Tarra Lyons:New Work: paintings
Joan Weiss:Reckless Blooms: paintings
Eric Bohr, Margaret Chavigny, Maya Kabat, Laura van Duren:Two by Two: new work
Exhibition dates: October 2-31, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, October 2 from 6-9pm (in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur)
Reception and Artists’ Talk: Saturday, October 3 from 12-3pm, artists’ talk at 1pm
Mercury 20 Gallery
25 Grand Ave. (at Broadway)
Oakland, CA 94612
Exhibition dates: October 2-31, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, October 2 from 6-9pm (in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur)
Reception and Artists’ Talk: Saturday, October 3 from 12-3pm, artists’ talk at 1pm
Tarra Lyons New Work: paintings
Tarra Lyonspaints organic abstractions that vibrate with deeply-felt symbol, color, texture and surface to create a resonant visual poetry. Her imagery includes morulas, embryonic divisions, botanical forms, sprouting seeds, tubers, and plant life that emulate structures in animal and human life. Lyons is fascinated with the coexistence of repetitions and parallel patterns in such phenomena as microscopic cells and plant forms, arteries of traffic and insect trails. Even a paint drip flowing from one end of a canvas to the other creates distinctive patterning that reappears in the veins in the ears of a rabbit or in a marble slab. This interconnectedness of things man-made and natural gives the artist confidence in an overarching plan without human blueprint, and an outside purpose for life’s processes.
Tarra Lyons, Morula (detail), 2009, oil on beechwood panel
Tarra Lyons has a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Boston University and an MFA from California College of the Arts in Oakland. Her work has been exhibited at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA, Oakland Art Gallery and is represented in numerous public and private collections.
Joan Weiss Reckless Blooms: painting
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. –Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke
Joan Weiss‘s recent paintings continue to explore the processes of growth and decay in the natural world. Her large, richly colored works exploit the possibilities of oil on canvas with layers of underpainting and transparent glazes. Packed densely, teeming with plant and flower-derived forms, there is a sense of ripeness teetering on the edge of dissolution. Here nature beckons, and threatens. Beauty struggles with excess, in an overgrowth of reckless blooms.
Joan Weiss, Garden Redux, 2009, oil on canvas
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Joan Weiss received a BFA in Painting from the University of Michigan, and an MA in Psychology from Sierra University. She has exhibited her work locally at ACCI Gallery, Alameda Center for the Arts, and the Berkeley Art Center, and has work in numerous private collections.
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in the back gallery…
Eric Bohr, Margaret Chavigny, Maya Kabat, Laura van Duren:Two by Two: new work
Paintings by Eric Bohr evidence a progression in his work with found objects. Starting with the gentle placement of a single piece of wood, the series moves to a more direct use of wooden planks and finally arrives at a piece made almost totally of found objects with minimal painting. The artist employs new ways of breaking the plane of a two-dimensional canvas, representing three dimensions physically instead of with the traditional manipulation of perspective.
Eric Bohr, Yellow, 2009, painting, wood
Painter Margaret Chavigny works with collage, acrylics, beeswax, oils and alkyd on panels. Attentive to shifting boundaries between order and chaos, intention and chance, knowing and not knowing, the artist creates complex surfaces with multi-layered patterns. Interconnections – nerves, pathways, growth and fragility – are part of her primary vocabulary.
Margaret Chavigny, work in progress
Maya Kabat’s drawings evolve from an interest in language and numbers as systems of symbolic abstraction. Relating to nature and natural laws as well as to the human need to structure and order the universe, these graph-like images play with a fantasy of space-time that is derived from a simple system of mapping words and sayings that express the artist’s search for simplicity, joy, beauty and order.
Maya Kabat MYBH1, 2009, drawing on paper on panel
Sculptor Laura van Duren works in metal, clay, wood, resin and sugar. Her current work is inspired by Samuel Beckett’s 1961 play, Happy Days, in which a woman questions the futility of her existence. In van Duren’s installation, a lone ceramic figure emerges from a sea of loose rock salt as ladders made of sugar suspend in the surrounding space. Juxtaposing sugar, salt and human figure, van Duren presents images that imply mortality in the context of a harsh, but also "sweet" world.
Laura van Duren, Ladders, 2009, sculpture