Photo Gallery: Challenging creations by Riverside artist Caron Guerrant Rand

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SPECIAL TO THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE

Riverside artist Caron Guerrant Rand’s artwork is reflective, insightful and thought provoking. She infuses portraits with sentiment and creates abstract works exploring layers of pattern and meaning. She also creates art that delivers intense, impassioned messages.

Caron Guerrant Rand's artwork is reflective, insightful and thought-provoking. She infuses portraits with sentiment and creates abstract works exploring layers of pattern and meaning. She also creates art that delivers intense, impassioned messages.

Rand's most recent works, "In Our Dreams," was inspired by the documentary, "The Rape of Europa." The series of paintings delivers powerful visual commentaries of the insidious forces of evil that gripped the world during World War II and contextualized these images with a more contemporary relevance.

Though the Riverside resident is far too young to have personal recollections of the Holocaust, Rand's family and friends, including her grandparents, have connections to the terror of Hitler's Germany, so this art is deeply personal while at the same time universal. It vents the artist's angst while it speaks to each of us to remain vigilant against the perversely destructive forces of ignorance, prejudice and hatred. Rand's work asks us to remember our humanity, compassion, tolerance and sense of decency.

Los Angeles-based curator and art critic Peter Frank, commenting about Rand's work says, "All these issues and more roil the surfaces of Caron Rand's canvases and buzz about her occasional work in three-dimensional media. Rand's obsession with the events that transpired well before she was born comes from her conviction that these events remain unsettled and unresolved, and that, as such, they can happen again in some form. Consider her exhibition a booster shot against re-infection, an antidote to ignorance, forgetting, and in particular, base prejudice."

Rand received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2006 and has been an adjunct art instructor for Azusa Pacific University and California Baptist University since 2008. She has served on the board of the Riverside Arts Council and is on the board of the Riverside People's Gallery. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows throughout Riverside, San Bernardino, Pomona, Claremont and Los Angeles and is a generous contributor of art to community charity events.

In January, Rand will have artwork included in a group exhibit with other adjunct faculty members of Cal Baptist at the Riverside Art Project, a gallery space located at Riverside Plaza shopping center and operated by the Riverside Arts Council.

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The Press-Enterprise

"#8463" by Caron Guerrant Rand, recalls the Holocaust.

For more information about the Artist Spotlight, contact Daniel Foster at The Community Foundation at 951-684-4194 or DFoster@thecommunityfoundation.net

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"Ashen Cross: AntiChrist's Hackenkreuz" by Rand.