Maya Kabat: Cities and Desire : paintings
Mary V. Marsh: Everyday Readers: artist book and prints
Ce Ce Iandoli, Jill McLennan, Mary Curtis Ratcliff, David Seiler: Foursite: new work
Exhibition dates: August 7-29, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, August 7 from 6-9pm (in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur)
Reception and Artists’ Talk: Saturday, August from 12-4pm, artists’ talk at 2pm
PRESS RELEASE:
Mercury 20 Gallery
25 Grand Ave. (at Broadway)
Oakland, CA 94612
Exhibition dates: August 7-29, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, August 7 from 6-9pm (in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur)
Reception and Artists’ Talk: Saturday, August from 12-4pm, artists’ talk at 2pm
Maya Kabat
Cities and Desire: paintings
A new series of paintings by Maya Kabat explores the city as a metaphor for the human condition. Playing within the space between chaos and order, structure and formlessness, the artist explores an urban existence that feels solid, unchanging, and safe, while simultaneously knowing that nothing is. The result is the visual record of her struggle to hold these two realities at once; to create a language for uncertainty and precariousness, without crumbling beneath the weight of the understanding. At once a construct and a process, constantly shifting, moving and changing in ongoing cycles of birth and decay, the city becomes a metaphor for the desire to understand, hold, structure and possess the unknowable, formless and unpredictable.
Maya Kabat, Cities and Desire # 4, 2008, Oil on wood, 12 x 12 inches
Maya Kabat attended Oberlin College in Ohio and received her MFA in 2000 from UC Davis. She recently had a solo show at the San Francisco MOMA Artist Rental Gallery at Fort Mason and has shown in Seattle, Portland OR, Arkansas, and the Bay Area since 2001. Her work is represented in public and private collections across the country including Cisco Systems in Santa Clara and the Hotel Adagio in downtown San Francisco. She lives and works in Berkeley, California.
Mary V. Marsh
Everyday Readers: artist book and prints
Drawings of people reading–sketched during the artist Mary Marsh‘s daily commute–are translated into block prints and printed on discarded library cards and newspapers. The commuters engaged in their own private world intersect with the book titles and names of past readers on the cards. In different postures of concentration, they are creating a mental space for themselves, an escape, or just making time pass. The visceral materials, the nostalgia of the old cards and newspapers, suggest expiring mediums and a history of the changing methods of reading.
Mary V. Marsh, Reader: Bay Area Backroads, 2009, blockprint on checkout card, 5 x 3 inches
Reading has always been a big part of Marsh’s daily life and collecting books is a family legacy. The artist grew up buried in the comfort of a stuffed armchair and a book, currently she enjoys the morning paper with coffee, novels on the bus, and bedtime reading aloud. Marsh is interested in the different ways people read as she thinks about her own reading habits. She loves reading for the escape, submersion into other worlds, and envelopment into new ideas.
everyday readers, is a series of prints and a new artist book. An open edition variété, each everyday readers book is unique. Block prints on library checkout cards are combined and bound in pamphlet format and finished with a unique vintage book cover. The twelve different Reader prints which comprise the book will also be presented individually framed.
everyday news, large woodcuts on newspaper suggest consideration of the current state of newspaper publishing, and reading from actual paper. As the earliest method of book illustration woodcuts evoke the whole history of printing. Printed on the Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, all of the papers that the artist reads, it chronicles a daily pastime.
Mary V. Marsh was born in Portland, Oregon and has been making art and working in libraries in the Bay Area since 1982. She received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1992. She has exhibited in many venues in the Bay Area with solo shows at, San Francisco Art Commission at Grove Street, San Jose Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Center, and San Francisco Public Library, Skylight Gallery. She makes unique and small edition artist books under Quite Contrary Press.
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In Mercury Twenty’s Back Gallery….
Ce Ce Iandoli, Jill McLennan, Mary Curtis Ratcliff, David Seiler
Foursite: new work
Ce Ce Iandoli conveys the uncontrollable beauty that emerges from pieces of detritus and common imagery, collaged into images that reach for the heart, not the mind. She relies on leftover magazines, ephemera, colorized glues, broken objects, and painted overlays.
The paintings of Jill McLennan collect points of view of the city as it sparkles in the moment, still yet always moving, silent, humming, encompassing the constant rhythm of the freeway as it winds through it like an urban river.
Mary Curtis Ratcliff begins her compositions with photographic images from nature. Mystery and visual complexity are built through the techniques of painting, drawing, transfer and collage.
Working in painting, sculpture and drawing, David Seiler envisions chaotic fantasy lands combining past and future where form and figure explode, run, touch, dance and cry.
Mercury 20 is an artist-established and operated gallery located in Oakland, CA. A collective comprised of 20 members, Mercury 20 exhibits high quality, innovative work from emerging and mid-career artists, and promotes art in the community. Gallery hours are Friday 4-7pm and Saturday, 12-3pm, and by appointment. www.mercurytwenty.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE For additional information, or higher resolution images, please contact mercurytwenty@gmail.com or call Kathleen at 510.701.4620