As art exhibition and curatorial frameworks go, the current Santa Barbara Museum of Art show Inside/Outside casts an especially broad-based and inclusive net. The premise underscoring the collection of artworks by emerging artists of diverse backgrounds, media, and intentions relates to the innate act of artists to bring their interior states and impulses to dealing with the outside world.
Under such a widely embracing and vague curatorial umbrella, many are potentially called, and welcomed. The show, neatly arranged in the remodeled museum’s upstairs contemporary gallery (the Loeb Family Gallery) manages to be one of those seemingly modest sleepers among art worth seeking out in Santa Barbara at the moment.
The “inside looking out” theme is well-embedded in Narsiso Martinez’s “Mission-Precious Cargo,” a large piece painted on actual produce boxes. The mega-image of daily work-life in agriculture gains a protagonist’s vantage through the small inset portrait of a worker swaddled in a hat and protective bandana, plus headphones to supply his own interior world while on the jobsite.