Gustave Carlson, Emily Shepard, Elizabeth Sher: Sensing Place
August 29 – October 4, 2025
- Artists’ Reception: Saturday, August 30, 3 – 5 pm
- Artists’ Talks: Saturday, September 13, 3 – 5 pm
- Oakland Art Murmur / First Friday: September 5, October 3, 5 – 9 pm
Gustave Carlson, Elizabeth Sher, and Emily Shepard each trace the contours of place — not just where we live, but how we feel, remember, and imagine it. Their work reveals place as shelter and question — a map of memory and a mirror of change. Carlson’s layered paintings of cottages conjure architecture, home, light and shadow, weaving nostalgia with the quiet rhythms of neighborhood. Sher’s On the Block series channels her unease about climate change, piecing together collaged “blocks” of repurposed paint chips and painted panels that echo the fragility of home and the earth. Shepard turns inward, crafting intimate landscapes of awareness through marks and threads — lines that map, connect, and hold. Together, their works invite viewers to sense place as a layered experience of body, memory, and imagination.
Gallery
Available Work
Elizabeth Sher
Bay Area artist and filmmaker, Elizabeth Sher is Professor Emeritus of Art at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where she taught painting and media arts. Currently working in video, artist books, digital mixed media on canvas, paper, and metal, Sher passes freely between static and moving images, paint and pixels, traditional and new media. She mixes these with a strong basis of formal discourse and a quirky sense of popular culture blended with insightful honesty and humor. Career highlights include her work being widely collected including SFMOMA and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum of California; her films have been broadcast on PBS and internationally including “PENNY: Champion of the Marginalized” Film (writer, director, editor) and “Rituals of Remembrance: Exploring the Art of Mourning” (co-director and producer); exhibits such as “Good Coffee, Bad News” solo Show at Mercury 20 Gallery in 2024 and “Ten Years of Artist Books” curated by Donna Seager at the Brooklyn Central Library; an artist residency at Studi D’arte Nel Castelio, Aragonese, Castle, BAU Institute in Otranto, Italy; and as a featured artist at the Bioneer International Conference in 2022.
Gustave Carlson
Gustave Carlson is the founder and principal of Gustave Carlson Design in Berkeley, California, and a painter. Carlson is the author of “Pacific Modern Houses of Northern California,” published by Oro Publications in 2018. His award-winning architecture has gained widespread recognition, appearing in prestigious publications such as Elle Decor, Dwell, Wallpaper, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Carlson holds a master’s degree in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and studied painting at Penn Graduate School of Fine Arts under Adele Alsop. He has participated in artist residency programs including Edgewood Farm at Castle Hill in Truro, Massachusetts, and Studio Faire in Nérac, France. His paintings are privately collected and have been shown nationally including at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Castle Hill Art Gallery, both in Massachusetts, the Tiburon Library Gallery, and Mercury 20 Gallery.
Emily Shepard
Emily Shepard was born in Boston, Massachusetts and attended Middlebury College in Vermont, where she majored in history, and began her fine art studies. She relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend the California College of the Arts, and in 1993 received an MFA with Distinction in work that integrated printmaking, book arts, and sculpture. Shepard was honored with the Barclay Simpson Award, and has shown her work locally and nationally in juried exhibitions, including the Crocker-Kingsley exhibition in Sacramento and on Artsy with Jen Tough and the Artist Alliance. She is a member of the artist-run gallery, Mercury20, and her work is included in private and corporate collections. Shepard’s practice of year round swimming in the San Francisco Bay without a wetsuit wakes up her senses, challenges her will, and informs her art.