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Isis Hockenos, MIdway Gallery resident artist and curator of RHIZOSPHERE, discusses the upcoming exhibition which spotlights the creative legacy, both past and future, of West Marin.

Self-described as a “sensitive, curious, pessimist” multimedia artist, James Shefik, constructs installations with the intent to confront viewers with harsh realities culled from contemporary society. 

Luminary, a one-night event spotlighting the innovative unification of art, performance, music and technology, will occur on March 18th from 7pm to 2am at The Midway. In this post Future Fires’ founder, Clark Suprynowicz, and The Midway Gallery’s art director and curator, Kelsey Marie Issel, discuss the vision behind Luminary.

Watercolorist Christine Aria creates delicate figurative compositions that seem to rest right on the surface of the paper. Originally an oil painter, this artist picked up watercolor as a temporary fix to compensate for time and ease of shipping while completing an out-of-state residency. Years later, Christine continues to create ethereal watercolor compositions while searching for ways to push the boundaries of her medium.

Isis Hockenos creates vividly colored, abstract figure paintings. Her stunning compositions spotlight moments of everyday life and elevate them to marvelous occasions. The subject of her art pieces emerge from subconscious reactions to events in her personal life. These introspective visual dialogues then manifest beyond her and culminate in powerful reflections on societal expectations.

“Tour to Terrain” winds down with our final blog post on Elisa’s “vanventure” across several states. 

As part of the Midway Gallery’s exhibition, Terrain: navigating landscapes, Elisa will be showing the three paintings she made on the road, accompanied by her sketchbooks and sound recordings as an audio-visual installation.

“I imagine people putting on these headphone and only hearing these clips while looking through the book to will help them understand what I was experiencing while making the work they are seeing,” Elisa writes.

Alexa Eisner has a background in social rebellion through dance in which art interrupts the redundancy of public spaces. For the opening reception of Terrain: navigating landscapes, she will be synthesizing dance and paint in a performance that will challenge traditional concepts of what “landscape” is and provoke viewers to consider the environments traversed outside of the physical and external. 

 

Working out of his San Francisco studio on the outer edges of the city’s Mission district, Mark Garrett transforms neglected maps picked up at flea markets into intricately cut, mixed-media pieces that read like geographic oil-spills.

Mark’s intriguing deconstructed maps draw viewers in with an air of familiarity while simultaneously displacing them. The nature of the medium stirs an innate need to orient oneself by searching for clues in what remains visible: a body of water here, a cluster of mountain ranges there, and on occasion, a partial text label still visible.

“The thing I love about working abstractly is that you’re really forcing people to sort of tap into stuff that they think they’re seeing, but they’re not really sure they’re seeing,” Mark adds.

* Featured photo provided by the artist *

For Terrain James is presenting a series he refers to as “process landscapes,” in which the act of creation is the focus of his large, collaged compositions. For these pieces James uses his 1952 Heidelberg Windmill to venture into solidly abstract territory and touch upon the conceptual.

James’ new, reductive direction in his “process landscapes” is heavily reminiscent of the Process Art movement of the 60s and 70s which has been expressed in several mediums but has yet to be seen in printmaking. In employing monoprints and allowing mishaps like the ink running low, misprints, and other “defects” to remain a part of the final form, James effectively exposes what happens behind the closed doors of a printmaking shop when creating a piece of fine art.