The Arts & Ojai With Porch Gallery's Lisa Casoni & Heather Stobo

Porch Gallery hosted the first gallery show opening over two days at the end of June with Shana Mabari's "Constellatio: Planeta: Stella" featuring the work of an artist who went into the stratosphere on a NASA mission with an enormous telescope to observe black holes, quasars and other astronomical phenomenon. The opening was spaced over two days and insured careful social distancing by limiting the number of people in the gallery at any one time. While waiting to enter, patrons could check out the six tables designed by seven local artists as a meditation on the age of social distancing, and what keeping a six-foot distance means for humans being together. This exhibit will be up until July 18th. Heather Stobo and Lisa Casoni opened their gallery nearly 10 years ago, and have shook up the arts scene with their inventive pairings and unexpected and inventive pairings. They have attracted acclaimed conceptual artists to Ojai, including big names like Gary Lang, Ruth Pastine, Andy Moses (son of Ed), Russell Crotty and many others. The two have been together for 20 years and as a couple each bring strengths that reinforce their various enterprises.  We talk about how this exciting exhibit came together, how it felt to sit with it for the months that the gallery was shut and how gratifying it was to host the opening for an audience of people starved for art's meditative presence as well as basic human contact. The one-hour talk went all over the place, but mostly centered on the relationship of Ojai to art and its artists; how the art world may look coming out of  the pandemic, and how Los Angeles is an amazing place for creativity and culture. We did not talk about taimen fishing in Mongolia, the works of Isaiah Berlin or this year's attenuated baseball season. Correction: The painting "Nightwatch" was mentioned by the host. The painter was Rembrandt, not Van Gogh. Doh!