FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Exhibition dates: May 10th- June 16th 2012
Artists’ Reception: Saturday May 12th from 6-9 pm
Artist’s Talk: Saturday June 9th 4-6 pm
Oakland Art Murmur First Fridays: June 1st from 6-9pm
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Charlie Milgrim: Dark Alliances
Asphalt building paper heavy and black provides the background and scaffold for Charlie Milgrim’s recent works. Nuclear cooling towers glow and radiate a soft fluorescence and hover in the black-ground of space. Black paper planes shadowy stealth bombers are folded and creased into the angular abstractions and dark geometry of the military machine. Creation and destruction conjoin uneasily in our technocratic state.
Charlie Milgrim Cool Pair #1 2011 drawing on roofing tar paper photo: Charlie Milgrim
Charlie Milgrim was born in New York City. She received a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MFA from UC Berkeley. She has exhibited her work at the Oakland Museum the Haines Gallery and Gallery 16 in San Francisco OK Harris in New York City and has work in many private collections including the Di Rosa Collection in Napa CA.
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Julianne Wallace Sterling: this body
East Bay painter Julianne Wallace Sterling presents this body a study in paint made flesh. In her latest series the artist considers the carnal experience we all share of living in a body our vessel home and means by which we encounter life. Her painting focuses primarily on the realities complexities and absurdities of life as a woman.
Julianne Wallace Sterling this body 1 2012 oil on panel photo: Julianne Wallace Sterling
Julianne Wallace Sterling was 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 also 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.
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Gallery Artists: From Here to There
Mercury 20 Gallery is pleased to present Terryl Dunn Jill McLennan and Mary Curtis Ratcliff in the group exhibition From Here to There. These three well-traveled artists show painting and mixed media work inspired by time and place both far away and closer to home.
Images from left:
Mary Curtis Ratcliff Martha the Messenger 2006 collage acrylic graphite xerox transfer
Terryl Dunn DAM 2011 acrylic & pencil on wood panel
Jill McLennan Sustainable 2012 oil and encaustic on wood
Terryl Dunn presents paintings and works on paper from his recent series titled Megathrust. Inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan Dunn explores the explosive forces of nature imagining energy as it moves through the different elements examining how line and mass can signal speed reverberation and cross current.
Jill McLennan’s paintings portray a contemporary city in ruins as it is taken over by nature and graffiti. The paintings are set in a future that looks back towards present wasteful systems and shows the strength of nature to reclaim the earth. Graffiti forms become part of the urban structure as they take on a life of their own.
The work of Mary Curtis Ratcliff looks back to a time before the internet when messages were conveyed by actual birds (Martha the last passenger pigeon) or letters carried by large cumbersome airplanes around the globe. Now correspondence is instantaneously transmitted at the speed of light…….And light in turn transmits its energy signal underneath the toy boats of the children of Paris.