Art patrons who visited the premiere of the LAND-artproject at the Manhattan Beach Art Center exhibition, became engaged in the process of viewing, listening, touching, interacting and exploring the various interactive transmedia installations that were prominently displayed in the main gallery of the MBAC. Jacalyn’s process of embedding photographic images with an underlying coded language to provide a vehicle that can expand upon the interpretation of an art piece and beyond the object’s first impression is becoming her signature art style.
In a gallery or museum setting, Jacalyn’s installations provide a space where both physical and digital worlds can be accessed simultaneously so the art patron can interact with a scannable embedded Quick Response Code (referred to as QR Code). Once the code is scanned, using any media device that has a QR code reader, the art patron is immediately transported to this website where photographs, stories, poems, videos, musical compositions, and other documentations by LAND-artproject collaborators can be viewed.
Jacalyn López García was born in Los Angeles, CA. She received her B.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Riverside and an M.F.A. in Multimedia and Photography from Claremont Graduate University. Through the years López García has earned local, national and international acclaim for her photographic works and interactive, multimedia installation projects. She is the recipient of a California Council of Humanities Grant for her documentary project, “Life Cycles: Reflections of Change and A New Hope for Future Generations” and has several works collected by the Hispanic Research Center of Arizona State University at Tempe, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and the California Museum of Photography.
As a photographer and transmedia visual storyteller her artistic vision is fueled by a desire to integrate technology with the use of traditional and non-traditional artistic practices. A common theme among many of her interactive multimedia projects involves creating reflections of the past with the intent of exploring new understandings of the present. In her recent work López García uses the Internet and QR Codes as a framework to blur the boundaries of museum and gallery walls in an effort to create a global audience. As seen in many of her artworks, López García is determined to push the boundaries that exist between politics and art by challenging her audience to think in new and unconventional ways about “what art is” and “what art can be about.”
In 1997, Jacalyn took an early retirement from the University of California, Riverside as the Director of Virtual Research. She later retired from the Riverside Community College District where she taught numerous courses in Photography ( including wet-lab and digital photography), Art Appreciation, History of Photography and Introduction to Art. Lastly, she retired from teaching a variety of Multimedia courses in Visual Communications at Los Angeles Mission College for the Institute of Arts and Multimedia. She is now very excited about devoting her creative energies full-time to complete a lifetime goal – building her own house. In 2019, Jacalyn designed her very own Tiny House, Construction began in the Spring of 2020 and will soon be completed. In the Spring of 2021, Jacalyn will present a drive-by installation “From Nothing to Something“ that is being designed as a video projection using the inside of the Tiny House that resides at her Artist Retreat & Spiritual Healing Center located in Salton City, CA at goldiesfarm.com