Material Matters
Material Matters Joe Brubaker . Lia Cook . Stephen Paul Day . Charles Eckart . Ann Hollingsworth
Lisa Kokin . Gyรถngy Laky . Alexander Rohrig . Jane Rosen . David Ruddell . Richard Shaw Helen Stanley . Patricia Lyons Stroud . Tim Tate . Kazuko Watanabe.
Material Matters Joe Brubaker . Lia Cook . Stephen Paul Day . Charles Eckart . Ann Hollingsworth Lisa Kokin . Gyรถngy Laky . Alexander Rohrig . Jane Rosen . David Ruddell . Richard Shaw Helen Stanley . Patricia Lyons Stroud . Tim Tate. Kazuko Watanabe. www.seagergray.com Exhibition Dates: February 3 - March 1, 2015 Reception for the Artist: Friday, February 6, 6 to 8 PM Front Cover: Lia Cook, Big Tera, detail Back Cover: Jane Rosen, Skyscraper Bird, Left and Skyscraper Bird, Right Photo Credits: Joe Brubaker: Dan Brubaker Charles Eckart: John White Lisa Kokin: Lia Roozendaal, www.jagwiredesign.com Gyรถngy Laky: Christine Arthur, T. Grotta David Ruddell: Lee Fatheree Richard Shaw: Alice Shaw Helen Stanley: Jay Daniels Direct inquiries to: Seager Gray Gallery 108 Throckmorton Avenue Mill Valley, CA 94941 415.384.8288 art@seagergray.com All Rights Reserved
Material Matters Material Matters is a re-examination of a theme presented in the gallery’s 2013 exhibition, Materials Matter. Once again, we wanted to create a presentation that spotlights the
interaction of artists with their materials and how the materials themselves are an essential
part of the content of the work. Indeed, whether the medium is painting (Charles Eckart), printmaking (Kazuko Watanabe), weaving/photography (Lia Cook), cast or blown glass
( Jane Rosen, Ann Hollingsworth), stone (Alexander Rohrig), wood ( Joe Brubaker,
GyĂśngy Laky, Patricia Lyons Stroud), clay (Richard Shaw), video and glass (Tim Tate), mixed media (David Ruddell, Stephen Paul Day, Helen Stanley), or books and thread (Lisa
Kokin), often the focused interchange with the materials themselves allows the artist to arrive at new expressions, increasing their visual vocabulary and thus their communication with the world.
Donna Seager, 2015
Joe Brubaker The wooden carved figures of Joe Brubaker echo sources of inspiration from Spanish colonial Santos and retablo objects to Egyptian tomb figure and Buddhist stone carvings. In recent works, Brubaker has gone beyond these early influences, crossing cultures on a broader basis. He has included forms reminiscent of ritual costumes and body decorations from indigenous peoples all over the world. Incorporating scraps of metal and found materials, he has created a cast of characters that are at once strikingly universal and absolutely unique. For Brubaker, there is a moment when the work takes on its own personality. “I almost imagine myself as channeling some soul that’s out there and wants to come back”, he says. “It’s really an eerie moment, a Geppetto moment”. Joe Brubaker was born in Lebanon, Missouri and raised in Southern California. He received his B.A. from Sacramento State University, then attended UCLA where he earned his MA and MFA. From 1980 to 1988 he lectured in Art and Design at UCLA, as well as at Long Beach State from 1982 to 1984. In 1987 Joe moved with his wife and two children to the San Francisco Bay Area. He continued to teach as an Art and Design lecturer at both San Francisco State from 1989 to 1994 and Academy of Art College from 1989 to 1997. He retired from teaching in 1997 to begin full time work on his own sculpture.
--------------------Joe Brubaker Felipe, 2015
Carved wood, found materials, acrylic 32 x 13.5 x 12 in
Lia Cook The dramatic hand woven Jacquard work by Lia Cook, Big Tera takes photography into another dimension. The artist has intentionally expanded the weaving pattern, so that the viewer can see the complex network of threads. This candid photograph of the child’s face dramatically enlarged and then translated into warp and weft becomes soft and tactile, begging to be touched. Lia Cook combines digital technology and traditional influences in her work using the Jacquard loom and other innovative processes. Her cutting edge work blurs the distinctions between the traditionally disparate media of computer technology, weaving, painting, and photography. Using personal portraiture as a visual base, Cook’s work lingers on the edge of intimate and monumental. Cook is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including several NEA grants, the California Arts Council Fellowship, and the Flintridge Foundation Fellowship. Her work is in the permanent collections of major international museums including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the American Museum of Art and Design, NYC; the Metropolitan Museum, NYC; and the French National Collection of Art, Paris.
--------------------Lia Cook Big Tera, 2007 Woven Cotton 102 x 50 in
--------------------Lia Cook Dollface Pink, 2007 Woven Cotton 52 x 39 in
--------------------Stephen Paul Day Souvenir Matchbook - Jay Dee Painted museum board, wax, wood 26 x 20 x 3 in, 2014
Stephen Paul Day Stephen Paul Day creates artifacts from history and popular culture. His Souvenir Matchbook Series, humorously oversized, are perfect symbols of the ironies of history. These combustible giveaways were at one time necessities, used for everything from stoves and lamps to cigarettes and pipes, considered at the time harmless. Meant to slide easily into a gentleman’s pocket, in their heyday, they bore ads for department stores, girlie shows and restaurants. They were ubiquitous at the time, a tiny tidbit of advertising, each bearing the warning, “Close cover before striking.” Stephen Paul Day lives in New Orleans and works part-time in Berlin Germany. His main studies began at the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1979 to 1983. He had his first solo show in New Orleans at the alternative Bienville gallery in 1985. He is now an artist with the Arthur Roger Gallery. In 1986 he received the first of many artist residencies at the Experimental Glass Workshop in New York City. He stayed for six years. During this time, he was awarded a grant to study with Laurie Anderson at the Banff Art Center, worked with Dennis Oppenheim and Jenny Holzer. He began to teach at the Bild-Werk Art Akademy in Frauenau Germany where he currently teaches. In 1993, he and his partner, Sibylle Peretti founded the collaborative group, Club S&S. Their exhibitions include, 1822 at the CAC in New Orleans, Diluvial Hood at the Freies Museum, Berlin, and an unofficial Souvenir Wagon for Prospect-1. Their awards include two Joan Mitchell grants, a Pollack Krasner grant, and a Warhol foundation award.
Charles Eckart In curating an exhibition based on materials, Charles Eckart was the natural choice for representing oil paint. Eckart has a reverence for paint and is intimately familiar with how it behaves. A favorite quote of the artist is that of Pierre Bonnard, “Painting is the transcription of the adventures of the optic nerve.” Growing up in Yosemite Valley in the 50s, Charles Eckart was surrounded by majestic beauty in a place where long hikes and the change of seasons might well turn the creative mind inward. Eckart’s concerns are metaphysical - with questions of being and becoming. His works emerge from the energy of the paint itself. Charles Eckart attended the University of the Pacific, the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Art Institute. He exhibited regularly with the Charles Campbell Gallery from 1980 to 1989 and then with the CampbellThiebaud Gallery from 1990 to 2000. His work has been reviewed frequently by writers from Alfred Frankenstein and Thomas Albright to Mark Van Proyen and Kenneth Baker. His 46 year retrospective at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara runs from February 21, 2015 – April 19, 2015. The work exhibited in our exhibition is part of a series entitled “Paintscapes”. Richly layered, these masterful works epitomize paint and color as a language of their own. In the words of Kenneth Baker in a recent review of Eckart’s work at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, “But for all their honest materialism, Eckart’s paintings feel suffused with soul. They read as true reports of the entanglement of decisions, acts and recognitions that composes any one of us.”
Left --------------------Charles Eckart Paintscapes 9, 4 & 3 2011 Oil on canvas 24 x 20 in
--------------------Charles Eckart Paintscape 2, 2011 Oil on canvas 24 x 20 in
Ann Hollingsworth Ann Hollingsworth’s spiky, luminous glass nests are metaphors. Their forms, invoking the intricate, twiggy constructions assembled by hawks or eagles, are perched on greenish, icy-looking slabs of glass or rough wooden blocks, stone boulders or plinths, all of which suggest a resting place between worlds—as if these complicated masses of translucent ‘twigs’ are portals, glowing from within as the glass captures light. Hollingsworth’s preferred technique for working with glass is casting, rather than blowing. Cast glass begins as a sculpture made out of some other material, from which a mold is made. Wax is then poured into that mold to make a replica of the original; after this first mold is removed, a refractory shell is built around the wax version, out of which the wax is then steamed or burned. This shell-mold is placed in a kiln and glass is slowly melted into it, over several hours or even days. After cooling, the mold material is cleaned off; the resulting sculpture can be angular or round, rough or smooth. Hollingsworth studied casting at California College of the Arts, where she returned to school in the early 2000s to complete her education. She took a class with Jane Rosen and they began an association experimenting with ways of perfecting Rosen’s cast birds. Their association resulted in their 2013 exhibition, Form and Place at Seager Gray Gallery.
--------------------Ann Hollingsworth Moss and Rock, 2014 Kiln cast glass, rock 14.5 x 11.5 x 11 in
Lisa Kokin Great art inspires multiple associations. Artists like Lisa Kokin use those associations to mix metaphors and offer a mirror to the idiosyncracies of the world around us. In Rustle, she takes the covers of cowboy pulp fiction novels, with their shoot ‘em up images and tough guy poses and she cuts them into leaves, painstakingly sewing natural patterns on them and creating a horticultural wall sculpture that transforms the hardened “rustler” into something that “rustles” in the wind. Armed with just her sewing machine, she has cleverly reduced the menacing gunslinger, taking an ingenious poke at gun control and issues of gender. Rustle was part of a series Kokin created for her one person exhibition at the Boise Art Museum entitled How the West Was Sewn. (October 5, 2013 – April 27, 2014). Kokin had collected cast off copies of Louis Lamour style cowboy novels, mostly from the 1940s and ’50s. The exaggerated macho stances of the cowboys were humorous and Kokin saw them as rich with contradiction. Although the cowboy pieces are not a part of this exhibition, we do have examples of these works in the gallery that we would be pleased to show. A detail of one is provided on the following page.
--------------------Lisa Kokin Rustle 2013
Cowboy book covers, thread, wire, mull 55 1/2 × 35 × 15 1/2 in.
Kokin’s work is often a critique of the socio-political status quo imbued with a healthy dose of levity and a keen sensitivity to materials and processes. Sewing and fiber-related sensibilities play a key role in much of her work, which she attributes to growing up in a family of upholsterers. It is difficult to classify Lisa Kokin’s work. She is a conceptual artist to be sure, but few conceptual artists break as many boundaries in working with their materials. Her work has content, humor and social commentary while maintaining a rigorous adherence to painstaking process.
--------------------Lisa Kokin Rustle, details (above)
Cowboy book covers, thread, wire, mull 55 1/2 × 35 × 15 1/2 in
--------------------Lisa Kokin Cowboy #7, La Vie en Rose, detail Vintage textiles, thread, 46 x 41 in
Gyöngy Laky Whether grids, vessels, language related sculptures or abstracted architectural forms, Laky’s work cues a combined sensory and mental experience exploring the possibilities of form, arrangement, dimensionality, material, texture and pattern. Laky is fundamentally concerned with learning, remembering, thinking and understanding through the relationship between what is tangible and tactile and what is metaphorical. She is interested in the place where the physical intersects with word, thought, memory and imagination. With simple text, common signs, or familiar objects she probes how experiencing these in visual, physical form might alter, extend and/or enhance a viewer’s response. By what is recognized and what is suggested she seeks mental connections one might not otherwise make - often cunningly combining the verbal with the visceral. With concerns crossing a variety of subjects and social issues - Laky undertakes to make a letter function like a sentence or to make a symbol, single word, sign or object function like a narrative. Gyöngy Laky (b.Budapest 1944), San Francisco sculptor, is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Laky’s work is in a number of permanent museum collections. She created a large work commissioned by the Federal Art-in-Architecture Program for the Social Security Administration Building in Richmond, CA, and another for the City Council Chambers in Sacramento, CA. She exhibits her work nationally and internationally (solo exhibitions in England, Denmark, Hungary and Spain). ---------------------
Gyöngy Laky Natura Facit Saltum, 2011
Wook, screws 21 x 21 in
--------------------Gyöngy Laky Rib Structure, 1988 (below)
London plane tree prunings, electrical wire. 26 x 24 x 24 in
Patricia Lyons Stroud Using a vocabulary of simple, reductive forms to create abstracted sculptures referencing elements of nature and structures found within the human body, Patricia Lyons Stroud has produced a body of work meticulously crafted from wood. Tending to work in series, Stroud will focus on a theme allowing the work itself to lead her on an investigation that concludes when the work no longer offers either interest or surprise. This focus may dwell on the conceptual idea of “bundles,” then “houses,” leading to “nests” and onto “patterns” or the use of “words” as sculptural form. Interlaced fingers, ribs and spines emerge from blocks of wood – these are sculptures that are primal in their simplicity but present Stroud’s uncanny understanding of the complexity of three-dimensional form. Using nature as touchstone, Stroud achieves a pureness of form that clearly reveals a piercing intellect. The titles of each work reflect both the truth and complexity of concept that has been achieved through formal simplification and the Brancusi-like craftsmanship that earmarks Stroud’s oeuvre. Born in Liverpool, England, she and her family endured the World War II nightly bombings of that city by the Germans. Stroud studied at the Liverpool School of Art where she earned her diploma in 1945. After immigration to the United States she attended the San Francisco Art Institute graduating with a MFA in 1985. Represented by Triangle Gallery of San Francisco since 1989, Stroud exhibited in one person exhibitions regularly until its closure in 2011 and was the subject of frequent reviews by Kenneth Baker of the SF Chronicle and Artweek Magazine.
--------------------Patricia Lyons Stroud Back to the Wall, 2000 Pine with stain 29 x 29 x 6 in
Alexander Rohrig Alexander Rohrig lives and works in magnificent surroundings in the mountains in San Gregorio. In 2009, he took a position as studio assistant to artist and sculptor Jane Rosen on her ranch, a beautiful natural preserve high in the California mountains. Under Rosen’s tutelage and with his daily practice of drawing from these extraordinary surroundings, Rohrig developed a drawing style and vision all his own. Reluctant to exhibit until he felt that he had found his own expression, Rohrig will be featured in three exhibitions in 2015 and was featured in an article in Works and Conversation, an insightful chronicle of California art and artists published and written by Richard Whittaker. His time has arrived. Rohrig works minimally, getting the “bones” down before moving on. He has a studied restraint, careful not to cloud the original essence of the thing he is aiming at. His work with Rosen over the years has given him an intimate understanding of materials and the translation from drawing to finished work is sensitive and respectful of his subject matter. An art historical reference might easily be drawn to Franz Marc whose work was characterized by an almost cubist portrayal of animals, stark simplicity and a profound sense of emotion. Alexander Rohrig was raised in Northern California and received his education at the University of California in Santa Cruz.
--------------------Alexander Rohrig Mei Mei , 2015
Painted limestone and glue 10 x 6.5 x 4 in”
--------------------Alexander Rohrig Rooky, 2015 Painted limestone and glue 8.5 x 7 x 4 in
--------------------Jane Rosen
Skyscraper Bird Left, 2011
Kiln cast pigmented glass and limestone 71 x 15 x 16 in
--------------------Jane Rosen
Skyscraper Bird, Right 2011
Kiln cast pigmented glass and limestone 66 x 15 x 13 in
Jane Rosen Jane Rosen’s masterful birds of prey in cast and blown glass are a phenomenon unto themselves. Rosen is able to use the fluid and malleable properties of glass to realize the iconic nobility of these magnificent birds. Once she perfects the shapes and colors so carefully defined by her preliminary drawings, she overcomes the more temporal qualities of glass - its shininess and apparent fragility. Utilizing her skills and tools as a stone carver, she takes the medium to a new dimension capturing the essence of the birds as inspired by a youth spent at the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum in her New York upbringing. Rosen was selected by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for inclusion in their Annual Invitational in New York in 2010 and again in 2015. This prestigious exhibition is juried by some of the greatest artists of our time. A masterful and sought after teacher, Rosen has taught at numerous elite institutions including the School of Visual Arts and Bard College in New York, LaCoste School of the Arts in France, Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. Rosen’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America, and Art News. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and is in numerous public and private collections including the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery, the Aspen Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Chevron Corporation, the collection of Grace Borgenicht, JP Morgan Chase Bank, the Luso American Foundation, the Mallin Collection, the Mitsubishi Corporation, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
--------------------Jane Rosen Ferd’s Bird, 2011
Hand blown Glass Gaffers: Ferdinand Theriot & Guido Gerlitz 16 x 4 x 4 in
David Ruddell David Ruddell explores his own mythology for the journey of life by using the boat form as a metaphor for the passage of the human vessel through time. The physical representation of this symbol is meant to represent the choices we make in our lives. Ruddell creates works on raw poplar panels and blackboards, utilizing a palette of rich blues, reds, and yellows in natural tones that evoke a symbolic landscape. His most recent works show a mastery of gold leaf as seen on the upper section of Three Fir Boats, Blackboard, Golden Board and Gold Boat, Red Board Background, pictured in inset (not in this exhibition, but available for viewing in the gallery. Ruddell’s long-standing interest in the formal clarity and palpable physical reality of his art. As the artist readily acknowledges, he has always been attracted to the natural beauty and tactile character he finds in ordinary materials – the meandering grain of plywood, the silken smoothness of varnished hardwood, the scrabbly look of concrete – and in his recent pieces he communicates this interest with an intensified sense of rigor and focus that marks a turning point in his art. But unlike the minimal artists with whom he shares certain affinities, Ruddell continues to work with materials that are vested with the undeniable subjective significance to him, transmuting them into spare expressions of subtle intensity. Quietly assertive, his works are contemplative explorations into the interface between the past and present, emotion and intellect, the personal and universal. (from the catalog essay by Karen Tsujimoto) David Ruddell’s work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Museum, Renwick Gallery, Washington, DC, the di Rosa in Napa, California, and the Oakland Museum of California, as well as many private collections.
--------------------David Ruddell
Three Fir Boats, Blackboard, Golden Board, 2014 Fir and mixed media with gold leaf 56 x 46.5 x 7 in
--------------------David Ruddell
Gold Boat, Red Board Background, 2014
Fir and mixed media with gold leaf 62 x 57 x 6.5 in
Richard Shaw In the world of contemporary ceramics, Richard Shaw is the master of trompe-l’oeil sculpture. He has developed an astonishing array of techniques, including perfectly cast porcelain objects and overglaze transfer decals. By combining the commonplace with the whimsical, the humorous with the mundane, Shaw captures the poetic and the surreal with the sensibility of a comedian. Shaw is one of the most respected and collected artists in contemporary ceramics. He came out of the San Francisco Bay Area art scene in the late 1960’s and he continues to add to his skills and appropriate from mass culture. He has developed a vocabulary of found objects that form intimate still life sculptures, complex figures, and personally referential assemblages. He brings life to the detritus of the studio, as a cartoonist animates the page.
--------------------Richard Shaw
Seated Lady with Blue Shoe, 2013 Clay 34 x 13.5 x 15 in
Helen Stanley Helen’s Stanley’s cutout urn, Never-ending depicts a cracked and broken vessel bearing a map of the Middle East and a poem written in Arabic. The title reflects a dual history - that of the Middle East and of the painting itself. Stanley cut out three urn panels in 1993 as a reflection of the first Gulf War. She painted and gessoed the panels, selling one, keeping one for herself and leaving this one in her studio, unresolved. In 2003 during the second Gulf War, she took the painting out again, deepening the cracks and adding the poem. Again she put it away. In December of 2014, she took out the painting for the last time. She added more cracks and brightened the poem. The work reflects an area of the world shattered by war and turmoil, a struggle over fundamental differences in the translations of sacred texts. Helen Stanley’s individual style, keen sense of observation and love of process have long distinguished her work. She has been widely exhibited in many galleries including the prestigious Paula Anglim Gallery and William Sawyer Gallery in San Francisco and the Susan Cummins Gallery in Mill Valley. She received a Life Work award by the Marin Arts council and was given a retrospective show at the Falkirk Cultural Center, San Rafael, California.
--------------------Helen Stanley Never-ending, 2013
Oil on birch panel 46 x 25 in
Tim Tate Artist Tim Tate sees his sculptures as self-contained video installations. Blending traditional craft with new media technology gives him the framework in which he can explore history, storytelling, popular culture and memory. The important revelations here are in the viewer’s response to his hybrid art form and its conceptual nature. These works are phylacteries of sorts, the transparent reliquaries in which bits of saints’ bones or hair — relics — are displayed. In many cultures and religions, relics are believed to have magical or spiritual powers, especially for healing. Tate’s relics are temporal, sounds and moving images formally enshrined, encapsulating experiences like cultural specimens. Tim Tate is co-founder of the Washington Glass School located in Mt. Rainier MD. He has shown nationally and beyond since the 1990’s, including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, SOFA New York and Chicago, Art Basel Scope in Switzerland, the Art Miami at Art Basel-Miami, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art at the Smithsonian, the Renwick Gallery and commercial galleries from Washington, DC to London and Berlin.
--------------------Tim Tate Grand Central, 2013
Cast amber lead crystal and video 7 x 9 x 2 in
--------------------Tim Tate Vonnegut Studio, 2013
Cast blue lead crystal and video 8 x 10 x 2 in
His awards include “Rising Star of the 21st Century” from the Museum of American Glass, the Virginia Groot Foundation Award for Sculpture, three Artists Fellowship awards from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Mayor’s Art Award. He also was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to teach in Sunderland, England in 2012. His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, the Mint Museum, the Fuller Museum, the Katzen Art Center of American University, the Milwaukee Art Museum and Vanderbilt University.
Kazuko Watanabe The multiple color intaglio etchings of Kazuko Watanabe are a testament to patience, precision and a love of inks and paper. Watanabe has worked in print media for over twenty years, researching and developing three-dimensional prints, print sculpture, the use of intaglio in artist’s books and the combination of traditional print media with computer techniques. Kazuko Watanabe is a graduate of the San Francisco Academy of Art University and has taught classes on printmaking at both the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and the University of California, Berkeley. Her multiple color intaglio prints are meticulously crafted in a way most printmakers shy away from due to the inordinate amount of time and patience needed for this particular medium. She handles these stubborn metallic plates with such ease and subtlety that the viewer is generally unaware of the mastery involoved in generating the beautiful abstract compositions and delicate color gradations. Ms. Watanabe was the recipient of The 1999 Library Fellows Award from The National Museum of Women in Arts Foundation in Washington D.C. for her bookmaking.
--------------------Kazuko Watanabe Diffraction I, 2010
Mulitple plate intagiio etching 40 x 30 in paper size, 32 x 24 in image size
--------------------Kazuko Watanabe Diffraction II, 2010
Mulitple plate intagiio etching 40 x 30 in paper size, 32 x 24 in image size
Joe Brubaker Lia Cook Stephen Paul Day Charles Eckart Ann Hollingsworth Lisa Kokin Gyรถngy Laky Alexander Rohrig Jane Rosen David Ruddell Richard Shaw Helen Stanley Patricia Lyons Stroud Tim Tate Kazuko Watanabe