Darkness: A Full Time Faculty Exhibition

PRESS RELEASE

EVENT: Porterville College Art Gallery: Darkness: A Full Time Faculty Exhibition, featuring work by Pascual Arriaga, Jackie Buttice, and Diran Lyons.

DATES OF SHOW: September 2 – September 10, 2026

OPENING: Wednesday, September 2, 2026 at the Porterville College Art Gallery

GALLERY HOURS: Monday – Thursday from 12 – 4 pm

Darkness: A Full Time Faculty Exhibition

Porterville College Art Gallery presents Darkness, a group exhibition featuring full-time art faculty Jackie Buttice, Paco Arriaga, and Diran Lyons. Taking darkness as more than a visual or atmospheric condition, the exhibition considers the limits of perception, memory, identity, and knowledge. Across photography, painting, sculpture, found objects, and installation, the three artists approach darkness as a condition in which what appears visible or knowable becomes increasingly difficult to secure.

Jackie Buttice initiated the exhibition’s theme through her interest in the solar eclipse. Her large-scale photograph depicts an eclipse viewed through trees, allowing branches and foliage to partially obstruct the astronomical event and transform interference into a condition of seeing. Her accompanying large-scale oil abstraction shifts this investigation toward the sensuous experience of painting itself, foregrounding pigment, gesture, surface, and materiality. Together, Buttice’s works suggest that darkness does not simply prevent vision. It can alter the conditions through which something becomes visible.

Paco Arriaga approaches darkness through recognition, ambition, memory, and the psychological consequences of systems that measure human worth. Works such as Never Remembered, Appease, and Forgotten consider athletes whose identities become inseparable from competition, public approval, and achievement, only to confront the impermanence of recognition and the deterioration of the body. His Collateral Damage extends these concerns into warfare, questioning whether soldiers, sailors, and Marines can themselves become forms of collateral damage when economic pressure, limited opportunities, and social expectations complicate the idea of freely chosen participation. Arriaga’s darkness is frequently internal, residing in experiences of disappointment, erasure, bodily sacrifice, and trauma that remain largely invisible to others.

Diran Lyons approaches the exhibition through what he describes as the “creative lie,” an artistic strategy that destabilizes the viewer’s confidence in objects, titles, photographs, attribution, and autobiographical testimony. Across thirteen works, familiar objects appear to provide evidence for events or identities that cannot necessarily be verified. Dead flowers become Anniversary, a dead privet becomes Successful Transplant, and a sickle becomes Abundance, while Three Manifestations presents two appropriated reproductions of a Walker Evans photograph whose duplication complicates distinctions between original, copy, authorship, and attribution. In a related series, handwritten 3 × 5 index cards repeatedly begin with the intimate question “Did I Ever Tell You The Story...” and encourage viewers to trust Lyons as an autobiographical narrator even when the objects beside them cannot establish that the stories are true. For Lyons, darkness becomes epistemological, emerging at the point where evidence remains visible but certainty disappears.

Although the three artists arrive at the exhibition through distinctly different practices, Darkness converges around the instability of what can be seen, remembered, believed, or known. Buttice obstructs vision in order to reconsider seeing. Arriaga examines identities threatened by disappearance, judgment, bodily decline, and the invisible consequences of experience. Lyons places apparently authoritative objects and narratives under suspicion. The solar eclipse that initially inspired the exhibition consequently becomes an apt metaphor for the exhibition as a whole. Darkness begins at precisely this threshold, where seeing no longer guarantees knowing, memory no longer guarantees truth, and language no longer guarantees that what has been declared ever occurred.

Darkness: A Full Time Faculty Exhibition opens September 2 at the Porterville College Art Gallery. The exhibition will remain on view Monday through Thursday, 12:00–4:00 PM, through September 10. For more information, please contact Gallery Director Theodore Lyons at theodore.lyons@portervillecollege.edu.