219 Gray Avenue, in Santa Barbara's Funk Zone
Presents
Accession
with
Marthe Aponte, Diane Silver, Kerrie Smith
Curator, Andi Campognone, Director at MOAH, Lancaster, CA
Opening Saturday, May 15th, 4 to 8pm
Exhibit runs through June 13, 2021
The gallery is currently open Thursday and Sunday, 1-4
Friday and Saturdays, 12 to 6
through June 30.Ruth@GraySpaceArt.com, or text/call 805 689-0858.
Gallery abides by current Covid protocols for masks and distancing.
This exhibition brings together the work of three women who enact existential and esoteric phenomena in their abstractionist work. By performing rigorous, even ritualistic interactions with their chosen mediums, Silver, Smith and Aponte each highlight the primacy of the hand of the artist in making visible the unseen forces and structures that make up the universe. Deconstructing motifs of pattern and decoration, gesture and abstraction, each of them navigates a balance of intention and intuition, across mixed media painting, muscular yet vulnerable abstract sculpture, and delicately obsessive piercing. Their assembly is imbued with a rich universe of symbols and history, as well as stencils, stamps and punctures, swirls and eddies and wounded surfaces, things layered and knotted, things kneaded and needled.
Kerrie Smith builds her abstract compositions with multiple layers of pattern, color, and an array of techniques and tools, as she seeks a balance between feral nature and its geometrical armature. With a mindful intention to capture not only the grandeur but also the unpredictability and potential for crisis in our environment, Smith’s work challenges conventions of organic and artificial beauty. Distilling a sense of place from encounters with the natural and industrial worlds -- and especially their intersections -- Smith evokes paradoxical, even contradictory emotions at the same time. Optimism and expansiveness, threat and distress, symmetry and entropy, creation and destruction.
Andi Campognone
“Kerrie Smith builds her abstract compositions with multiple layers of pattern, color, and an array of techniques and tools, as she seeks a balance between feral nature and its geometrical armature. With a mindful intention to capture not only the grandeur but also the unpredictability and potential for crisis in our environment, Smith’s work challenges conventions of organic and artificial beauty. Distilling a sense of place from encounters with the natural and industrial worlds — and especially their intersections — Smith evokes paradoxical, even contradictory emotions at the same time. Optimism and expansiveness, threat and distress, symmetry and entropy, creation and destruction.”