What If? In The Days When the Tiger Smoked

What If? In the Days When the Tiger Smoked
a total-gallery experience
in video and photography
by Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin

June 4-July 17, 2010; reception for the artists: Saturday June 5th, 6-9

Krowswork Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition What If? In the Days When the Tiger Smoked, a collaboration between veteran video artists Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin. The exhibition includes four videos and accompanying prints and photographs and is the culmination of an ongoing project which began in Busan, South Korea in 2006. The first part of the title – “What If?” – sets the tone for both the scientific and speculative nature of the artists’ point of departure. The second part – “In the Days When the Tiger Smoked” – is the Korean equivalent of “Once Upon a Time,” suggesting an event set in a mythical time. This juxtaposition of the exciting, unknown possibilities of “future” with the playful, whimsy of a fictional “past” provides a perfect capsule for this uniquely complex narrative of the imaginative present.

Exhibition dates: June 3 – 26, 2010

Opening Reception: Friday, June 4 from 6-9pm (in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur)

Maya Kabat | This Living Process
Bay Area abstract painter Maya Kabat’s work explores the urban landscape as a metaphor for the human condition. Rather than viewing the city as a static entity, she approaches it as an organic system that evolves from a matrix of human needs and funtions. Kabat’s work exposes a vision of the city as a living organism where growth, birth, death and decay mingle as forms and structures stack and grow, evolve and shift, only to decay, and dissolve again.

Using a range of scraping tools, Kabat creates her surfaces with stripes, gouges and broad slabs, applying, scraping away, and re-applying layers of paint. Paintings are built and edited, obliterated and reconfigured in an ongoing process of exploration. She ultimately simply abandons the piece, as for her the paintings are never really “done”. The artist’s active painting process mirrors a view of the city as a living record of human activity and history.

Maya Kabat was born in Portland, OR. She graduated from Oberlin College with a BA and received an MFA from the University of California, Davis.  Her work has been exhibited at SFMOMA Artists Gallery, Los Medanos Community College Gallery, Front Gallery in Oakland and the Seattle Art Museum Rental Gallery. Her work is represented in numerous public and private collections including Cisco Systems in Santa Clara, Kaiser Oakland, and the Hotel Adagio in San Francisco.                     

Julianne Sterling | The Mommy Assassins
In the face of fearsome laundry and formidable toy weaponry, painter Julianne Sterling delves into her fantasy life of fabulousness with a series of large scale oil paintings, The Mommy Assassins. Sterling’s exceptionally dressed hitmoms are ready to bed James Bond, vanquish Darth Vader and leap loads of laundry in a single bound.

Inspired by a misreading of good friend Barbara Butkus’s photography series titled The Mommy Asanas, the artist began to wonder what a Mommy Assassin might look like. She had been working on a series of figurative paintings also exploring motherhood but wanted to have more fun with the subject. The Mommy Assassins was a natural outgrowth with its added musings about boys, her life with boys and her boys making weapons out of everything from sticks, TinkerToys and legos to bread and even guitar picks.   

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 Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland and A Different Day Gallery in Albany.

Gallery Group Show | Small Works
Whether they are little, bitty, miniature, petite, micro, pocket-sized, tiny or wee, small art works cannot be ignored! This art is affordable and ready to be collected. In conjunction with Pro Arts Open Studios’ weekends during the month of June, Mercury 20 gallery artists present the best of their small works. Painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and mixed media.                                                                            

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Founded in 2006, Mercury 20 is a contemporary art gallery established, supported and operated by East Bay artists. Mercury 20 maintains a venue for its member artists to exhibit, develop, and advance their work and is committed to exhibiting art of diverse media and content. Exhibitions rotate monthly and the gallery presents a well-attended opening event every first Friday in conjunction with the Oakland Art Murmur. ARTISTS REPRESENTED: JULIE ALVARADO, JO ANN BIAGINI, ERIC BOHR, MARGARET CHAVIGNY, CHELA FIELDING, PETER HONIG, MAYA KABAT, KATHLEEN KING, MARY V. MARSH, JILL MCLENNAN, DAVE MEEKER, CHARLIE MILGRIM, JAMIE MORGAN, MARY CURTIS RATCLIFF, JULIANNE STERLING, LAURA VAN DUREN, JOAN WEISS

Hi resolution images available on request. For more info: mercurytwenty@gmail.com, 510-701-4620, www.mercurytwenty.com

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Carol Lefkowitz explores the delicate balance between pattern and chaos in this series of large abstract paintings. Working with a specific palette derived from sky, sun, and leaves, she paints in thin layers of oil, creating fields of color that start out as studies of reflections in water and quickly become monumental structures of their own. The gridded patterns that underlay each composition give the works an architectural base, but one that has a progressive pattern, like stairways or ladders that move the viewer upward towards the heavens. This upward thrust and sense of infinite depth is counterbalanced by the pull of paint dripping down the surface in a wash that shows the artist letting go, allowing expression, accident, and movement in. But the paint and its movement ultimately stops, frozen in time and space, which returns the viewer to the present moment, and to the finite and material reality of both painting and humanity.

Open:

Thu–Sat 12–5

Tue–Wed by appointment

First Fridays 6–9pm

www.slateartanddesign.com

New Paintings By Joell Jones

The paintings in this installation contain portals, or thresholds–a limen into the infinite space of NOW. These open spaces have forced their way into the paintings, demanding to hold potential for expanding consciousness amid the patterns and conditioning of life situations.

In addition to First Fridays A Spec of Nowness will be on view Saturdays from 2pm-5pm at Oakopolis during the month of April and the first two Saturdays in July from 2pm-5pm.