Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to announce Chroma Luminescence, a two-person exhibition featuring Lumen paintings by Jerry Cabrera & illuminated sculptures and mixed media paintings Carmen Menza.
 

Jerry Cabrera’s Lumen paintings capture the preciousness and sacredness of light through his glowing and vibrant rectangular canvasses. Although abstract, the stacked canvases give the viewer a visual escape and create the sensation of looking at a sunset or gazing through an open window from a dark place. Cabrera’s intent with these paintings is to, “give the viewer a narrow but vast window of light. Narrow enough not to physically fit through, but vast enough through which to visually escape.”

 

Carmen Menza is an interdisciplinary artist creating fine art and technology-based installations utilizing light, painting, interactive software, music composition and sound design. Her work explores themes of time, space, color, perception, and human connection. Menza strives to create work that transforms through the passage of movement and time and that will form a quiet dialogue with viewer. Her work is activated and brought to life through light and materials that reflect and refract that light as you move across them. Many of her works create optical effects for the viewer as you change your angle of incidence, whereas her paintings contain thin layers of pigments utilizing light and reflective surfaces.
 

Cabrera lives and works in San Antonio, TX.  He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Texas State University and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Cabrera has exhibited nationally in fine art galleries and art fairs, and his work is included in prominent collections, including Neiman-Marcus, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centers, and the AT&T Center.
 

Menza is located in Dallas, TX. She received her BFA in jazz guitar performance from the University of North Texas. She has created public and commercial art installations for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, TX; Perot Museum of Nature and Science, TX; McKinney Avenue Contemporary Museum, TX; Dallas Aurora Light & Sound Festival, TX; UTSW Clements University Hospital, TX, among others. She is a TACA 2019 New Works Fund Grant recipient and a founding member of Texas Vignette, an organization dedicated to supporting women artists.