Exhibitions

Shar Coulson's exhibition Rhythmic Reflections: Pursuit of Nature's Pulsing Heart distills the essence of the natural world through gestural abstraction, revealing core truths that resist categorization beyond her longstanding tripartite series title of Fauna, Flora, and Figure. Her paintings convey a profound physicality and texture while also establishing a dynamic range of contrast and color. With formal training in figurative realism, she perceives nature's underlying patterns in wonderfully surprising ways. She often works from accumulated memories and incorporates earlier plein-air experiments.

Blend In: Between the Lines is a continuation of my Blend In series, reflecting on experiences with social anxiety. This show focuses more on the feeling of being and not being somewhere at the same time. I encounter this often in social settings and it’s something I can’t quite overcome. Each piece in the exhibition touches on this theme in its own unique way. - Calvin Ma

VIEW COLLECTION

Seasoned stone sculptor Will Robinson’s nuanced sensibilities with his material have become highly instinctual throughout the three decades his career has spanned. Achieving warmth and softness with unforgiving stone, Robinson breathes life into each piece, revealing the innate qualities of the natural medium he works with. His sculptures are as much about discovery as they are reflections of the artist’s intuition.

Cameron Anne Mason came to fiber art through another passion; performance and installation art. She has since worked in a variety of textile processes, from dyeing techniques to surface treatments and intricate stitching. Largely inspired by nature, Mason utilizes nearby plants in her work, either in dyeing or as forms for printing processes. Often mistaken for paintings from afar, Mason’s textile sculptures are lushly detailed and attractively tactile.

Steven Nederveen’s artwork has long been grounded in the artist’s meditation practice and influenced by the calming effect of immersion in his favorite places. The artist creates oceanic coastlines, panoramic landscapes, and tree compositions using heightened colors and an almost magical, high contrast golden light. The world becomes a place of wonder and mystery as we recognize what is familiar and discover what we are invited to perceive.

The colorful curls and wisps of smoke in Carol Inez Charney’s newest series are sophisticated and elegant while being rich with metaphor. The series, Secondhand Smoke, highlights the dangers of cultural censorship, the limiting of individualism and artistic expression. Book burnings and the destruction of artwork have been an all too common practice in both modern and historic eras, public demonstrations meant to show the power of authoritarian governments. However, the pieces in Secondhand Smoke seem to remind us that such censorship can sneak in; can whisper and spread like rumors, creeping in around the edges, as smoke can.

Bratsa Bonifacho’s work has gone through a drastic range of articulations during his long career as a painter. Continuing to site some of his earliest memories of surviving World War II as inspiration, Bonifacho’s work for many years was a direct representation of his process of moving through trauma. The weight and darkness of his experiences was evident in content, style, and palette and exists now in striking contrast to his current work.

The second of four group exhibitions grounded by the elements, Elements: Fire opens at Foster/White Gallery on November 4, 2021. A wide range of interpretations, the artwork in this grouping includes explorations of the increasing frequency of forest fires and their implications, the raw violence of fire, and the beauty of a flame; we are reminded of water's power against an inferno, given images of death and rebirth, of natural cycles, and of the devastation left in a fire's wake. And, despite the impact of that devastation, many of us have deeply cherished memories attached to fire - it can represent gathering with loved ones, staring into embers beneath starry skies, learning to make a s'more for the first time, or warming cold hands after hours in the snow.