The Preview Exhibition is the 'living catalog' to the annual East Bay Open Studios event in June. View works by over 400 artists in 16 East Bay cities. 

All participating artists are featured in the annual Directory of East Bay Arts. Published and distributed in conjunction with East Bay Open Studios, the directory includes artist listings, studio maps, a 12 month East Bay Arts Calendar and the East Bay Arts Index. Pick up your copy at Pro Arts' gallery!

Exhibition dates: May 10th- June 16th, 2012

Artists' Reception: Saturday, May 12th from 6-9 pm

Artist's Talk: Saturday, June 9th 4-6 pm 

Oakland Art Murmur First Fridays: June 1st from 6-9pm

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Charlie Milgrim: Dark Alliances

Asphalt building paper, heavy and black, provides the background and scaffold for Charlie Milgrim's recent works. Nuclear cooling towers glow and radiate a soft fluorescence and hover in the black-ground of space. Black paper planes, shadowy stealth bombers, are folded and creased into the angular abstractions and dark geometry of the military machine. Creation and destruction conjoin uneasily in our technocratic state.

Charlie Milgrim, Cool Pair #1, 2011, drawing on roofing tar paper photo: Charlie Milgrim

Charlie Milgrim was born in New York City. She received a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MFA from UC Berkeley. She has exhibited her work at the Oakland Museum, the Haines Gallery and Gallery 16 in San Francisco, OK Harris in New York City and has work in many private collections including the Di Rosa Collection in Napa, CA.

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Julianne Wallace Sterling: this body

East Bay painter Julianne Wallace Sterling presents this body, a study in paint made flesh. In her latest series the artist considers the carnal experience we all share of living in a body, our vessel, home and means by which we encounter life. Her painting focuses primarily on the realities, complexities and absurdities of life as a woman.

Julianne Wallace Sterling, this body 1, 2012, oil on panel, photo: Julianne Wallace Sterling

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 Dacia Gallery in New York, A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato and Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland. She was also awarded first prize at Marin Museum of Contemporary Art's 2010 Juried Annual. Her work has been written about in the San Francisco Chronicle and the East Bay Express. Ms. Sterling's work was selected for A.I.R. Gallery's 9th Biennial in Brooklyn in March 2011.

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Gallery Artists: From Here to There

Mercury 20 Gallery is pleased to present Terryl Dunn, Jill McLennan and Mary Curtis Ratcliff in the group exhibition From Here to There. These three well-traveled artists show painting and mixed media work inspired by time and place both far away and closer to home.

Images from left:
Mary Curtis Ratcliff, Martha the Messenger, 2006 collage, acrylic, graphite, xerox transfer
Terryl Dunn, DAM, 2011, acrylic & pencil on wood panel
Jill McLennan, Sustainable, 2012, oil and encaustic on wood

Terryl Dunn presents paintings and works on paper from his recent series titled Megathrust. Inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Dunn explores the explosive forces of nature, imagining energy as it moves through the different elements, examining how line and mass can signal speed, reverberation, and cross current.

Jill McLennan's paintings portray a contemporary city in ruins as it is taken over by nature and graffiti. The paintings are set in a future that looks back towards present wasteful systems and shows the strength of nature to reclaim the earth. Graffiti forms become part of the urban structure as they take on a life of their own.

The work of Mary Curtis Ratcliff looks back to a time before the internet when messages were conveyed by actual birds (Martha, the last passenger pigeon) or letters carried by large, cumbersome airplanes around the globe. Now correspondence is instantaneously transmitted at the speed of light.......And light, in turn, transmits its energy signal underneath the toy boats of the children of Paris.

Popuphood Celebrates Six Months of success!
Friday, May 4th 5-10pm
We are so excited to be announcing that Marion and Rose's Workshop will be signing a lease!!

Join us in celebrating this Friday with a night of revelry- art, music, wall projections, street closures and MUSIC by DJ Hakobo and The John Brother’s Piano Co. playing an upright piano in the street with old time-y jams!

We will be featuring an installation called Clusternook by the (local & mysterious) art collective of fun-havers known as.. Wonderboom! This installation features paintings on found wood in various sizes, colors and shapes, macramé, afghan blankets AND a full sized clubhouse!

PLUS! Make sure to check in and get a Passport, if you visit each shop and get a stamp it is good for 10% off any of the shops until the end of June.

With all that is happening on First Friday...why not relax and take the Free B Shuttle. Hop on at 9th + Broadway and go up and down Broadway from Jack London Square to West Grand.

Marion and Rose's Workshop

461 9th St. (betwn Broadway and Washington)
Old Oakland neighborhood, Oakland, CA 94607
marionandrose.com

Come out for a wild night of mixed media paintings that will excite your senses and leave you hungry for more!  Join us for another fantastic show, stroll through open studios, and enjoy delicious tamales.  Easy street parking.

REMIX

Mixed media paintings by Gared Luquet

Friday, May 4th

6-9 pm

The Hive Gallery, 301 Jefferson Street

In the Project Space: Installation by Nathaniel Parsons

Food for purchase by Tina Tamale!

www.hivestudios.org

Solo Exhibition featuring Jennie Ottinger
Show Runs May 10 - June 16, 2012
Opening Reception May 12, 5-7pm

On Johansson Projects 5th Anniversary we present Jennie Ottinger's "What to Do with Your Orphan: A Manual", in which orphans partake in orphan-like activities. These include sleeping, playing dodgeball, and eating breakfast. But don't be fooled into thinking an orphan's life is just like yours or mine. Ottinger nonchalantly renders a mouth too far unhinged or a patch of flesh a bit too pink, making her gouache ghosts look almost human, but not quite. Horror invades the lullaby of the sweet, little orphan. 



Ottinger's collection depicts groups of children who, for some reason or other, do not have a place to call home. Yet her subjects don't even seem to be at home in their own skin, which morphs and erodes before your eyes. In fact, in the face of her paintings, you won't feel at home either. With a style that evokes Marlene Dumas and Francis Bacon, Ottinger creates her own orphan legend, part "Annie" and part "The Bad Seed". She skillfully balances levity and dread, the sweet and the grotesque, making her aesthetic a visual manifestation of gallows humor. Ottinger's orphans need something to laugh at in their unfortunate situations. The lucky ones get godparents who exploit them, while the unlucky ones... well, we don't really know where they go.

Ottinger gives cliched scenarios a funhouse mirror treatment, rendering every nun into a monster, every schoolgirl into a freak. But it is a topsy-turvy world when a child is left without parents at such a young age, and a world filled with ugly indeed. 



Jennie Ottinger was raised in Massachusetts and currently lives in San Francisco, CA. Ms. Ottinger earned her BFA from California College of the Arts and her MFA from Mills College.What to do with Your Orphan: A Manual will be Jennie's third solo show at Johansson Projects. She has also mounted solo exhibitions at Eleven Gallery in London as well as a solo booth at Volta NY Art Fair. Her works have also been included in the NADA Art Fair in Miami, Southern Exposure, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Adobe Books in California, as well as galleries in New York, Dallas and Los Angeles. She was awarded a residency at the Kala Art Institute as well as two Graduate Research Grants from Mills College and the Sara Lewis Scholarship Award. Ottinger's reviews appeared in Art in America, San Francisco Chronicle, ArtSlant, Daily Serving and 7x7 Magazine.

Manna Gallery’s May exhibition, E = mc2, offers a survey of recent works by Mark Lightfoot. This exhibition opens on First Friday, May 4 and continues until Saturday, May 26. Mr. Lightfoot will host a reception on Saturday, May 5, from 3 to 6 pm. when he will be available to talk about the development of his work.

Mr. Lightfoot’s exhibition features artworks where paintings move away from the walls and, finally, onto the gallery’s floor. He is most interested in the relationship between energy, structure and motion, especially as manifested in the human body. Always seeking new metaphors for this relationship, his work has evolved from the figurative to the abstract and from painting to mixed media sculpture.

Raised in Michigan, Mr. Lightfoot attended the University of Michigan, graduating with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Design. He moved to the west coast that year to attend the University of Washington in Seattle, completing his Master of Fine Arts Degree. He has exhibited his work extensively in Michigan, Washington, British Columbia and California where his paintings, drawings, sculpture and handmade paper pieces are in both private collections and public buildings.

Creative Growth Art Center is pleased to announce its annual exhibition Home: Natural Selection.

The oldest and largest art center for artists with disabilities invites you to experience some of nature’s finest creations. The annual Home show has remained a much anticipated tradition for Bay Area art collectors for more than twenty years and invites the artists at Creative Growth to focus on hand-designed, decorative furniture, textiles, ceramic wares, as well as drawing and painting and collage work by artists Donald Mitchell, John Hiltunen, Franna Lusson, John Martin, Ray Vickers, Terri Bowden and more.

Also, check out photos and fashion ensembles from the Creative Growth March runway event, Beyond Trend. Backstage and ‘on the catwalk’ photographs captured by Bay Area artist Terri Loewenthal and Danish artist, Yann Houlberg Andersen will be on view in our upstairs exhibition space.

Join the studio artists as they lead an afternoon parade, wearing hand-built floats with designs ranging from unicorns and lighthouses, to hand-feathered bird wings. A street parade of wild and fantastical creations you don’t want to miss!

Also open Saturday, May 5, 11am – 4pm

April 21 - May 27, 2012
Gallery | ANCILLARY ADAPTATIONS | Masako Miki
Project | AMALGAM | Joe Penrod

Reception Saturday, April 21, 2012 6-8pm

PRESS
PRESS RELEASE

Swarm Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of multi-media works by Masako Miki, ANCILLARY ADAPTATIONS, on view from April 21 - May 27, 2012. An installation by Joe Penrod, AMALGAM, is presented in the project space.

Masako Miki's work explores the idea of synthesis. She manipulates contradicting spatial elements such as flatness and illusion to suggest a disoriented context. The narrative is based on her own experiences of living in the United States for seventeen years, and dilemnas of her cultural identity. Her works explore how one can truly assimilate to a foreign environment, considering both pessimism and optimism. In the constant adjustment of her own personal cultural assimilation, she has experienced feelings of perplexity, incongruity, and obscurity. Ultimately, she believes that different cultures can be hybridized to become a unique alternative one. In her process of making work, she seeks to achieve this equilibrium.

In ANCILLARY ADAPTATIONS, Miki considers personal transformation, and the necessary process of both adapting to a new environment and evolving as a person. Acknowledgement and realization is the central narrative here. Finally, insight into who she was in the past, leads to who she is now, and ultimately who she wants to become.

Miki uses deer to symbolize survival, as they are a highly adaptable species. Their ability to adjust and integrate has allowed them to subsist throughout the world. This series was inspired by the hypothesis of an alternative reality, where order in the deer's lifecycle is challenged. The shedding and re-growth of the antlers represents a process of survival. What if the beautiful antlers keep growing until they reach the sky? What if there were no predators of deer? What is growing has to die in order to mature the process. Maybe it is okay to leave something that was part of us because it will grow again. Maybe it is also okay if we lose it forever.

The mundane is the object of Joe Penrod's work. It often becomes invisible to us. Through his exploration of simple materials, he calls attention to the immaterial; turning a moment in time into an object; solidifying the brief interaction between light and eye. He is interested in impermanence and the forgotten, in the barely remembered and barely perceived.

Eric Bohr, "context", acrylic on canvas, 48"h x 36"w, 2012, photo: Eric Bohr

Eric Bohr: Variations

Oakland-based artist Eric Bohr presents Variations, new large scale mixed media paintings exploring the wide range of possibilities inherent in the monochrome tradition. Bohr continues his ongoing dialogue with the color blue, from which he has developed a luminous style of gestural abstraction that moves between restraint and release, the calm and the kinetic.

Originally from Lansing, Michigan, Eric Bohr has lived and worked in California for over twenty years. He apprenticed with Michael Jacobs in Venice, California for four years before moving to Oakland in 1999. His work has been shown in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Washington D.C. and is included in many collections in the United States and Europe.

Terryl Dunn: Megathrust

Exploring the explosive forces of nature, Oakland painter Terryl Dunn presents a new series of work titled Megathrust. The shift in both subject, to current natural events, and palette, in a dramatic departure into black and white, started with last year's Mississippi Rising exhibit and continues with these new pieces.

Dunn's inspiration is the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. In this work he imagines energy as it moves through the different elements, examining how line can signal speed, reverberation, and cross current. In addition to conventional brush and paint, the artist uses loose graphite and an electric sander in his mark-making process.

Terryl Dunn was born in Portland, Oregon and received his BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 1982. He has exhibited in Portland, San Francisco, and and New York.

Terryl Dunn, "ANIMA", acrylic and graphite on wood panel, 60"x80" diptych, 2011

Gallery Artists: Object Lessons

Mercury 20 is pleased to present P.K. Frizzell, Peter Honig and Dave Meeker in the group exhibition Object Lessons. The artists are united in their use of found objects to create sculptural work, as well as in their engagement with themes of reflectivity, luminosity, and humor.

Exploring and exploiting the possibility for transcendence contained in the seemingly mundane, P.K. Frizzell's layered transparent prints of paint-can interiors reflect her conviction that "the interior of our human experience, though contained in a finite body, is vast and beautifully mysterious". Through the embedded lenses of her cast resin "mind cones", objects are revealed as symbolic containers of experience, revealing the complex organizational strategies employed in the production of memory.

Peter Honig's large-scale luminous prints of humorous scenarios created from found objects hover between the realm of sculpture and still life photography. Honig manipulates detritus rescued from the landfill, and creates minimal vignettes that mirror interior psychological states. In Honig's world, the interwoven planes of humor and horror exist in harmonious dead-lock, platforms for the exploration of consciousness.

Working in a minimalist vein, Dave Meeker seeks out the most "uber-mundane" of materials as a conceptual leaping off point for his benevolent and ambitious artistic agenda, the wish to "instill wonder, joy, and delight in the viewer." His aggressively non-functional bowl-like constructions of swizzle sticks evoke neurological structures, with their gaping exposed synaptic ends inviting literal and metaphoric connection.

Images from left: P.K. Frizzell, "Paint Cans", layered ultrachrome transparencies, 18"x18", 2012
Peter Honig, "Precipice", archival giclee print, 36"x36", 2012
Dave Meeker, "Red Straw Bowl", swizzle sticks, 24"dia, 14"h, 2012, photo: Bob Jew

Founded in 2006, Mercury 20 is a contemporary art gallery established, supported and operated by East Bay artists. Mercury 20 maintains a venue for 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, TERRYL DUNN, P.K. FRIZZELL, ELI GEISER, PETER HONIG, MAYA KABAT, KATHLEEN KING, LEAH MARKOS, MARY V. MARSH, JILL MCLENNAN, JODY MEDICH, DAVE MEEKER, CHARLIE MILGRIM,  PAUL MUELLER, MARY CURTIS RATCLIFF, JULIANNE STERLING, KERRY VANDER MEER, JOAN WEISS

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Chandra Cerrito Contemporary is pleased to announce Super Optic – paintings and sculpture by Brian Caraway and David Allan Peters. The act of seeing can be both delightful and mentally challenging. Upon close observation, what first appears as one thing may reveal itself as another. Vision becomes active interaction. The works of Brian Caraway and David Allan Peters embody perceptual subtlety and meticulous detail that invite fully engaged viewing.

In Super Optic, Oakland-based artist Brian Caraway presents reductivist paintings and sculptures that incorporate line, pattern and the reverberation of color creating “a dance between the eye and brain.”1 Caraway’s work mines geometric abstraction from the 1950’s and ‘60’s, including Hard-edge Painting (as in Karl Benjamin), Op Art (Bridget Riley) and Minimalist painting (Frank Stella), all of which were indebted to the pioneering color studies of Bauhaus-influenced Josef Albers. Caraway, along with other artists working in these genres, is fascinated by the phenomenon of seeing. In particular, his work explores illusory depth created through morphing patterns and how specific relationships between colors can influence their very appearance. Caraway introduces a contemporary freedom of materials--combining acrylic paint with vinyl, ink and other drawing materials, and working in an open-ended range of media including painting, printmaking, video and sculpture.

Los Angeles artist David Allan Peters works primarily in painting but has recently produced ink collages and sculptures, all of which are featured in Super Optic. While Caraway’s work may evoke that of Karl Benjamin, Peters actually studied with Benjamin at Claremont Graduate University, where he also worked with Light and Space artist James Turrell. Both geometric abstraction and Minimalism have influenced Peters’ aesthetic. Despite their painstaking process, his works are based on simple abstract forms. Their surface complexity encourages viewers to move around his paintings and sculptures in order to visually comprehend them. Stratified paintings are comprised of dozens of colorful layers of acrylic paint, the build-up of which is visible from the sides. Front surfaces are generally one of two directions— smooth monochromatic fields with colorful “craters” where the artist carved through the upper layers, or an all-over chipped surface of hundreds or thousands of tiny gouges. Removing material to reveal under- layers of color recalls the sanded-through painted surfaces of Ken Price’s ceramic sculptures. Peters, however, is working with paint layers not as coating, but as construction. While his paintings cross into the realm of sculpture, Peters’ wall and tabletop sculptures are made with the detritus of his paintings, which he chops into cubes and adheres together into colorfully striped, crystal-like forms. Sometimes compared to geological strata, Millefiore glass or ribbon candy, Peters’ accretive use of acrylic paint is evident in the work’s final appearance. In this day of mechanical and computer-aided tools, however, such industrious handwork is not assumed on first glance and is astonishing once realized.

About the Artists

Brian Caraway lives and works in Oakland, CA. He received his BA in painting and printmaking at San Francisco State University in 2000 and his MFA from Mills College in Oakland in 2009. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Brooklyn, NY, Portland, OR and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including CREAM from the top at Richmond Art Center in 2009, a two-person exhibition at SF Arts Commission Gallery in 2004 and a solo exhibition at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral in 2010. This is Caraway’s third exhibition at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary.

Raised in the Bay Area and currently residing in Los Angeles, David Allan Peters received his BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1997 and MFA at Claremont Graduate University in 2000. His work has been exhibited internationally since 1999, including in Italy, New York, Atlanta, Washington State, and throughout California. His work will be featured at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA in 2013. This is Peters’ third exhibition at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary and his tenth exhibition curated by Chandra Cerrito.

About Chandra Cerrito Contemporary

Established in 2007 as a curatorial project space, Chandra Cerrito Contemporary features exhibitions and site-specific installations that highlight exceptional regional and national artists, with an emphasis on conceptual strength, refined craftsmanship, contemporary vision and art historical relevance.

Two feminist artists join the gallery to examine the realities of life. Conceptual works with paper and silk by JoyceAiken prepare for finality, following through in a celebration of what has been.

Sculptures with books by Vita Wells help us to see through the complexities of perception. Her objects illuminate "our subjective investment" in perception.

Gallery hours: First Fridays 6-9pm, Saturdays 1-5pm

Oakopolis Creativity Center 447 25th Street, Oakland, CA 94612