Art Picnic Tickets   Garden Tour Guide

Art Picnic at The Lloyd-Butler Ranch Saturday, September 14

Between 2-6pm, please join us for an afternoon family picnic on the sprawling lawn of of one of Ventura County’s most exclusive, historic ranches: The Lloyd-Butler Ranch.

Enjoy a self-guided tour of the Stumpery, Victorian Gardens, and view 4 art installations created exclusively for SCIART’s Land + Sky Artist Invitational.

Artists: Ceramicist Marianne McGrath • Mixed Media Artist Elizabeth Souza • Composer Justin Messina • Digital Image Creator Allanah Vokes.

Justin Messina will be performing his original musical composition on a 168 year old Estey Melodeon pump organ at 2pm, 3pm, 4pm, and 5pm.

Land + Sky // Tierra y Cielo pairs agriculturally significant properties with contemporary artists to create immersive site-specific installations.

The artists’ work touches on topics such as the role of personal narratives in land use, historical ecology, sound mapping, archival audio layering, and the porosity of cultural territories.

Beer, wine, and non-alcoholic drinks will be available for purchase on site, and boxed lunches from Urban Plates are available for pre-order.

We hope to see you there! Tickets

Hello and Welcome!

Land + Sky invites artists to create site-specific work at culturally significant properties to deepen our understanding of the land by seeing it through their eyes.

The symbol for Land + Sky is a plus sign with windmill-shaped blades, centered in an unbounded frame. It represents Studio Channel Islands’ mission to facilitate meaningful collaborations and creative experiences in times of continual change.

Current issues call for what contemporary art is uniquely positioned to provide: a new way of seeing that fosters curiosity and awareness.

The intention of Land + Sky is to inspire appreciation for Ventura County’s agriculture, ranchers, and open spaces, and to spark conversations about our changing landscape.

These four internationally recognized artists bring their interests in historical ecology, cultural territories, and bio-cultural sound mapping to the Lloyd-Butler Ranch. Their extensive research, gathering of source material, and building of the installations you will see today has been a steady five month process, and we are incredibly proud of what they’ve accomplished.

Thomas Lloyd-Butler, a humble artist himself the most supportive host imaginable, and the curious, welcoming spirits of Cynthia and Jim Lloyd-Butler are deeply felt throughout.

With gratitude for your interest and support, 
Robin Wallace, board member and co-curator, SCIART
Peter Tyas, Executive Director and co-curator, SCIART

Thank You. Your Support Made This Project Possible.

The Land + Sky Artists were selected based on their engagement with topics such as the formation and dissolution of cultural territories, the role of memory and personal narratives in land use, and historical ecology.

Allanah Vokes | Digital Image Creator

Allanah Vokes develops elaborate technology-driven systems to collect and transform visual data, producing works in sculpture, drawing, photography, and digital media. Her studio practice investigates how the alchemical powers of technology can be harnessed to preserve natural phenomena, and in doing so, entangle the human and more-than-human spheres and contemplate possibilities of future coexistence.

The Entangled Garden

The Entangled Garden is an immersive virtual reality video work that explores the natural, agricultural, and horticultural landscapes of the Lloyd-Butler Ranch. This project is not about re-wilding the ranch but rather about entangling landscapes, each with different degrees of human influence and control.

Using machine learning, I weave visual elements from different plant communities into a 360° video of a walk through the ranch’s garden. This process generates a hybrid landscape; one that dissolves the boundaries between human and non-human spaces and allows them to symbiotically interact in new, surprising ways.

I am particularly drawn to the primeval plants in the garden’s collection – conifers, ferns, palms, cycads – plants whose forms have persisted for millennia. These ancient plants provide the foundation for the transformed landscape. Over this base layer, I apply low-rank adaptation models trained on various elements of the ranch’s plant life: sagebrush chaparral, avocado foliage, floral pollinator plantings, and native sage species. This process of successive layerings mirrors geological action, where each pass through the model adds another layer of complexity and history to the evolving ecological landscape. The immersive VR environment thus becomes a space where the present moment dissolves, revealing a landscape that is not fixed in time but is constantly unfolding. As the layers accumulate, my own figure, once central in the footage, becomes engulfed by the landscape until it disappears completely.

The Entangled Garden

Justin Messina  | Composer + Sound Artist

Southern California native Justin Messina works with both acoustic and electronic means to create works that explore the expressive nature of sound. These works range from large orchestral compositions to electronically created sound installations.Through installations like Island, recorded at Channel Islands National Park, he explores the relationship between music and sound by recording acoustic instruments in unusual acoustic spaces like sea caves and forests.

Lloyd-Butler Ranch Day :: Night :: El Sueño :: Dawn

This composition is a meditation on place and memory, layering sounds from field recordings, folk songs, scores from California missions, Chumash culture, and topographic maps to create an audio experience of the past and the present.

As an artist, I seek opportunities to create work derived from and about our origins. Investigating the history of Oxnard, where I was born, and Ventura, where I was raised, is an investigation of context and of self.

For this piece I gathered several components:

• Music for pump organ from snippets and fragments of local folk songs recorded in the early 1900s.
• Nighttime and daytime field recordings of bees, frogs, owls, coyotes, and trucks at the ranch, and even a bell that hangs on the ranch house porch.
• A wax cylinder recording from 1904 of Adelaide Kamp, a Ventura singer, singing “El Sueño,” the dream.
• A Chumash bullroarer, which is a lasso-like sound maker, used to summon gatherings.

The scores are printed on vintage lemon crate labels and draw from methods of music notation used exclusively at California Missions, including colored, shaped, and stemless notes. They guide the performer to respond to what they are hearing, and as such, no two performances will be alike. It’s all about listening and responding!

The pump organ, brought to the Ranch specifically for this performance, was made during the time the Lloyd-Butler family purchased Rancho Santa Clara Del Norte. It was was shipped to California before the Panama Canal was built, clearing the treacherous Horn of Africa, a testament to the value of music to early European settlers of California.

Elizabeth Souza | Mixed Media Artist

Stories permeate my work; some stories are true, some are not. I share them to build connections that follow a maternal line, instead of those that have been force-fed by patriarchally influenced, mainstream history. My work connects to the past, and I reflect upon a diaspora that is disappearing from collective memory. Despite this, the Dutch Indonesian Diaspora persistently retraces itself through maternal lines that have been erased by the process of colonialism.

We Make Our Home In The Littoral Space

Home is something I never knew. Having been born into a family that was displaced, I never had a real place of belonging, but when I came to the Lloyd Butler Ranch I felt the long-standing connection to place.

Being at the Ranch is a physical and spiritual experience. It is to be felt with the whole body and all of senses; walking, listening, smelling, and feeling what it is to be present among people of the past and present.

The spiritual experience comes through the images of the stars, the Lloyd-Butler family members, the Chumash basket weavers, and the monarch butterflies that are representative of Mexican migration. In my work the family members gaze toward us in a ghostly way, as spirits, and they are very present at the Ranch.

For this piece, I wanted to give the viewer a way to move through layers of time and space, and to be enveloped in that experience. So I chose to make a diaphanous tunnel of wool and silk fabrics allowing entry into the porous and interrelated layers of history experienced here. It is my way of conveying the complexity of what you see and feel in the present.

The work that I’ve been creating since 2009 has been about the past and how it manifests itself in the present. Our pasts affect all of us whether we acknowledge it or not, and the land itself also has a past and a present.

Early photos of the Lloyd-Butler family show how much water filled their environment; its presence is consistent. It is also the element of emotion. It holds a lot of feeling in it. It can be placid and peaceful, and it can be fast and strong. It can rage, and it has the power to obliterate everything.

Originally the Santa Clara River that runs alongside the Lloyd Butler Ranch ran freely from the mountains, bearing nutrients from the hills and fish from the ocean. Now it’s been dammed and diverted and tamed to suit our needs. We’ve changed where it is located and how it moves on the land, but water will always go where it wants to be. It moves, and we use it to transport ourselves too. Water is a migratory force.

Migration connects all of us. Everybody who is here now has come from somewhere else, whether it was through their ancestors 30,000 years ago, or a journey they took themselves 30 years ago, like I did when I found my home.

The Ancestral Portrait: Ida Ross

We tend to associate men with career farming, but ownership of the Lloyd-Butler Ranch was passed down through a woman who was an adopted daughter. It’s important to me to honor the matriarchs that are often forgotten in history, so I chose to create a separate portrait of Ida Ross. She is surrounded by the palm trees and the house in the background. Also included are the Painted Cave symbols, moving diagonally across the frame, they are omnipresent, a constant guiding celestial force. They acknowledge the Chumash presence- a people who are still here. Although the reference photo I used was taken on a visit to England, home is in her heart, palm trees to symbolize California, and the Painted Cave symbols place Ida right in the middle of the ancient Central Coast.

We Make Our Home In The Littoral Space

The Ancestral Portrait: Ida Ross

Marianne McGrath | Ceramicist

Born into the fifth generation of a farming family, Marianne grew up on the Oxnard plains in Southern California. She studied Conservation Biology and Ceramics at The University of Colorado at Boulder, and received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin. After teaching in Texas for almost ten years, she returned to California, joining the faculty at California State University Channel Islands in 2017 as an Assistant Professor of Art and Head of Ceramics. Currently, she is Chair of the Department of Art and Art History and an Associate Professor of Art at CSUCI.

Living Room

Inspired by her childhood home and memories of days spent at the Lloyd-Butler Ranch during that time, Marianne invites the viewer to physically inhabit Living Room, a dimensional metaphor for a time and place in her past.

In ranching, the built, the wild, and the farmed environments are forever intertwined, as are Marianne’s hand shaped porcelain lemon branches, springing up amongst Victorian furniture and barn wood.

The stark white ceramic eucalyptus and lemonwood leaves appear life-like and playful, but are also ghostly, stiff and heavy, referencing an eternal spirit or dream world that has always been there and is thriving alongside us but we cannot access.

Untamed, the porcelain botanicals steadily advance around us and between us, bearing silent witness to our lives and marking the passage of time, with or without us knowing.

Whether we succeed or fail, hurry or rest, the plants carry on, pushing through the slats of the wooden barn walls, the way memories protrude into our consciousness.

– Robin Wallace