Maya Kabat, Cities and Desire # 4, 2008, Oil on wood, 12 x 12 inches
Mary V. Marsh, Reader: Bay Area Backroads, 2009, blockprint on checkout card, 5 x 3 inches
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.
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.
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 Gallery
25 Grand Ave. @ Broadway
Oakland, CA 94612
Exhibition Dates: August 7 through August 29, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, August 7 from 6 – 9pm in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur
Meet the artists at Afternoon After: Saturday, August 8 from 12-4pm
ShareThisSimilar posts that you might like:
- >> Maya Kabat And Julianne Sterling At Mercury 20
- >> Mercury 20 Presents Julie Alvarado And Jo Ann Biagini
- >> Mercury 20 Holiday Fair
- >> Mercury 20 Gallery Presents Jill McLennan and Jamie Morgan
- >> Mercury 20 Presents Painters Tarra Lyons And Joan Weiss
Tags: art, contemporary art, east, oakland
