Tara Esperanza, Laura Malone, Monika Mayer: Rhythms and Reveries

February 7, 2025 – March 8, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 8, 3 – 5 pm

Oakland Art Murmur / First Friday: February 7, March 7, 5 – 9 pm

Rhythms and Reveries is the work of three Mercury 20 artists celebrating the interconnectedness of the natural world and human consciousness.

Tara Esperanza’s love affair with succulents invites us to relish their fleshy resilience. Her almost hallucinatory use of hyperreal color reveals that life holds more depth when we stop to take a breath, feel with our eyes, and see with our entire being.

Monika Mayer’s sculptures use repetitive forms to echo the rhythms of traditional crafts, evoking a simple, meditative reverie. Monika Mayer’s sculptures use repetitive forms to echo the rhythms of traditional crafts, evoking a simple, meditative reverie. By working with ordinary familiar materials in unexpected ways, she highlights their potential for reflection and balance through the organic unfolding of intentional handiwork.

Laura Malone’s abstracted figures and spaces flux and flow between the reverent and the irreverent, humor and awe. Her figures emerge from and melt into the natural world – its primordial vastness and undulating specificity. As if to say, “come on in, the water’s fine,” they invite us to surrender to nature’s limitless rhythmicality.

Gallery

to connect, to join; 2021 (detail); jeans, staples, thread, dimensions variable; $15,000 and up, depending on site specifics

to connect, to join, 2021 (detail); jeans, staples, thread, dimensions variable; $15,000 and up, depending on site specifics

to connect, to join 2021 (detail); jeans, staples, thread, dimensions variable; $15,000 and up, depending on site specifics

Available Work

Monika Mayer

Monika Mayer is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Berkeley. She grew up on a farm in Germany where she was exposed to a rich tradition of textile craft and making from a young age. She often incorporates traditional textile techniques such as knitting or sewing in unusual ways to give her artwork color and bring it to life. Her approach is experimental, her creative process intuitive and iterative, layering techniques to create organic textures and dimensions. Her use of found and recycled materials reflects a commitment to sustainable, circular design. Mayer’s work is held in private collections in the U.S. and Germany and has been exhibited nationally, including at Tryst Alternative Art Fair (Los Angeles), Tiburon Library Gallery, College of Marin (Kentfield), Kala Art Gallery (Berkeley) and Mercury 20 Gallery (Oakland). She has been an artist in residence at Kala Art Institute and will return to Kala as an alumni in 2025.

Laura Malone

Born in Tucson, Arizona, Laura Malone grew up in a family of artists. Like her uncle, artist Richard Artschwager, she received her first art lessons from her grandmother Eugenia, a Ukrainian immigrant painter with deep roots in Russian art patronage. Malone has studied under renowned artists including Janine Antoni and Alex Kanevsky. Residencies include The School of Visual Arts, New York, and a virtual residency with Mira Schor. Malone co-founded Art’s Pupils, a forum dedicated to discussing contemporary female artists.Her paintings have been shown across the US and internationally, including The Crocker Kingsley National Art Competition, Sacramento, California and “Disrupted Realism,” curated by John Seed Buckham Gallery, Flint, Michigan. She currently exhibits at Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland, California and is also represented by The Studio Shop Gallery in Burlingame, California. She lives and works in Oakland.

Tara Esperanza

Tara Esperanza resides in Oakland CA, where succulents thrive year-round. When she is not painting, she is running and capturing images of succulents. Esperanza earned a BFA in Painting and graduated cum laude from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In addition, she has studied plein air painting in Brittany, France. As a representational painter inspired by nature, she has dedicated years to meticulously portraying succulents. Esperanza’s paintings have been included in several group exhibitions at Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland, the Sturt Haaga Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Jennifer Perlmutter Gallery in Lafayette, as well as the Palace of Fine Art San Francisco, San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum of Northern California Art, Chico, CA and virtual galleries. She has had solo exhibitions at Mercury 20 Gallery, and the Women’s United Art Movement Virtual Gallery. Her work adorns the walls in private collections around the country.