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Homegrown
Renee Adams, Ariana Boussard-Reifel,
Shannon Conroy, Misako Inaoka,
Kristina Lewis, Amber Stucke
Curated by Renee Adams
May 1 – June 1, 2008
Opening Reception:
5-8pm
First Thursday, May 1, 2008
Homegrown is a gathering of biologically rooted works
by Renee Adams (Thorp, WA),
Ariana Boussard-Reifel (New York, NY), Shannon
Conroy (Seattle, WA), Misako Inaoka
(San Francisco, CA), Kristina Lewis (San Francisco,
CA), and Amber Stucke (Berkeley, CA). Extracting
and manipulating elements of nature, combining organic with
synthetic, each artist creates a distinctive, artificial reality.
The unclassifiable subjects within these drawings, sculptures,
and mixed media installations spread and creep into the microcosm
of the gallery space, inviting interaction and blurring the
artificial with the actual.
Renee Adams creates delicately detailed works
out of wood and polymer clay. Her imagined organisms convey
the typical human traits of vanity and vulnerability coupled
with the inherited qualities of illness and virility. Her works
become vacuous reflections of humanity, at once enticing and
offensive.
Focusing on accumulation and discard, the sculptural work of
Ariana Boussard-Reifel alludes to the body
as a vessel for both tangible and intangible elements. Using
core materials that are fragile and environmentally responsive,
her forms have a sense of defeat, executed through carved space
and impermanent materials, suggesting the temporality of existence.
Shannon Conroy's delicate, embroidered knots
on paper are slowly layered to create dense clusters. Referencing
the process of organic growth through the accumulation of texture
and pattern, her works reflect a history, an arrangement of
growth and decomposition that serves as a marker of time.
Interested in the boundary between what we call natural and
artificial, Misako Inaoka observes our physical
and social environment in detail to find hidden beauty and peculiarity-things
such as a cell phone antenna in the shape of a pine tree, birds
that are not native to the area, or moss growing in a crack
of cement sidewalk. Emphasizing these subtle details and exaggerating
their illogicality, she cultivates her own version of invented
creatures and forces the viewer to take a harder look at their
surroundings.
Kristina Lewis' work originates from an interest
in the relationship that people have to basic, utilitarian objects.
Wielded by hands in daily tasks, these objects become mere extensions
of human bodies, completely in the service of human desires.
In order to explore the possibility of these objects having
their own lives, her first operation is always to make them
useless, destroying their original function. With the resulting
components, she begins rebuilding, imagining that her materials
have their own bodies and are intent upon reorganizing in order
to extend or advance themselves, free of human controls.
Drawing upon conscious and unconscious relationships, Amber
Stucke invents a new language through metaphor using
biological forms, human anatomy and technology to communicate
a fantastical interconnection to everything around us. Through
unemotional drawings, her intention is to create an invented,
logical space and to open a socio-psychological dialogue with
the viewer, exploring the idea of human beings’ relationship
to everything and nothing at all.
www.arianaboussardreifel.com
www.amberstucke.com
www.kristinalewis.com
www.misakoinaoka.com
www.shannonconroy.com
May Hours: Noon-5pm Friday-Sunday,
or by appointment.
Next Exhibition:
Natalie Schmidt-Dotzauer
(more info)
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Composite of details from works in the exhibition
Download Press Release
in Word format
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