Gallery Route One Exhibitions: Geraldine LiaBraaten, Xander Weaver-Scull and Marie Luise Klotz, \,and Suzanne Parker

Geraldine LiaBraaten: VISUAL POETRY: words into images, Photography
Xander Weaver-Scull and Marie Luise Klotz, Disappearing Act: our role in species extinction,
Suzanne Parker: New Work: Painted Photographs

May 9 – June 15, 2014
Reception: Sunday, May 11, 2014 from 3-5 PM

Salon Sunday June 15, 2014, 4 to 5 PM
Geraldine LiaBraaten : VISUAL POETRY: Words into Images
Photography inspired by Literature: I have always liked the idea of words becoming images, since the mind's eye flashes a picture when we hear words spoken or see them on the page.  Inspiration for this exhibition came from listening to Jane Hirshfield and Kay Ryan read
their poetry.
Disappearing Act: Xander Weaver - Scull and Marie Luise Klotz

Two artists whose work "speaks" for endangered and threatened species, reminding us that we are all bound together within the web of life on earth.
Suzanne Parker: New Work

I am using color photographs and contact sheets, made while I was a professional photographer, as my canvas. The process of painting on these photographs re-engages me with that external world.

Gallery Route One Exhibition: “And then you don’t miss anything”

Gallery Route One (GRO) in Point Reyes Station presents an exhibition of the works of four artists. A reception will be held on Sunday, May 11, 2014, from 3:00-5:00 pm and the exhibition continues through June 15, 2014.

“Shoot in a hurry and analyze at leisure,” Geraldine LiaBraaten says, “and then you don’t miss anything.”  LiaBraaten’s body of work has brought the overlooked, the fragmented, the light and shadow, the diagonal line, the thing-we-pass-by into view and asks us to stop and look before we miss anything. Look again. By closing in on an object, LiaBraaten finds a pattern; by closing in on a pattern, she finds that special, spare beauty that resonates with us long after we have seen her photographs.

LiaBraaten says that “I take the picture that I like; there’s rarely a need to change anything in the pictures that I finally select .... no special effects, no color or lighting changes.” Three hundred photos may yield one or two that preserve the effect she is after, but then the artist leaves the work untouched. “I never think, ‘this would be better if it were blue.’”

For this show, “Visual Poetry: Words into Images,” LiaBraaten’s photographs engage with poetry for the first time. She hopes this new linguistic inspiration will “make a connection, through comparison, for the viewer, where the eye enters into the language-part of the brain” because then, she says, the photograph is “no longer a straight shot.”  One picture began as a snapshot of the shadows created by venetian blinds cast onto examining-table paper. The original title was “Wrinkles,” because of the creases in the paper, but then the diagonals, close-to, began to feel more like waves, or “Ripples,” once LiaBraaten re-read a poem by Robinson Jeffers. The lines, from “The Place for No Story,” discuss the wilds of the California coast, Jeffers’ respite: “The old ocean at the land’s foot, the vast/ Gray extension beyond the long white violence.” LiaBraaten, through her lens, through Jeffers’ lens, lets us into that shared landscape, a way to see and appreciate seeing for its own sake. LiaBraaten says that “things are not necessarily how they appear... my intent is to make the viewer wonder what this is.”  The viewer looks at each of her images, at each poetic interaction, and wonders. Seeing into this pursuit of art, out of these artists’ passion, we cannot miss anything.

use with “Ripples” photo

The Project Space/With the Earth gallery exhibition, “Disappearing Act: Our Role in Species Extinction” showcases two artists whose work differs in material and approach, but who are nevertheless motivated by a common passion to rescue our environment. Marie-Luise Klotz became intrigued by Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Klotz says that “over the last eight years, large quantities of bee colonies suddenly started dying under mysterious circumstances.” Honeybees pollinate many Central California crops; every year, 900,000 hives are transported here to almond growers alone. Klotz found an observation by Albert Einstein: “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live,” and she began to focus her art on documentation and metaphor, to picture -- for all of us --  the urgency of the threat. One set of images, the artist’s photographs, document small-scale beekeepers in Marin County and Montana. “I want to portray people working with bees in a helpful way, and also in a questionable way .... the line blurs,” she says, and “it is “left for the viewer to judge.”  Klotz’s second series, the stunning “Goldwert” series, portrays small, commonly found objects like almonds, stalks of broccoli, raspberries, female honeybees and seeds, each realized ignoring natural differences in size (the almond the same dimensions as the honey bee) and all covered in gold and presented against a black background. This treatment -- a wide range of natural beings removed from context, changed in size, and treated like jewels -- might force the viewer to wish them back into their own environments and into safety. Klotz tells us that “I want to imply that something so seemingly mundane as the honeybee is something that we should value as much as gold (gold being the ultimate measure for value).”

Xander Weaver-Scull (who shares the With the Earth/Project Space with Marie-Luise Klotz) describes himself as a "social/environmental/climate justice awareness artist."  For his exhibition in Gallery Route One, this artist is concentrating on environmental art, picturing threatened creatures through arresting means. Weaver-Scull begins by drawing freehand images with progressively darker shades of markers on thin acetate, and then cuts out shapes with an x-acto knife.  The resulting stencils are printed onto paper and spray-painted (or, more recently, hand-painted in watercolor or ink).  When he first experimented with this method, Weaver-Scull says, “I noticed that stencils were primarily used for street art and was curious how they could be implemented in (more formal) book arts.”  His stencils bridge this gap, offering him “endless flexibility.” He has placed his stencils on the beach and sprayed through the stencils onto the sand, photographing the images of  turtles and lizards as the water evaporated and the figures disappeared. One of Weaver-Scull’s works at Gallery Route One is a 30-foot accordion book, presented in a specially-built platform, portraying the endangered reptiles, mammals and amphibians of his home state. Weaver-Scull’s website quotes Buckminster Fuller on our common fate: “It has to be everybody or nobody." We can look at an inspiring page from his children’s book, a boldly-colored Arctic Peregrine Falcon heading into an unclear future, and agree.

Suzanne Parker’s Annex exhibition, “New Work: Painted Photographs” returns the artist to her beginnings as a professional photographer. She was inspired to revisit this time both by the light permeating the images she shot and by seeing that the photographs “preserved a piece of time.” Could she do the same thing in painting?  Her most recent body of work seemed, by contrast, dark and brooding, so Parker aimed for a completely new vision. She began to use the light in the photographs as a guide into the paintings. Parker takes time, she says, deciding “how much to leave of the original photograph." A conversation would ensue between the photograph and the painting.” Sometimes all that remains of the photograph is the light, the light that pulls Parker up to the surface. The painted photograph titled “When You Are Gone” shows just enough of a still life: sharp-angled deep blue wall, bottles, a vase, objects on a counter. Is this a vanity table? A mirror behind a bar? And, then, over the surface, bits of light are scattered: greens, soft yellows and pinks, that give the work the softened look and light and shadow of a vintage photograph. What we sometimes miss in digital photography is the characteristic of time passing, the artist’s hand, the sitter’s patience, that we could see in the earliest photographs: a family portrait, where everyone was able to sit still except the four-year-old, who turns her head, and we see that movement. Parker’s painted photographs engage us in both the more objective, external world of photography, as well as the more private, internal world of painting.

 use with “When You Are Gone” photo or Strangers No More