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Interiors/Exteriors:
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Fossils, wood, plaster and paint, by Tracy West |
Creating rectangles from concrete, plaster and wood, Tracy West explores the tactile and metaphorical properties of walls.
While readily symbolizing the concealment of emotion, West’s “walls” suggest stories modified through their retelling. With bumpy, weathered and reworked surfaces finished in various stains and metallic paints, narrative layers emerge as stories written and rewritten, becoming graceful compromises reached with weighty pasts.
While mortality is suggested through the walls’ similarity to unearthed of monuments or effaced tombstones, West’s walls can be less profoundly understood as witnesses to private narratives, the remnant inner casings of under funded prisons or obsessively redecorated homes. Tragedies and redemptions can faintly be traced in Tracy West’s telling, blank walls.
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Untitled, oil on canvas, by Vivian Prinsloo |
Vivian Prinsloo’s oil on canvas paintings contain a dissonant quality of pastoral yet ominous landscapes.
While Prinsloo exploits hidden connections and patterns in the form of tensely complex natural forms, this doesn’t account for the obscure, ominous narratives that her work frequently suggests in what should otherwise be warm, reassuring landscapes.
Her landscapes depict a place somewhere between natural harmony and subjective anxiety, capturing an ambiguous twilight world between reassurance and warning to bridge exterior and interior worlds.
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Dreaming in the Hog Trough, oil on canvas, by Scott Courtenay-Smith |
Cityscape painter Scott Courtenay-Smith draws upon Oakland scenes as sources to depict the familiar in a surreal, almost apocalyptic manner.
Bowed light posts skew perspective, blue skies fold upon their normally even blue dome, tops of trees fade smokily into the horizon and streetlights’ fixtures seeming burn on fire rather than glow evenly from their center. At the same time, Courtenay-Smith combines realistic architectural elements with shadowy, displaced figures to suggest alert perceptions that accompany life in city streets.
This show runs through September 3rd, 2007.
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