America and the Course of Empire

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First Friday, April 6
Santa Cruz Rehearsal Studios
118 Coral Street

Artist Reception 6-9 p.m.

Joaquin Spengemann is a Santa Cruz native returned to his roots after an extended residency in the east bay.  His collages are testimonies to excess and injustice, hubris and tyranny, salvation and redemption as they pay homage to and celebrate the fine craft of the illustrators and photographers whose work he dismembers and reorders.  His work exalts the power of nature and scrutinizes the nature of power with recurring themes of greed, romanticism, nostalgia, propaganda and bloodlust.   His most recent works betray a burgeoning penchant for the wisdom of alchemical hermeticism, and attempt through the glorious cartography born of the age of discovery to reveal the folly of statism, nationalism, and the currencies that bear their standards.   The artist is currently examining the concepts of “value” and “worth” from an antediluvian perspective.