Fair Trade
Fair Trade is an organized social movement and market-based approach that aims to help producers in developing countries make better trading conditions and promote sustainability. At The Loft at Liz’s through October 24.
Fair Trade is presented in conjunction with Fair Trade month (October) and dedicated to featuring works that speak to this increasingly relevant and transformative topic. Featured artists will be creating original works in statement of fair trade practices and others will actually incorporate the use of fair trade products as their medium. This exhibit will be featured alongside the Los Angeles Fair Trade Marketplace, to be hosted at the gallery.
Fair Trade is an organized social movement and market-based approach that aims to help producers in developing countries make better trading conditions and promote sustainability. The movement advocates the payment of a higher price to producers as well as higher social and environmental standards. It focuses in particular on exports from developing countries to developed countries, most notably handicrafts, coffee, cocoa, sugar, tea, bananas, honey, cotton, wine, fresh fruit, chocolate, flowers and gold.
Featured Artists: Ofunne Obiamiwe, Stéphane Tourné, Raksha Parekh, Pascal Giacomini, Andre Van Zijl
Ofunne Obiamiwe and her family survived the genocide of the Biafran/Nigerian war. Now living in the United States for the past 20 years, Ofunne is an Associate Professor of Digital Art at Santa Monica College and the founder of Republic of Peace, an emerging arts and culture collective. Ofunne's work deals with multilayered issues of racism, gender, poverty, class, inclusion/exclusion, power/disenfranchisement, culture, colonialism, and spirituality unattached to religion. Her work reflects a profound dedication to human rights and activism and the belief that afflictions of violence, discrimination and intolerance will continue to fester until they are replaced with understanding and empathy.
Stéphane Tourné’s series “Ici L’Espoir” is the basic foundation and inspiration for this exhibit. His work in Africa with Oxfam led the artist to consider the consequences of unfair trading practices. Through his photographs, Tourné invites us to discover his views on this subject and in turn, to form our own. So simple, but powerful, the photographer utilizes images of naked bodies, carved and redesigned with raw materials and consumables (oil, flour, rice, cotton, etc.). This alliance between a smart aesthetic research and a humanitarian cause leaves the viewer in a state of breathless shock and ultimately develops to a sensual art-trash.
Raksha Parekh creates her unique 
works from such commodities as sugar and cotton. “I am deeply interested in the dynamic space where the history and psychology of the Indian and African experiences meet. My current works examine the connections of these two diasporas in relation to the colonial past using cotton and sugar as my mediums, both products being central players in this history.
The international expansion in consumption of sugar and cotton is deeply embedded in colonial history as these goods were crucial to the establishment of empire in the Americas, Asia and Africa. The history of sugar continues to have great relevance because of its defining role in shaping world history and culture”.
Pascal Giacomini is a multi-talented and multi-faceted artist. Working in several genres — mixed-media photography, sculpture, and functional art — he has exhibited in museums (UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History; Museum at California Center for the Arts, Escondido; and the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles), as well as creating solo public sculpture exhibits (City of West Hollywood, City of Malibu) and site-specific functional art for prestigious private properties (Lloyd Wright’s Sowden House and the Norma Talmadge Estate). Over the years, he has also exhibited in various Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department venues throughout the city.
Andre van Zijl – “Art in my present understanding is the activity of the de-tribalized shaman, navigating a path beyond death through the reefs of art history and political reality, finding within the confusion of modern society a clear vision of the stars above; so that the ancient rite of storytelling may continue around the ‘campfires’ of the city, granting all a vision celebrating the fruits of their unique spirit gifting the earth and all who dwell therein.” Andre van Zijl: Painter, sculptor, educator, writer, pragmatic idealist, visionary, husband, father, world citizen.
RSS 2.0 Feed
