About Karen M. Gutfreund, Curator
Karen M. Gutfreund is an independent curator and artist with a focus on feminist and social justice art. She has worked in the Painting & Sculpture Department for MoMA, the Andre Emmerick Gallery, The Knoll Group, the John Berggruen Gallery and the Pacific Art League, and is an art consultant to both corporations and individuals. She served on the board of the Women’s Caucus for Art, the Pacific Art League and the Petaluma Arts Council. She was the National Exhibitions Director for the Women’s Caucus for Art, is a member of ArtTable, the Northern California Representative for The Feminist Art Project, and Curator for UniteWomen.org.
To date Gutfreund has created over forty national exhibitions recent exhibitions include: Process,TheSpaceBetween,Agency: Feminist Art and Power, Deadlocked and Loaded: Disarming America , NotNormal:ArtintheAgeofTrump , and EmbeddedMessage,DebatingtheDream:Truth, JusticeandtheAmericanWay . She co-curated F213 , F*ckU!IntheMostLovingWay , and ManasObject: ReversingtheGaze . She has been an exhibition director for dozens of exhibitions.
Karen is partner in Gutfreund Cornett Art, with curator Sherri Cornett, a curatorial partnership that creates art as activism exhibitions, with the motto “changing the world through art” with national touring exhibitions. GCA exhibitions included: BeyondBorders:Storiesofim/Migration , SocialJustice:ItHappens toOne,HappenstoAll , Rise:Empower,ChangeandAction , Vision:AnArtist’sPerspective,What’sRight, What’sLeft:DemocracyinAmerica,Visural:Sight,SoundandAction. Gutfreund is a consultant to artists and documents and creates art catalogs for galleries and individual artists around the country, and frequently juries exhibitions, participates in panels and gives lectures and classes. Lastly, she is an artist and has exhibited extensively around the country. She has a BFA in Photographic Design and a BA in Art History, and studies towards a MA from New York University. Gutfreund has lived in all four corners of the United States and now lives on a ranch in the Sierra Foothills.
KarenGutfreund.com, GutfreundCornettArt.com
@karengutfreundart
karenmgutfreund@gmail.com
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Ties that Bind: Magic, Messages and Memories
TiesThatBind:Magic,MessagesandMemories features Ellen Brook with Wendy Ackrell, Marie Cameron, Rozanne Hermelyn di Silvestro, Lisa Kairos, and Larraine Seiden in an exhibition hosted at Art Bias, San Carlos and curated by Karen M. Gutfreund. These six Bay Area women artists explore the various interpretations of connections, relationships, and bonds that link individuals through time and memory. TiesThatBindis a poignant exploration of the human experience, inviting viewers to reflect on their own recollections, the passage of time, and the significance of the moments that shape our lives. The diversity and beauty of these individual artist’s work has created a rich and thought-provoking exhibition that highlights magic of hopes, dreams and human connection.
Wendy Ackrell looks to connect with her grandmother to honor the matrilineal DNA and memories that fill her soul. Through her collected talismans and treasures she expresses thoughts and memories by braiding them into three-dimensional objects. Ellen Brook series of works: MessagesinaBottle,express universal themes of isolation, connection, and healing, based off a collection of war letters she found written from her Grandfather to her Grandmother. They also reflect on the themes of belonging and love in one’s ancestral chain, perhaps even as a way to “heal backwards in time.” Marie Cameron creates works that express themes of hope and beauty in the face of loss in exploring how humans relate to their environment and each other. During the pandemic she searched for connections to the feelings of wonder, hope and joy. She also reconnected to our collective past, to the perspective of the long arc of time and remembering the love. Rozanne Hermelyn Di Silvestro is a visual thinker, reflecting life through paint and ink portraying the fleeting moments between the unfamiliar, sharing a common place and time. She seeks to document and to remember these drifting connections. Lisa Kairos explores themes of change and transformation through the subject of landscape. The places that inspire her paintings become a lens through which she strives to make sense of the world and time that we are living in. She is inspired by the intersection of environment, perception, beauty, and technology. Larraine Seidens’s SeamlessSeriesis about transformation of the unseen work that holds things together and comes directly out of the chaos of contemporary life. Her art practice is meditation, searching for moments of transcendence. She accumulates memories and witnessing, to see what is revealed and therefore remembered. to find meaning among the everyday minutia.
By: Karen M. Gutfreund Curator
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Wendy Ackrell
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
@wendyackrell
wendyackrell.com
Biography: San Francisco-based artist Wendy Ackrell has worked as a painter for over two decades, primarily exploring abstraction but returning to figuration over the past few years. Originally a writer, she incorporates fiber art, poetry and mixed media into her work. Along with painting, her first love, Wendy animates and transforms natural materials such as river stones, trees and fallen branches with paint, wool and wire, leaving them to be discovered in situ. She is of the firm belief that joy in the act of creation and the wonder in alchemizing the quotidian into something precious and perceived anew is a resounding yes to life. She is currently investigating kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, both as artistic metaphor and a celebration of resilience.
Her great passion is making public art. Wendy was chosen to interpret works by five renowned poets for San Francisco Beautiful’s Muni Art 2020 Project, Hidden Gems in San Francisco. Wendy’s paintings were displayed on Muni buses throughout the city. More recently, Wendy created a 400pound heart sculpture, Labyrinthine Heart, for SFGH Foundation’s Hearts in San Francisco 2023. Wendy’s work has been exhibited at San Francisco’s Union Square, O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, the offices of Senator Scott Wiener, CounterPulse, and the de Young Museum, among other venues.
Wendy received her B.A. in English from Duke University. She is currently studying at The Alternative Art School, an online community of artists founded by art writer and curator Nato Thompson.
Statement: Necklaces. They center me, steady me, rest on my shoulders and collarbones. The weight of them soothes me, brings me physical comfort, makes me think of my grandmother holding my shoulders and of her indubitable lifelong confidence in me. They remind me I am corporeal and mortal and tiny and tender and blessed with known multi-generational history. I am about to begin a series of large paintings of necklaces and bracelets, all circles, that I have inherited from my grandmother. None of them have much worth to others, but they are fortune and richness beyond measure to me. Since I became a mother myself, I’ve had a great longing to contact my grandmother through this work, to honor that matrilineal dna and epigenetic memory that suffuses my soul. I’m compelled to explore the weight and power and comfort of that lineage. Wearing these feminine adornments of hers, I’m able to reach across lines of time as she comes alive again for me through her talismans and treasures.
My fiber artwork is a diary my hands express of thoughts and memories braided into three dimensional objects. I loop colorful, vibrant wool yarn hundreds or even thousands of times around each object I work with. Each circle captures a slightly different moment in time and in the river of thought that flows as I wind. I feel so grateful to have found a way to access memory while transforming such simple objects as branches and household tools. The alchemical aspect of making you see a hammer or a fallen branch as something worth considering such unsung and quotidian parts of our world brings me joy and fulfillment. The Latin phrase Anima Mundi, or World Soul, is the best way I can describe what I mean to do. The soul of the world is in every single thing we see or neglect to see, and I am forever trying to discover that.
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Wendy Ackrell
Installation from the FullCircleseries, 2024, reiki stone necklaces and wool-wrapped jeweler’s tools, sizes variable
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Wendy Ackrell
Installation from the FullCircleseries, 2024, reiki stone necklaces and wool-wrapped jeweler’s tools, sizes variable
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Wendy Ackrell
FullCircle(installation), 2024, Reiki stone necklaces, sizes variable
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Wendy Ackrell
FullCircle,2024, Reiki stone necklaces and
Ellen Brook
SAN MATEO, CA
@ellenbrookartandfashion ellen-brook.com
Biography: Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1963, Ellen Brook found her way to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1997. After calling many cities and towns ‘home’ and traveling extensively, she began her artistic journey in California. Investigations into consciousness and meditation paralleled her introduction to painting. After a career in investor and corporate communications, Ellen reoriented her life to focus on her art. While largely self-taught, she has supplemented her self-education with art classes, workshops and privately. Ellen holds a B.A. from Duke University and an M.P.A. from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In addition to her art practice, Ellen also designs and creates original, hand-made women’s clothing on silk. Her artwork has been exhibited in solo and group shows and her artwork and clothing have been recognized on the cover of the San Francisco Open Studios Guide, in Fiber Arts Now Magazine and on the runway in FashionART Santa Cruz 2013, FashionART Santa Cruz 2014, and the ART Party.
Ellen is on the Advisory Board of the Fashion & Design Department at Canada College, Redwood City CA. She now resides and maintains her studio just south of San Francisco.
Statement: My discovery of an entire box of wartime correspondence written by my grandfather launched a magical journey of personal and artistic discovery. I never met my father’s father, so the nearly 100 letters penned to my grandmother more than a century ago, during World War I, inspired me to visually express some of the feelings, stories, and moments in his life as a soldier, while also reflecting universal themes of isolation, connection, and healing. The artwork is infused with tears of sadness and comfort. It draws from poignant turns of phrase, the materiality of ink and paper, and a certain transcendence of time. I hope to capture the enchantment of this “message in a bottle” which has washed up upon my shores, and which transmits more than mere words on paper.
Take Me Out of the Blue : At the center of war is the human being, striving to survive against the bombarding threats and a harrowing sense of isolation. The truths of one antidote to war’s cruelties real human connection radiate out from my grandfather’s words, including when he wrote to his beloved “Goldie”: Ineedtohearfromyoumoreto take“theblue”outofme. Feeling isolated and yearning to reconnect are hardly unique to war they can occur during a global pandemic or simply everyday life. I try to reflect both the joyous dream of reconnection with a loved one as well as the “blue” of the longing that befalls all of us now and then.
ThreadsofConnection : My grandfather was a tailor and I, too, work creatively with fabrics and thread. This lineage of hands gave rise to a sub-series in which his letters dance with my fabrics, as if we are in conversation in the current moment. I am curious about this personal connection of hands, hearts and DNA, but also about the larger themes of belonging and love in one’s ancestral chain, perhaps even as a way to “heal backwards in time.”
I am a mixed media artist, and fabric and fashion designer who began my artistic life at age 40. I employ gesture, intuitive marks, texture, and a passion for color to explore ideas related to the mind, the nature of the self, and the healing and energetic properties of beauty and color.
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Ellen Brook
ThreadsofConnection#14,#8,2023, mixed media on wood panel, 10 x 10 inches each
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Ellen Brook
ThreadsofConnection#15,#16,2023, mixed media on wood panel, 10 x 10 inches each
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Ellen Brook
TakeMeOutoftheBlueifYouCan,2023, mixed media on wood panel, 13 x 13 inches (framed)
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Ellen Brook
TakeMeoutoftheBlue#11,2022, mixed media on panel, 24 x 24 inches
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Ellen Brook
TakeMeoutoftheBlue#12,2022, mixed media on panel, 24 x 24 inches
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Ellen Brook
TakeMeoutoftheBlue#5,2023, mixed media on wood panel, 20 x 20 inches
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Ellen Brook
Remedy,2023, acrylic and mixed media, 40 x 30 inches
Marie Cameron
LOS GATOS, CA
@mariecameronstudio
mariecameronstudio.com
Biography: Marie Cameron is an imaginative realist oil painter and mixed media assemblage artist based in Los Gatos, California where she works out her dream studio, in the garden behind her house. Born in New York City, and raised in Maine and Nova Scotia, she earned her BFA with distinction at Mount Allison University, in Sackville, New Brunswick where she minored in photography and sculpture and majored in painting. She was awarded a prestigious Canada Council Grant and worked in giftware design and children’s book illustration while maintaining her art practice. Upon moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in the late nineties, she became heavily involved in the local art community. Creating various series, her work focuses on the connections we have to each other, to nature and to our environment.
Cameron creates works that express themes of hope and beauty in the face of loss, exploring how humans relate to their environment and each other. During the pandemic she searched for connections to the feelings of wonder, hope and joy, turning to our collective past and the perspective of the long arc of time though vintage photographs, remembering the love.
Her award-winning work has been exhibited and collected internationally and featured in many publications, galleries and museums, including the Museo Diocesano, Triton Museum of Art, Marin MOCA, SOMArts, Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art, Santa Clara University Art and Art History, Las Laguna Gallery, Sanchez Art Center, Vargas Gallery, NUMU, Whitney Modern, Arc Gallery, Woman Made Gallery, Curated, de Young Museum of Art, Cabrillo Gallery, O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, Blue Line Arts and Jen Tough Gallery. She has just curated her first show, LOSTWILDfor Whitney Modern.
Statement: Rainbows are such an awe inspiring sight! During the dark days of the pandemic I was searching for what might reconnect to me to this feeling of wonder, hope and joy and decided to infuse them into my daily life. I began embroidering silk rainbows onto found, vintage photographs. I was entranced by the way the luminous, pastel silk threads magically appeared, stitch by careful stitch, upon the faded and forlorn images of the past. I felt it imbued the narratives in the photographs with new life and new, or enhanced meaning. Something else happened as well, I felt reconnected to our collective past, to the perspective of the long arc of time, where there is nothing that hasn’t happened before, and was endured in one way or another, and that there is a river of wonder, hope and joy, despite it all, that will continue to trickle, flow or flood as time marches on.
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RainbowSelf22 , 2020, silk thread on found photograph, 5 1/2 x 3 1/4 inches, 12 x 10 inches framed
Marie Cameron
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RainbowEmbrace2,2021, silk thread on found photograph, 4 1/8 x 3 1/4 inches, 12 x 10 inches framed
Marie Cameron
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RainbowEmbrace3,2021, silk thread on found photograph, 5 1/8 x 3 1/2 inches, 12 x 10 inches framed
Marie Cameron
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RainbowPatience , 2021, silk thread on found photograph, 2 5/8mx 4 3/8 inches, 10 x 12 inches framed
Marie Cameron
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RainbowHiker,2021, silk thread on found photograph, 4 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches, 12 x 10 inches framed
Marie Cameron
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Rainbow Sweethearts, 2021, silk thread on found photograph, 3 x 4 7/8 inches, 10 x 12 inches framed
Marie Cameron
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RainbowEmbrace4 , 2024, silk thread on found photograph, 5 1/4 x 3 3/8 inches, 12 x 10 inches framed
Marie Cameron
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RainbowEmbrace5 , 2024, silk thread on found photograph, 3 3/4 x 4 5/8 inches, 10 x12 inches framed
Marie Cameron
Rozanne Hermelyn Di Silvestro
SUNNYVALE, CA
@rhermelyndisilvestro
fineart.hermelyn.com
Biography: Rozanne Hermelyn Di Silvestro was born in British Guyana South America, raised in Los Angeles, and is Portuguese, Chinese, and Dutch. She is a San Francisco Bay area visual artist working in the disciplines of painting and printmaking. Exposed very young to the arts through her mother, a fashion designer and master seamstress, Rozanne followed her passion for the arts throughout her youth. Rozanne studied art and design at UCLA and Art Center College of Design and went on to form her own award-winning design firm in San Francisco. After her successes in the commercial art world, Rozanne pivoted her focus to express her own creative voice. A self-taught fine artist, she spent many years studying and exploring painting and printmaking, pushing beyond traditional techniques. Rozanne’s work reflects her love of the visual message and is inspired by lived experiences and people. Often painting the unheard voice, her art encourages dialogue on many overlooked social issues.
Awarded Best of Show and 1st place in numerous exhibitions, Rozanne’s work has been shown in Triton Museum of Art, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Sonoma County, Janet Turner Print Museum, The Art Complex Museum, Museum of Los Gatos, and can be found in the permanent collections of the Harvard Art Museums and the Library of Congress. Rozanne has also been published in Reed Magazine, California’s oldest literary journal and in The California Printmaker journal.
Statement: Every day, we experience fleeting moments between the unfamiliar, sharing a common place and time. These near meetings have a transparency to them, passing points in space, seemingly insignificance. Points where future, present, and past overlap then fade. It feels important to remember these drifting connections.
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Rozanne Hermelyn di Silvestro
PointofCrossing4,2024, acrylic, work on paper mounted to panel, 25 x 19 inches
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PointofCrossing5,2024, acrylic, work on paper mounted to panel, 25 x 19 inches
Rozanne Hermelyn di Silvestro
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PointofCrossing6,2024, acrylic, work on paper mounted to panel, 25 x 19 inches
Rozanne Hermelyn di Silvestro
Lisa Kairos
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
@lkairos
lisakairos.com
Biography: Lisa Kairos makes dynamic abstract landscapes to get lost in; her work is inspired by the intersection of environment, perception, beauty, and technology. A California native, Lisa received her degree in fine art with an emphasis in painting at UC Santa Cruz in 1990. She has exhibited in group and solo shows and at art fairs throughout the United States. Her work is held in many private and corporate collections and she has completed numerous commissions for public and private spaces.
She currently lives and works in San Francisco.
Statement: My abstract paintings explore themes of change and transformation through the subject of landscape. I approach making my work the same way I explore a place: over time, in layers, with shifting perspectives. Layers of ink and paint mimic the geological formations revealed by satellite maps and colors drawn from the earth and sky converge and surprise. These paintings often pivot around visual interruptions, where crisp divisions in the picture plane suggest shifts in perspective and time . Sometimes areas of a painting are cut away entirely, marking the ephemeral nature of our environments. Atmospheric passages mingle with cartographical and technological references, resulting in a complex visual matrix, sometimes quiet and subtle, other times bursting with energy, like the landscape itself.
The places that inspire my paintings become a lens through which I make sense of the world and time that we are living in. I am particularly attracted to landscapes that have endured human interventions and dramatic changes over time, usually the remainders and margins of urban space or remote locations that have been shaped by extraction, use, infrastructure, and sometimes restoration. Other times I focus on physical and ephemeral dynamics in the landscape, such as geological formations, fire, water systems, and weather events. I am drawn to areas where one type of space transitions to another: earth to sky, shadow to light, burn pile to ash, tidal marsh to open water. I look for a resonance of opposites, a moment of slippage and surprise, a glitch of unexpected beauty; where one thing becomes another, I find a metaphor for personal transformation.
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Tesselation1and2,2019, acrylic, paper, polypropylene on panel , 24 x 12 inches each
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Lisa Kairos
TheMoonIsAMirror , 2019, acrylic ink, foraged serpentine powder, pencil on mylar, 16,75 x 15 inches
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Lisa Kairos
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Nimbus , 2023, acrylic on panel, 36 x 36 inches
Lisa Kairos
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Nautical1 , 2017, encaustic, paper, oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches
Lisa Kairos
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Nautical2 , 2017, encaustic, paper, oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches
Lisa Kairos
Larraine Seiden
OAKLAND, CA
@larraineseiden
larraineseiden.com
Biography and Statement:
Throughout her work Larraine Seiden uses the language of textiles, which has traditionally marked the tension of creating time and space in women’s lives. The processes of collage and assemblage, much like a quilter’s piecing, let her harness the rhythms of interruption and constraint into something whole and sublime.
By reimagining materials through her formalist lens, she seeks beauty in the overlooked, the forgotten, and in the repetition of the everyday. She uses the simplest materials collected domestically and from her community, to ground her work personally while bearing witness to our interconnectedness. She cuts paper ephemera out of its utilitarian origins and devotionally reassembles it through collage or knots, to become her map and meditation.
Her latest series Seamlessis about the unseen work that holds things together. In these paintings, Seiden draws with seams cut from spent clothing, creating gestural lines dance that hover above paper collage. By taking the seams out of their quotidian context they become fluid and poetic, like bodies set free.
TheSafetyNetsproject is her sculptural response to the prolonged shelter in place that made us cherish our personal connections against a new backdrop of thrift. To make them she uses the modest materials of cardboard rolls and kitchen twine with wax, as a metaphor for our sudden awakening to our interconnectedness. Through the repetitive act of connecting through knotting, she created conceptual safety nets. They grow organically into biomorphic shapes that look like crowds, continents, and nature’s support systems like hives and murmurations that depend on the sum of their parts to thrive.
Seiden grew up in the middle of Pennsylvania during the 1970’s and 80’s where the only art she saw was the fine craft of quilts. At home, the women she knew sewed and knitted, marking time with their stitching. She drew a lot and became a painter, but her eye never strayed far from the intuitive formalism found in the textile arts of Pennsylvania and later, from around the world.
Seiden received her Masters in Art and Design Education from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and a Bachelor’s of Art (Studio) from California State University at Hayward (now East Bay). Her work is in corporate collections including at Cushman/Wakefield in Minneapolis and Sutter Health at the new Van Ness Hospital in San Francisco. She has been an Artist in Residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA and twice at InCahoots printmaking residency in 2021 and 2023. The San Francisco based organization Artspan, featured her work Looking In, Looking Out in their 2019 SF Open Studio Guide and collateral materials. In 2020, she co-founded and co-chaired the Piedmont Art Walk, now a beloved annual event. She lives in Piedmont, CA with her husband and two kids. She’s also just down the street from her three hundred or so elementary art students.
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Seamless#10and #11 , 2023, acrylic mixed media and collage on canvas, 18x18 inches each
Larraine Seiden
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Seamless#12 , 2023, acrylic mixed media and collage on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
Larraine Seiden
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Seamless#14 , 2023, acrylic mixed media and collage on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
Larraine Seiden
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SafetyNet
Array 1 (Weird Fishes), 2024, cardboard, twine, and wax, 22 x 57 x 2 inches
Larraine Seiden
