The White Album
The White Album presents a recent selection of works in varying shades of white. Yet the focus of the exhibition is not about the color white or lack of color, or minimalism or serenity. This group of artists is engaged in various art-making processes ranging from works based in the organic interactions of materials and accumulations, to rituals of drawing and language. The reductive use of color in these works makes more clearly visible a combination of structure, chance, and the transitory nature of materials in our environment.
Bay Area artist Lauren Barcelon works with perhaps the most humble of materials – the ubiquitous white plastic trash bag. Through simple sleight of hand, Barcelon transforms this slightly less than delightful staple of everyday life into groupings of small white birds and other animals.
New York-based artist Sarah Bostwick constructs three-dimensional hydrocal (plaster) drawings that explore linear aspects of the urban landscape. Using a pattern of incised lines that imply rooflines, vacant spaces and the interlocking edges of architecture, Bostwick’s works are somewhat suggestive of puzzles. These precise and beautifully crafted plaster drawings walk the line between formal architectural renderings and a unique exploration of materials.
Based on scientific fact, the work of Cheryl Calleri gives imaginative expression to unseen sensory experiences within the body’s nervous system. Utilizing a combination of acrylic sheets, acrylic cement and fluid paint, these primarily white works appear as both abstract paintings and as scientific studies. Suggestive of tissue sections floating between sheets of glass, Calleri’s mixed-media constructions bring to mind the emergent yet ephemeral quality of life.
Noted for her extraordinary paper sculpture installations, New York-based artist Midori Harima is represented in this exhibition by a very different work. Freedom was selected from a series of sixteen prints each focusing on a single word printed in white ink on white paper. This politically inspired series comments on the diminishing power of certain words such as faith, peace, trust and morality, and the role these words currently play in our lives.
Robert Larson collects weathered urban cast-offs that have been carelessly discarded by others. He meticulously reconfigures these sun-bleached accumulations into nuanced, abstract patterns. Through a labor intensive process of organization and dissection, Larson creates contemplative works that reveal the numerous paths a bit of urban detritus may have taken before its transformation into a work of art.
Laura Paulini creates elegant white square paintings that are completed in a single day. Aspects of ritual are explored by carefully working in a pre-determined manner with a repetition of marks and sequential lines that vary slightly from one to the other. The unique, unaltered marks that cover the surface of each work evidence chance, harmony and the beauty of measured repetitious movements.
Exhibitions are free and open to the public.