Dos Amigo Chinos
Exhibition Dates: August 17 to September 24, 2009
Reception: Thursday, August 27, 5pm-8pm
Oliverio Quezada was born into an immigrant Guatemalan family in 1960. He grew up in Los Angeles and began his college studies in Architecture. After taking several ceramics classes at College of the Redwoods in Eureka, he was hooked. He continued his studies in ceramics at Cal State University Long Beach and graduated in 1985 with a BFA and an MFA from San Jose State University in 1990.
Oliverio has exhibited his artwork for over 20 years and has held numerous teaching positions throughout the Bay Area.
He has been the head of the Ceramics Program at City College of San Francisco, Fort Mason for 23 years.
Don Santos began as a production potter while in high school in the early 1970s. He received his BA from CSU Chico and MFA from San Jose State University, specializing in glaze chemistry and ceramic mixed-media sculpture. He has held teaching positions throughout the state of California and has taught workshops at San Antonio Art Institute, Mills College, California College of Arts, San Jose State and many other venues in California. He has now been a professor of ceramics at City College of San Francisco for over a dozen years and works out of his studio in Berkeley, CA.
Don states:
Having been a potter, I now make ceramic elements to use as sculptural components. Recently I have switched back to using porcelain in my constructionist wall sculptures, pottery and my sabbatical project. Smooth, white and dense, the porcelain makes the glazes sing. I enjoy using traditional Chinese glazes in a contemporary artistic manor.
My recent sabbatical project is to recreate the Sung dynasty mold process that produces multiple bowls with carved decoration on the interiors. I have also created a pallet of Celadon glazes that are inspired by glazes of the period in China and Thailand.
In my sculptural work the transition points between contrasting environments and are my focus. Clay lends itself to the conceptual and visual expressions of house and topography. The landscape and geology that surrounds us and it’s relationship to our architectural structures are what tends to be the motor behind my sculpture. I find myself using the house form, which is filled with symbolic references juxtaposed with the wilderness and industrial environments that I find myself attracted to.
Elsa Marley
Blue Ice: Greenland Summer 2009
Exhibition Dates: October 5 to October 29, 2009
Reception: Wednesday, October 7, 5pm - 8pm
Blue Ice: Greenland Summer 2009 is part one of a two part project that considers the conjunction of Art and Geology. Blue Ice explores the art of Nature's cycles preserved and exposed in some of Earth's oldest and youngest rocks. West Greenland preserves the earliest record of continents colliding, building mountains and decaying. The Himalayan Mountains of Tibet, where India is colliding with Asia, are that same process unfolding today. Greenland today is the rock buried underneath the Himalayan range. Essentially what is preserved above in Greenland lies below Tibet and vise- verse.
Artist Elsa Marley, working in association with Geologist William Glassley,
has just returned from a summer painting trip to Ilulissat, Greenland. The area, 69.13o north is on Disko Bay and lies above the Artic Circle. The Ilulissat Icefiord is famous for calving a significant amount of Greenland's icebergs into Disko Bay and eventually the Labrador Sea, Davies Straight, and on down to the Atlantic. This exhibition brings to light the beauty and the problems of rapidly melting ice that will soon submerge much of the early record of the earth that is now preserved in Greenland, and which effects our global and climate change now.
"Throne Handicapped", Clay
"Carved Vase", Celadon Glazed Porcelain,
7" tall
Monique Castiaux, Aliona Kazakova, Summer Shannon, and Alex Styrsky
Inclusions: Four Painters
Exhibition Dates: November 9 to December 10, 2009
Reception: November 11, Wednesday, 5pm-8pm
Curator’s Statement:
[inclusion: in Mineralogy, any foreign matter, whether solid or liquid, enclosed within the mass or a mineral or crystal.]
The concept applies to painting as well, an unexpected or untraditional physical element included in a painting along with paint and canvas. As clearly different in style and content as the works are, they are linked by inclusions as varied as fins, nails, taffeta and glitter. These advanced-level artists are linked also by a desire and a curiosity to push painting in more personal and contemporary directions.
Glen Moriwaki, Art Faculty
Artists’ Statements:
Monique Castiaux
As an artist, I see myself as a tight rope walker treading lightly, finding my way on that thin edge between the beautiful and the hideous, the future and the past, the gifts and the burdens of family and history.This new series speaks to the tension and elation between the coming of age and the leaving behind part of your past.
Aliona Kazakova
The recurring element in my current works is nails. They may be regular and square, antique and rusty, but mainly I use my own hand-forged square nails. These most mundane objects are extremely expressive because of their physicality and the profound associations reaching back into human history. The roughness, resilience and raw beauty of the hand-forged nails connect me with my background of growing up in the Soviet Siberia.
Alex Styrsky
I am interested in exploring ways through which abstraction can be given contemporary relevance.
Detail, Mulberry paper mounted on silk canvas
4'x4'
