By Luke Thomas, November 12, 2025
Vibrant colors, non-traditional art forms and reflective surfaces shine throughout Cal Poly Pomona’s exhibition Color & Quirk, putting viewers into a world of light and innovation at the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery Aug. 25-Nov. 18.
When putting together the exhibition, art curator Michele Cairella Fillmore sought to put together a collection of artists who dealt with vibrant colors in distinct and innovative ways, limiting the use of white, black and gray.
Megan Geckler, a featured artist at the Color & Quirk exhibition, works with vibrant flagging tape. Through Geckler’s studies, receiving her BFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in 1998 and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2001 for sculpture, she discovered a passion for creating installations.
“I love the idea that you can make an environment, walk right into it, and your entire idea of what you had before would cease and have this immersive experience,” Geckler said.
Geckler’s main installation at the exhibition, titled “You can never quarantine the past,” is a set-up of flagging tape connecting two pedestals to the Kellogg Gallery’s skylight. Geckler’s original idea stemmed from the concept of fraternal twins.
“I wanted (the pedestals) to be related but not identical,” Geckler said. “The pedestals color scheme was inside-out. One of them was hot in the center and the other one was cool in center and hot on the outside. … You see all the strands going between these two and intersecting each other.”
In the future, Geckler is hoping to continue making larger scale installations. Her largest is a six-story flagging tape structure in Sydney, Australia. Six colors of flagging tape overlap each other as they descent from the hoist at the top of the building, creating an illusion of a rainbow of gradients.
Colin Roberts has been creating art since he was 2 years old, leading to him studying at Otis College of Art and Design where he graduated with his bachelor’s degree in sculpture in 2001. Sculptors like Stephen Balkenhol and Charles Ray were early inspirations for Roberts, and he described working under American artist Jim Shaw as a huge influence.
“Sometimes I’ll just be walking down the street, and (a piece) will pop in my head,” Roberts said. “Sometimes I’ll be thinking about it for years. Or I’ll make a piece, and it’ll sit around for years unfinished, and one day I’ll think of the answer. It’s like a puzzle.”
The foundations for Roberts’ pieces at the Color & Quirk Exhibition, including “Multicolor Pillow” and “Holographic Pillow,” were laid when he was freelancing for a realtor in Beverly Hills back in 2004 studying glass-constructed buildings to model concept drawings.
“Once I saw those buildings, I started to fall in love with that green glass and the way they all looked like there was no structure holding the glass together,” Roberts said. “I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to take that and build it into miniature.”
From there, Roberts began experimenting with plexiglass, initially molding it off translucent deep sea creature life and eventually finding footing with the structure of a pillow.
Growing up in England, Seda Saar’s inspirations came from her country and artists who expressed their works in new and innovative ways, particularly the early modernists and cubists. Saar said studying interior architecture and environmental designs at the London Metropolitan University and Art Center College of Design served as a gateway into perception, light and color, the primary basis of her current work.
Prior to her career in public art, Saar worked as a themed entertainment designer for multiple Hollywood studios, where she experimented with light and perception in her set designs.
“In those spaces where there was natural light coming in, I was always looking to tell the story of the brand, whether it was a Universal story or a Disney story,” Saar said.
Her pieces at the exhibition, including “Chroma Column” and “Horizon,” serve as a continuation of her ideas of light and color, while also placing the viewer into the world of the art.
“By creating the depth of space, I can create a way to immerse the viewer in the space,” Saar said. “With ‘Chroma Column,’ I always wanted to create a way to reflect back a rainbow, so I was able to use materials that can reflect color back into space and include us in its reflection, … creating this sense of atmosphere and immersion.”
As a child of a wood sculptor, Safaryan has been involved in art her whole life. Straying away from an artisan focus in college, she credits her master’s degrees in psychology and public management for broadening the world view she’s able to create from.
“Artists, whatever they paint, it’s a reflection of their inner world, their thoughts, their emotions, whatever’s going on in their world,” Safaryan said. “Because I didn’t study art, I was free to explore that world myself. I was not told skill, and I had the freedom to explore, to learn myself, to find my own ways of expression.”
Safaryan founded the Wood Symphony Gallery in 2016 after the owner of the Mano Gallery, a close friend of Safaryan and her father, died. She sought to continue the efforts of the owner, giving a place for contemporary wood artists from around the world to showcase their work.
Combining conventional acrylic paint with eggshells allowed Safaryan to show the beauty in fragility. Her works at the Color & Quirk exhibition including “Thoughts in Color I,” are extensions of that artistic style.
“(The idea) may come when I’m reading a book or when I’m walking in nature,” Safaryan said. “(My art) doesn’t start when I take the canvas and brushes. It starts long before.”
Born in Pennsylvania, Jack Reilly attended Florida State University where he was trained in a New York style of art. His largest inspirations came from East Coast artists, including Frank Stella and Elsworth Kelly, and the genre of post-painterly abstraction.
After receiving his master’s degree, Reilly moved to Los Angeles with $300 to his name. However, he found rapid success in geometric abstraction and became associated with the minor abstract illusionism movement, which involve paintings with a three-dimensional illusion rebelling against the “flatness dogma” of abstract critics.
Reilly’s works at the Color & Quirk exhibition, including “Atmospheric Temptation” and “Silent Sound of Yearning,” showcase his style of illusionism and his signature brushwork through the juxtaposition of the interior and exterior of his circular canvas. His paintings were created using two techniques; around the perimeter of the painting, he filled several layered orbits with hundreds of tiny brushstrokes, and on the inside, Reilly used spray paint to create a simpler center with a more subdued feeling.
“We can look at these paintings and add all kinds of critical jargon to them, in terms of what they’re for, what they’re about, what they mean, what they represent,” Reilly said. “But, ultimately, (my paintings) are an object to meditate upon. … It’s just a thing that’s damn beautiful.”
Along with these five artists, the Color & Quirk exhibition also features the works of Kelsey Brookes, Freddy Chandra, Andy Moses, Nike Schröder and Phillip Vaughn.
The University Art Gallery will be hosting a closing reception Nov. 18 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. featuring several of the artists showcased in the exhibition.