savage beauty of the images.  It seems strong and real most of all.”

Other works in the show include collaborations between multimedia artist Victor Raphael and photographer David Jordan Williams documenting encounters with the unknown.

Reach staff reporter Kristin Yinger here