Primary – Works by Allyson Darakjian

 

EVENT: Porterville College Art Show: Primary – Works by Allyson Darakjian

 

DATES OF SHOW: February 5 – 27, 2025

 

ARTIST’S OPENING RECEPTION: February 5, 5 - 7 pm at the Porterville College Art Gallery

 

GALLERY HOURS: Monday – Thursday from 12 – 2 pm and 4 – 6 pm

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

The public is invited to experience Primary – Works by Allyson Darakjian at the Porterville College Art Gallery. An artist’s opening reception will be held on Thursday, February 5th, from 5 - 7 pm, where visitors can meet the artist and enjoy complimentary refreshments. The show will run from February 5 – 27, 2025. Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday from 12 to 4 pm. Parking is free and available to the public.

Allyson Darakjian is a multidisciplinary artist whose work integrates performance, poetry, and intuitive abstract painting. Primary is a meditation on absolutes, origin stories, and the search for expansiveness, inspired by the three primary colors—red, blue, and yellow. Over six months, Darakjian engaged in a ritualistic process, dressing in primary colors, capturing daily Polaroids, journaling in color-coded notebooks, and documenting spontaneous compositions of red, blue, and yellow in the world around her. Through this devotional repetition, her work explores belief systems, artistic inquiry, and the interplay between certainty and uncertainty.

A key element of the exhibition is Primary Vestments, a series of 158 Polaroids that archive her six-month performance. The act of dressing in primary colors became a meditation on identity, perception, and the symbolic weight of color itself. Visitors can also contribute to the exhibition with You Are Invited, an interactive journaling project that extends the conversation beyond the artist’s experience, encouraging participants to explore red, blue, and yellow as subjects, symbols, and languages of their own.

Language, its limits, and its potential play a crucial role in Darakjian’s work as well. Inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s assertion that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” she explores how words—and the lack thereof—shape understanding. Her poetry, derived from journal fragments, takes the form of self-created “scriptures,” bridging personal inquiry with universal questioning. These long-form, stream-of-consciousness texts act as a philosophical wrestling with the primaries—not as fixed truths but as evolving entities open to interpretation and redefinition.

Darakjian holds a BA in Studio Art from Westmont College, an MA in Theology and Culture from the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from the University of Nevada, Reno. She has served as a curatorial assistant and resident artist with the Cascadia Residency through Fuller Seminary Northwest and as a creative coach and resident artist for the Inhabit Arts Collaborative in Fresno, California. She currently teaches art at Clovis Community College and resides in the Central Valley of California with her husband and two sons.

For more information, please contact Porterville College Art Gallery Director, Theodore Lyons, via e-mail: theodore.lyons@portervillecollege.edu.