Gallery Route One exhibitions: Bruce Mitchell, Earth/Unearth, Diana Marto

Bruce Mitchell: From a Language of Forms

Earth/Unearth, Art Practice and Ecological Inquiry, Curated by Patti Trimble

Diana Marto: A Stone is Singing, Canto XXVIII

Friday, December 28th through Sunday, February 3rd

Opening Reception: Saturday, December 29th, 3 – 5 PM, Artist Talks, 2:30 – 3 pm

Performances by Diana Marto: Saturday, December 29th 3pm, 

Saturday, January 12 and Sunday, January, 13 from 2:30 - 4:10 pm. by appointment

Earth/Unearth Illustrated panel presentation and Artists Talks: Sunday, January 20th, 3pm. Artist in the exhibition will speak; audience invited to participate.

Center Gallery

Bruce Mitchell: From a Language of Forms

Mitchell began his career at the age of 19 as Inverness sculptor J.B. Blunk’s first apprentice in 1969. The carving techniques he learned from Blunk formed the basis of Mitchell’s own work that included sculptural vessels and other objects. While attending Laney College in Oakland and UC Santa Barbara, Mitchell studied painting, ceramics and photography, subjects that are deeply imbedded in the world of form and would become key elements in the development of his aesthetic approach to working with wood.Mitchell’s primary focus is to visualize an intrinsic shape within the material that suggests an idea or a starting point from which to explore. Mitchell’s work can be found in numerous private and public collections including the Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA; The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Project Space

Earth/Unearth, Art Practice and Ecological Inquiry Curated by Patti Trimble

Earth/Unearth, Art Practice and Environmental Inquiry is the most recent exhibition in Gallery Route One’s With the Earthseries. The exhibition presents paintings by Nancy Bertelsen, Toni Littlejohn, Stephanie Sanchez, and Peter Whitehead; prints by Shane Weare; and drawings by Sally Weare. Images and short texts invite viewers to look at parallels between the visual thinking of artists and several themes of eco-philosophy.

Curator Patti Trimble is a Petaluma poet and painter who writes for the S.F. Ethnic Dance Festival and teaches writing and art history in the Bay Area. Her current project is a book on American post-war painting and its relevance for today.

Patti writes: Our global environmental crisis is constantly on my mind, so anything I do feels multilayered. To think and write, to make art, all sorts of ideas need to talk with one another. Recently, in the worlds of art, anthropology, and environmentalism, I’ve found some surprising (or maybe not surprising at all) parallels in thinking. These are signs of our collective long-term concern about the planet. Across the disciplines, writing, artwork, and art practices express anxieties and insights about nature and technology; about humans as unstoppable makers; about human as creatures merged with our tools, our objects, and our landscapes. The question in all these disciplines is also similar: What better language can we find to talk about our experience? What conversation will take us forward? What interests me is the kinds of things visual art can express, and how visual art “thinks” about the merged human/nature and human/landscape. Art practice can lead to experiences of syntheses, simultaneous presences, hybrid landscapes, overlapping perspectives. A visual image is often a layered and complex thought-in-material, carrying us outside of what we call “rational thought” to more complex understandings. The poetic image is a “thing in itself,” it resonates: it shares understanding, and doesn’t explain.

I created this exhibit to essentially see some of these ideas in the same room, to push the conversation into local time and place, and invite viewers to join a conversation. 

Sunday, January 20th, 3pm: Where did we come from. What are we. Where are we going. An illustrated panel presentation related to the exhibit Earth/Unearth: Art Practice as Ecological Inquiry. Artists in the exhibit will speak on their studio practices and curator/writer Patti Trimble will talk about the inspiration and background for the exhibit. After the panel, audience members are invited to join the conversation. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS: Nancy Bertelsen, Toni Littlejohn, Stephanie Sanchez, Sally Weare, Shane Weare, Peter Whitehead

Nancy Bertelsen— for decades a resident of the Inverness Ridge, where vegetation and animal life is entwined with the human: (About painting) “I feel like an event took place and I was a participant and so was the paint and also the world: the painting is a collaboration, the result of that engagement.”

Toni Littlejohn—Point Reyes mixed media artist, art instructor, founding member of Gallery Route One, an artist who likes to swim in Tomales Bay and into the sky: “. . . painting practice allows for some feelings that don’t yet have words to emerge from my unknown murk into the light of day. Working with paint is to work with the earth. . .”

Stephanie Sanchez— Petaluma painter, teaching art at Santa Rosa Junior College, painting landscapes as they are, natural and transformed by humanity. The Florida floodland paintings (in the show) are: “quicker, less refined, so as to catch the mood of what I see . . . my choices of what to paint come from some inner conviction that I am seeing my sense of self displayed or projected in landscape.”

Sally Weare—Bay Area artist has work in public and private collections. She taught art at S.F. State and Berkeley City College. After losing most of her work in the Santa Rosa fires, Sally exhibits her newest series of drawings:“I’m still excited to find out what’s in my head without worrying about it. I start with agesture, just black ink, paper and my hand: me as witness, thief, sarcastic outlier, comic.”

Shane Weare—moved to the US from England and was a longtime professor of printmaking: at UC Santa Barbara, and Sonoma State University: “My work is about making marks to make sense of this strange World that I was born into. . . Usually one image follows another and I let myself swim amongst them and tryand knit them into a coherent whole.”

Peter Whitehead, British-born musician, instrument builder, and visual artist creates large- format journals of found materials and painting as source material for his projects.“I’m trying to get to the place where I don’t know where it is, but when I get there, and It’s resolved, I know it.”

Annex

Diana Marto: A Stone is Singing, Canto XXVIII,Vocal and Calligraphic Environment                                                                                                               In A Stone is Singing, Canto XXVIII, viewers will enter into an environment of recorded songs sung from sumi brush painted words on paper, inspired by a recent pilgrimage to Japan. Marto writes: “I am tsunamied by personal and global disarray . . . The act of painting, the act of singing become healings. Approaching a sheet of empty paper on my studio floor, dipping my brushes in ink and emptying my mind, it is as if the words paint themselves bringing forth their own intrinsic meanings.”

Marto’s passion for paper was ignited while living in Japan and Hong Kong in the late seventies to mid-eighties, where she began her Canto Series, an epic spirit play with paper and dance. Her firstCantowas created in response to the Hong Kong Housing Authority bashing in her studio with sledgehammers and crowbars in 1982.

This year she presented her first opera which took place along sidewalks and inside narrow windows in ProArts Gallery, Oakland. The libretto consisted of the sounds paper makes when it tears, rips, crumbles, along with words sung from her window installation of sumi brush paintings.                               She is a member of Terry Sendgraff’s Improvisation Performance group and studies voice with Ann Moss. Marto’s studio is in Emeryville.  

Diana will be presenting 3 performances during this exhibition:Saturday, December 29that 3pm (At the beginning of the Opening Reception)         Saturday, January 12 and Sunday, January, 13 from 2:30 - 4:10 pm.  Four people at 20 minute intervals will be ushered into the sound bath to experience her song-cycles with additional live sonic elements. Please contact the gallery to reserve your space.  415-663-1347 By donation.    

brucemitchellstudios.com

https://pattitrimble.com/

http://www.dianamarto.com/

Gallery Route One is open 11 AM – 5 PM every day except Tuesday. 

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