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Loss and gain; text isle
March 22 -April 6
Opening March 7, 6-9pm
Closing April 4, 6-9pm
Performances:
Saturday March 8th 6-10pm
Zachary James Watkins - resonant electro acoustics
Thingamajigs Performance Group - open composition / projections
Roco Cordova - voice / electroacoustics
Saturday March 29th 6-10 pm
John Davis - guitar/ electronics /projection
Shannon Gray - aerial dance
Cheryl E Leonard - eco electro acoustics
Artists:
Chelsea Stewart, Robin Dintiman, Sha Sha Higby, Stella Zhang
Turtle island. Text isle, we are marking our emotion, arced on the coast of the ring of fire. Swollen with a haunting at a vista point in the mineral epoch of the anthropocene, we take off our shoes. An active studio is here in the gallery, everyday objects, food, tea, phones and our attachments find their places. Landscape transformations, the catastrophic fires & flooding, earthquakes & tsunamis, clouds and vapors. It is challenging not to write apocalyptic. A Change and witness to change, describing our interdependence, co-sensing and inscribing our implications. One needn’t reflect any direction without feeling our generous grief. Especially toward ecstasy.
Here, these artists are compelled to work in these contrasting intentions: transforming contradictory dualisms into emotion that bind our empathy like grief. Worked into affirming arrays of address and questions. The not knowing of mystery looms. These moments cleave off shadows of impressions in our lives, overcoming family histories of lost selves and friends grown away with, the limits of muscle and movement, the stories of wounds and marks that stretch our bodies further afield. Back to ovulation and the tissue of birth processes implied in these artworks. Invoking our presence and fragility, their heartfelt challenges of grief are woven into experience, spooled by many polarities. Held up in the social fabric, these materials are conjugal and procreate, assembling together. Attempts along lines of different experiences create convergences; Attempts along lines of similar experiences create divergences. It is a poetic affair.
What is it that we, as participants, can hold and or drop?
We begin the lunar new year of the wooden snake, wound up around reconstruction and destruction of the changing social environment with connections, wounds, growth, and an awareness of our relation to time pushing on the cultural frames. All four of theses women are active agents expressing with their bodies and their minds and their spirit some set of transformational links to open us all to subtle phenomena and psychic externalities. Perhaps these methodologies of self inquiry are a balm for personal suffering, war, devastation and alienation, and a way to basic truths. On and off - Or offerings.
Here, on a primary emotional level, these works are unbinding, antidotes to simulation, wrapping themselves in themselves, embracing the difficulty and beauty of their own materiality and poetic mystery. These artists are working with their praise, grief, responsiveness, process and sense of responsibility. Taking care where? To what end? What is it that we are exploring, exploiting and extracting? Synergizing and inspiring? What seems like grief is. And, it is also ecstatic surrender, praise and the stained bloody rivers of time and attention. Some scattering rays on our ecliptic and another set of lunar advance.
Robin Dintiman is an artist who has danced with her practice her whole adult life; after school and teaching she turned away from exhibitions to become a successful master textile manufacturer, while developing her process behind the scenes. She has a wide range in her methodology engaging in an array of photographic metalurgical and building material sciences. Her skins are mycologically grown and formed. For her, experience and practice is intimately tied to ecological observations of specific places and their emotional fields. With many notable Fellowships and Residencies under her belt, her works are included in permanent collections of the Philadelphia Art Museum, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the Chrysler Museum and The Arkansas Museum of Art, Grace Cathedral San Francisco, Commonweal Wellness Center, Millay Arts. Laguna de Santa Rosa and Toyobo Senior Center, Osaka. www.robindintiman.com
Sha Sha Higby is a mercurial figure whose artistic practice has unfolded by carefully measured studies of Asian traditional theater craft and practices, as well as channeling intuitive folkloric visions. She visits Asia frequently, these days teaching workshops, giving back her insights gained in the many years of study there. Her methods are an obsessive and hypnotic participation with cultural styles and material adornment in the iconographies of ancient asian theater (Yugen, Noh, Butoh), Wunderkammers of Europe and shamanistic religious ceremony. Though grounded in dance and presence of the body, she crafts patterning that has the ability to transfer dreams and animistic energy of objects, resplendent in her intentions. Her silks are stained by using a Japanese traditional botanical formula with urushiol. Thailand, Sumatra, Myanmar, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Java, Bali, and Japan have all deeply informed her experience of material possibilities. Myriad awards, research grants and study continues the evolving of Higby’s own oneiric and theatrical language. www.shashahigby.com
Chelsea Stewart uses her practice as a temporal affirmation, even occasionally as a diary, to explore the vulnerability of mental health in the shadowed immensity of emotional overwhelm. Structural and material interrogations disclose fragility, even an anxiety of being. Situating the loom asks a question of complexity. Stewart is currently attending San Jose State while working towards her MFA in Spatial Arts. She was recently granted a Featured Emerging Artist Award in Content Mag. www.chelseaannestewart.com
Stella Zhang has a prolific practice, very sensitive to her basic materials energies, focussed on the emotional variations and permutations. Questions of identity and power structure compete. Replete with cultural narrative vectors and quiet crisis expressions, there is seemingly a hauntological vocabulary of divination. The ghosts of bodies both human and elemental imbue and color the gestures and manipulations of Power dynamics. The pieces float and turn and sag and splay from points of binding and release while she remains firm. Zhang was awarded the Xian Rui Artist Excellence of the Year prize from the Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco in 2010, and was an Artist-in-Residence at Stanford University in 2016. Her work is featured in the collections of the Fine Arts Museum of China, Beijing, as well as the Tan Shin Fine Arts Museum, Tokyo. www.stellazhang.net
This exhibition and the evenings of performances aim to expose in the gallery movement space, human processing, and process healing with textiles like bandages. The performances and exhibition inhabiting differing temporal aspects. Stella Zhang lines her work with playful, multifarious narrative stains that permeate in haunting complexities of cultural, personal and material implications. Robin Dintiman holds a profound sensitivity for the photographic cut branch, ruptures in methodological histories, as well as mycological and botanical aches that weave her ideas together. Sha Sha Higby wraps her mellifluous identities in folkloric patterns and traditional processes with her performances and material investments. Chelsea Stewart, a painter of liminal spaces wherein formations of expression are then foregrounded in the gallery by the traditional apparatus and process of hand pulling, line by line. Edward Schocker, Suki Okane and Rae Diamond invoke an ancient improvisational acoustic landscape with traditional instruments as well as those of inspired everyday objects. Zachary James Watkins is a composer, educator and sound designer working at the fault line of resonance harmonics and social interference. Shannon Gray is an aerialist and mover whose elegant architectural intervention for work with silks is transportative. Cheryl E Leonard is an ecological composer and instrument builder focussed on transforming minute and phenomenological aspects in the sensations of sound. John Davis is a multi-valent composer of sound and image using a subtle and wide array of equipment and approaches to create evocative cinematic experiences. Roco Cordova is a purveyor of electronic landscapes trained in a wide range of traditional vocalisations, as well as many types of throat singing and operatic techniques with a staggering range of social vectors and expression. Keith Evans uses paracinematic interventions into the gallery space to translate and articulate the unstable movement and energetics of barriers.
Chelsea Stewart
Here, these artists are compelled to work in these contrasting intentions: transforming contradictory dualisms into emotion that bind our empathy like grief. Worked into affirming arrays of address and questions. The not knowing of mystery looms. These moments cleave off shadows of impressions in our lives, overcoming family histories of lost selves and friends grown away with, the limits of muscle and movement, the stories of wounds and marks that stretch our bodies further afield. Back to ovulation and the tissue of birth processes implied in these artworks. Invoking our presence and fragility, their heartfelt challenges of grief are woven into experience, spooled by many polarities. Held up in the social fabric, these materials are conjugal and procreate, assembling together. Attempts along lines of different experiences create convergences; Attempts along lines of similar experiences create divergences. It is a poetic affair.
What is it that we, as participants, can hold and or drop?
We begin the lunar new year of the wooden snake, wound up around reconstruction and destruction of the changing social environment with connections, wounds, growth, and an awareness of our relation to time pushing on the cultural frames. All four of theses women are active agents expressing with their bodies and their minds and their spirit some set of transformational links to open us all to subtle phenomena and psychic externalities. Perhaps these methodologies of self inquiry are a balm for personal suffering, war, devastation and alienation, and a way to basic truths. On and off - Or offerings.
Here, on a primary emotional level, these works are unbinding, antidotes to simulation, wrapping themselves in themselves, embracing the difficulty and beauty of their own materiality and poetic mystery. These artists are working with their praise, grief, responsiveness, process and sense of responsibility. Taking care where? To what end? What is it that we are exploring, exploiting and extracting? Synergizing and inspiring? What seems like grief is. And, it is also ecstatic surrender, praise and the stained bloody rivers of time and attention. Some scattering rays on our ecliptic and another set of lunar advance.
Robin Dintiman is an artist who has danced with her practice her whole adult life; after school and teaching she turned away from exhibitions to become a successful master textile manufacturer, while developing her process behind the scenes. She has a wide range in her methodology engaging in an array of photographic metalurgical and building material sciences. Her skins are mycologically grown and formed. For her, experience and practice is intimately tied to ecological observations of specific places and their emotional fields. With many notable Fellowships and Residencies under her belt, her works are included in permanent collections of the Philadelphia Art Museum, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the Chrysler Museum and The Arkansas Museum of Art, Grace Cathedral San Francisco, Commonweal Wellness Center, Millay Arts. Laguna de Santa Rosa and Toyobo Senior Center, Osaka. www.robindintiman.com
Sha Sha Higby is a mercurial figure whose artistic practice has unfolded by carefully measured studies of Asian traditional theater craft and practices, as well as channeling intuitive folkloric visions. She visits Asia frequently, these days teaching workshops, giving back her insights gained in the many years of study there. Her methods are an obsessive and hypnotic participation with cultural styles and material adornment in the iconographies of ancient asian theater (Yugen, Noh, Butoh), Wunderkammers of Europe and shamanistic religious ceremony. Though grounded in dance and presence of the body, she crafts patterning that has the ability to transfer dreams and animistic energy of objects, resplendent in her intentions. Her silks are stained by using a Japanese traditional botanical formula with urushiol. Thailand, Sumatra, Myanmar, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Java, Bali, and Japan have all deeply informed her experience of material possibilities. Myriad awards, research grants and study continues the evolving of Higby’s own oneiric and theatrical language. www.shashahigby.com
Chelsea Stewart uses her practice as a temporal affirmation, even occasionally as a diary, to explore the vulnerability of mental health in the shadowed immensity of emotional overwhelm. Structural and material interrogations disclose fragility, even an anxiety of being. Situating the loom asks a question of complexity. Stewart is currently attending San Jose State while working towards her MFA in Spatial Arts. She was recently granted a Featured Emerging Artist Award in Content Mag. www.chelseaannestewart.com
Stella Zhang has a prolific practice, very sensitive to her basic materials energies, focussed on the emotional variations and permutations. Questions of identity and power structure compete. Replete with cultural narrative vectors and quiet crisis expressions, there is seemingly a hauntological vocabulary of divination. The ghosts of bodies both human and elemental imbue and color the gestures and manipulations of Power dynamics. The pieces float and turn and sag and splay from points of binding and release while she remains firm. Zhang was awarded the Xian Rui Artist Excellence of the Year prize from the Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco in 2010, and was an Artist-in-Residence at Stanford University in 2016. Her work is featured in the collections of the Fine Arts Museum of China, Beijing, as well as the Tan Shin Fine Arts Museum, Tokyo. www.stellazhang.net
This exhibition and the evenings of performances aim to expose in the gallery movement space, human processing, and process healing with textiles like bandages. The performances and exhibition inhabiting differing temporal aspects. Stella Zhang lines her work with playful, multifarious narrative stains that permeate in haunting complexities of cultural, personal and material implications. Robin Dintiman holds a profound sensitivity for the photographic cut branch, ruptures in methodological histories, as well as mycological and botanical aches that weave her ideas together. Sha Sha Higby wraps her mellifluous identities in folkloric patterns and traditional processes with her performances and material investments. Chelsea Stewart, a painter of liminal spaces wherein formations of expression are then foregrounded in the gallery by the traditional apparatus and process of hand pulling, line by line. Edward Schocker, Suki Okane and Rae Diamond invoke an ancient improvisational acoustic landscape with traditional instruments as well as those of inspired everyday objects. Zachary James Watkins is a composer, educator and sound designer working at the fault line of resonance harmonics and social interference. Shannon Gray is an aerialist and mover whose elegant architectural intervention for work with silks is transportative. Cheryl E Leonard is an ecological composer and instrument builder focussed on transforming minute and phenomenological aspects in the sensations of sound. John Davis is a multi-valent composer of sound and image using a subtle and wide array of equipment and approaches to create evocative cinematic experiences. Roco Cordova is a purveyor of electronic landscapes trained in a wide range of traditional vocalisations, as well as many types of throat singing and operatic techniques with a staggering range of social vectors and expression. Keith Evans uses paracinematic interventions into the gallery space to translate and articulate the unstable movement and energetics of barriers.
Chelsea Stewart
