Search
Close this search box.

Julianne Wallace Sterling: Plural

May 2013

145.jpg

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Jann Nunn: ARC OF ATLAS

Exhibition runs May 23 – June 29 2013

SPECIAL EVENTS:
*Artist Reception: Saturday May 25 4-7pm
*Artist Talk: Saturday June 8 5pm
*Oakland Art Murmur First Friday: June 7 6-9pm
*New! Third Thursday! June 20 6-8pm

Jann Nunn is an accomplished Bay Area artist and regardless of her media every aspect and implication of material usage in her art is carefully considered and specifically relates to the work’s content context and scale. In her new solo show Arc of the Atlas the central piece Arc of the Atlas is a 10-foot tall stack of reclaimed archival microprint paper carved into a spinal form capped at either end with cast bronze representing the atlas (first vertebrae) and the sacrum at the base. Using two starkly different mediums paper and bronze all works in the exhibition relate to the physiology and mobility of the human body. Nunn’s work engenders both conceptual and poetic sensibilities. She strives for a kind of draw-you-in beauty that will linger until the ideas fall into formation in the viewer’s conscious mind. Nunn says "While my work embodies a strong physical presence and the craft is considered and often laborious it is the ideas that are paramount." We say you won’t want to miss this show!

Biagini

Images: Jann Nunn "Dreaming of Machu Picchu" installation detail images (2012) hand-cut archival microprint paper nylon lead. "Small Drop" (left)6" x 6" "Long Drop" (right)6" x 41". Photos courtesy of the artist.

Oakland-based artist Jann Nunn has exhibited lectured and held residencies internationally and throughout the United States since 1987. Her work is represented in several public and numerous private collections including di Rosa Preserve Stadt-Sparkasse and Common Ground’s The New Milestone Project. Residencies include Atelier H�herweg D�sseldorf Villa Montalvo Prema Arts Centre England and Chesil Gallery Portland England. She was an affiliate artist for three years at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Nunn creates artworks–both monumental and minute in scalein a variety of forms including sculpture installation performance works on paper photography and video. She holds a BFA degree from University of Alaska Anchorage attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine earned an MFA in Sculpture from San Francisco Art Institute and is Professor of Sculpture at Sonoma State University.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Julianne Wallace Sterling: PLURAL

Exhibition runs May 23 – June 29 2013

SPECIAL EVENTS:
* Artist Reception: Saturday May 25 4-9pm
* Artist Talk: Saturday June 8 5pm
* Oakland Art Murmur First Friday: June 7 6-9pm
* New! Third Thursday! June 20 6-8pm

Julianne Wallace Sterling surely relishes in the small miracle of paint made flesh but there’s more than that to her raw stripped-down sensual portraits. Her love affair with portraiture (with some preference for nudes) runs deep but she doesn’t whitewash what she sees. Her subjects are the women men and children in her life and in line with the best of portraiture artists back through time Sterling captures physical likeness while revealing underlying truths.

Curtis Ratcliff

Image: Julianne Wallace Sterling "mirror" (2013) oil and graphite on panel 108"x 60" three panels (36"x 60" each); Photo by the artist.

Julianne Wallace Sterling is a Bay Area painter born in Southern California. She graduated from UC Riverside with a BS in Economics and pursued post-baccalaureate studies in art at San Francisco State. Her work has been exhibited at Dacia Gallery in New York A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato and Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland. She was awarded first prize at Marin Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2010 Juried Annual. Her work has been written about in the San Francisco Chronicle and the East Bay Express. Ms. Sterling’s work was selected for A.I.R. Gallery’s 9th Biennial in Brooklyn in March 2011.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jody Medich: STORIES THEY TOLD ME

Exhibition runs May 23 – June 29 2013

SPECIAL EVENTS:
* Artist Reception: Saturday May 25 4-9pm
* Artist Talk: Saturday June 8 5pm
* Oakland Art Murmur First Friday: June 7 6-9pm
* New! Third Thursday! June 20 6-8pm

Jody Medich‘s series of pencil and charcoal drawings come from a long-held very intrapersonal place where reality and media images merge. Of her family she says "We come from an area right on the border between Austria and Hungary…and survived two world wars in limbo between two evils: the Nazis and the Communists. As a young child [my family] wanted me to know how to survive in the face of hell. They tried to save me by telling me stories."

Curtis Ratcliff

Image: Jody Medich "Grandma" (2012) pencil on paper 30"x36". Photo by the artist.

Grandmother aunts uncles and parents told of traumatic experiences: taking beatings to protect Jews and Christians hidden in the cellar; where to hide when soldiers came to the door and to never peek out no matter what; and showing scars from concentration camps and the Gulag for resisting ideology of the oppressor. Telling these stories to a child the adults left out details but the artist’s active imagination filled in the terrifying blanks envisioning the stories through the imagery of old war and noir movies her father liked which she describes as "…disturbing and sinister made all the more terrifying because of what they do not show."

Jody Medich was born in South Bend IN grew up in Detroit MI and has lived in the Bay Area since 2001. She received an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. Medich has exhibited throughout the Bay Area is a member of the art group Five Ton Crane and the co-founder and creative director of the design firm Kicker Studio.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mercury 20 Gallery

475 25th Street, Oakland CA 94612

Gallery hours: Friday + Saturday: 12-5pm and by appt