Gallery hours: Weds-Sat 1-7 pm
Sun 1-5 pm and by appointment
Gallery onetwentyeight is pleased to present Forms and Structures
with artists: Dace Lucia Kidd, Sarah Katz, Amy C. Storey, and Joy Walker
Curated by Marina Goldena from Riga, Latvia. The show represents four women artists with different backgrounds, working with different materials and in different styles and yet there is a common thread to each of their works. There is also a sincerity to each artist's story; splashes of emotions with Amy C. Storey, freedom of movement and energy with Joy Walker, sensitivity and kindness in Sarah Katz's ceramic sculpture and fragility and shyness of Dace Lucia Kidd paper sculpture. The show marries different forms, structures, color, and the dichotomy of bright strong colors of big work against small fragile and sensitive ceramic and paper sculpture.
Amy C Storey prefers to work unconsciously, letting the image emerge through process. Finding an image is different from deliberately setting out to create an image, and in this sense her work is complete exploration. Engagement with materials, human gesture, chance and intention, and the interaction of self and nonself in the creative process through time, all interest and inform her practice. When confronted with something meaningful or poetic while working, it is the unconscious responding to imagery. By means of the imagination, an aspect of our experience is translated into poetic imagery and then recognized by the senses, which in turn affects our consciousness. If the painting is successful, it becomes a world in and of itself that has the power to alter how we think and feel by way of sensation. It becomes another world for us to encounter.
Joy Walker’s painting occupies the space between landscape and abstraction. Sea stacks, a collection of surf-rounded rocks, driftwood, fantastic tree forms in the old-growth forest, all delineate curved edges which expose and transform much as the afterwash of waves on a beach become a constantly evolving panorama of interacting arcs. The captured movement is accentuated with bold colors, highlighting aspects of the captured movement in much the same way that color is applied to NASA photography, electron microscopy or Kirlian photography to elucidate significant relationships in those images. “An implied continuation of a field is a constant in Walker's oeuvre, along with an emotive display of color held in check by powerfully graphic shapes, whether geometric or organic." Janet Koplos in Art in America, September 1995.
Sarah Katz likes to work with her hands and tell stories. Her work is both figurative and literary, in the sense of telling a story. She makes reference to sculptural traditions that can be traced back to the small figurative sculptures made by Meissen, Hummel, and other iconic images drawn from cartoons and heroic sculpture, but on a smaller scale. The raw clay shaped into these figures, sometimes combined with other materials, and the stories they tell, create different layers of meaning and interpretation, which speaks to who we are to each other and to ourselves. “When I make something, I always ask, ‘What is the nature of this object?’ I can’t control all of the metaphors, but I think it’s important to visit them. The raw clay shaped into these figures, sometimes combined with other materials, and the stories they tell, create different layers of meaning and interpretation, which speaks to who we are to each other and to ourselves.”
Dace Lucia Kidd uses her relationship to art history, notably modernism, as a filter through which she perceives new compositions. Using a three dimensional surface layered with complex two dimensional images she establishes unique relationships between artist, viewer and object. She wants to communicate a conviction that reminds us, in the age of visual trickery, direct experience still holds surprises and offers fresh insights.
