Heather Gaudio Fine Art is pleased to present Reflections on Light, a group exhibition featuring works by four female artists. The show opens January 25th and runs through March 8th, 2025.
Creating the visual discourse at the gallery will be paintings by Miya Ando, Pegan Brooke and Kathleen Jacobs alongside sculptures by Ann Gardner. These artists share a preoccupation with the nature of light and its ephemeral qualities. Fleeting aspects and impermanent moments are harnessed and captured into serene visual experiences intended to give the viewer pause and consider our relationship with nature. Each artist uses their specific medium and unique process to create beautifully contemplative and nuanced artworks that are sublime records of time, place and experiences. Including Miya Ando’s work in the exhibition is made possible with the generous collaboration of Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York City.
Miya Ando meticulously studies the sky, chronicling different times of day, location, weather and seasonal changes in her artworks. The artist’s practice is rooted in mono no aware, a concept from her Japanese heritage that refers to the awareness of impermanence and beauty, or a sensitivity to ephemera. Ando’s upbringing bridges the cultures and languages of two distinct worlds: the Redwood Forest of Northern California and a Buddhist temple in Japan. Her sculptures, paintings, drawings and installations reflect this cultural duality as well as the dialogue between the natural and the man-made. On view in the exhibition are sublime works that reflect her sensitivity to nature and passage of time. The images are sourced from photographs she takes and documents of a particular place and moment in the sky’s timeline. These images are then screen printed on metal sheets — the material chosen not only for its physical properties but also as a nod to the swordsmith trade of her forebearers. The artist layers her printing techniques with thin veils of ink and pigment mixed with urethane over the metallic surface. Some areas are left bare, allowing for the underlying sheen and color to assert itself, while a shift in tonality, luster and opacity render nuanced silvery clouds in the composition. For Ando, her creative process is a full immersion into her cultural background as well as an expression of the impermanence and human interdependence with nature. Ando’s works are in many important collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Nassau County Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Art; Luftmuseum Amberg, Germany, among others. Her exhibition roster includes the Noguchi Museum, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Ando was also commissioned to create an artwork for the historic The Glass House in New Canaan, CT.
Pegan Brooke’s paintings investigate light and its reflective qualities on water in all its forms – as a flowing river, a frozen lake, snow-capped mountain, and the like. For Brooke, the fleeting nature of light bouncing off these surfaces is filled with countless possibilities of subtle change. Locations also play an important part in her practice, for the light and experiences vary from Pont Aven in Brittany, France, to the Pacific Ocean near her studio in Bolinas and the San Francisco Bay area, to the Silver Creek in Idaho, to the Inland Seto Sea in Japan. Each region offers distinct light qualities and reflective experiences for the artist. Mixing micas into her pigments, Brooke’s abstract paintings offer an interplay between shimmer and flatness, luminosity and opaqueness. The soft brushstrokes arranged in linear patterns seem to appear and recede from the canvas, creating a symbiotic relationship between ambient light and the shifting position of the viewer. The artist’s palette with metallic sheens is reduced to whites, light and dark greys or warm ambers that underscore the elusive nature of the composition, reminiscent of evanescent moments in the light. The works in the exhibition were just featured in a solo show at the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, D.C. Brooke’s paintings have been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Oakland Museum; San Diego Museum; Des Moines Art Center and Museum; São Paulo Biennale and the Monterey Museum of Art in California. Her works are included in many prestigious private and public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; U.S. Embassies in Sri Lanka and Bolivia; Berkley Art Museum; University of Nebraska Art Museum; Bank of America International HQ; Charles R. Schwab and Steven Chase Collection, among others.
Kathleen Jacobs’ depictions of time, light, atmosphere and weather patterns are quite literal in that her process becomes a physical record of all. The artist wraps her linen canvases on the trunks of different arbor species, leaving them exposed to the elements over months or years. She returns to them periodically to apply layers of pigment and oil stick using frottage to trace the relief of the wood grains that act as support to the canvases. The linens absorb multi-layers of pigments hand-applied by the artist which get combined with Mother Nature’s patina, creating beautifully atmospheric compositions. When the weathered canvases are removed from the outdoors and taken into the artist’s studio, they continue to absorb pigments which are rubbed on the front and the back of the canvases. Once stretched, the canvases are re-oriented so that the bark markings run horizontally across the canvas, becoming reminiscent of cloud patterns or waves on bodies of water. Jacobs is also an acrobatic pilot, so it is no coincidence that her paintings share her views from the heights above and are titled after fixed navigation points in the sky. Jacobs has had a prolific career with numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Her works were installed at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts and have been extensively documented in film and written about. The artist lives and works in Massachusetts.
Seattle-based artist Ann Gardner is renowned for her investigations with one of the most ancient man-made materials: glass. As her primary medium, the properties of glass have allowed Gardner to explore her preoccupation with the perception of light and space, color, pattern, volume and other characteristics. Gardner hand-cuts large sheets of the colored and reflective material into tiny mosaics which are then arranged into large wall-mounted or free-standing sculptural structures. The artist is also known for creating hand-blown glass orbs with soft hues that can be presented as a single table-top form or arranged in clusters suspended from the ceiling. For Gardner, it is essential that artworks be in complete harmony with the environments they occupy. Light, vital to people and artworks, is often overlooked because as an element it is invisible to the naked eye. When it comes to glass, light becomes fundamental in highlighting key elements that are important to glassworks. The physical properties of glass combined with the ephemerality of light creates a dance between the two. Gardner’s decades-long career includes working on many site-specific installations that grace notable institutions including the Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in Norfolk, Virginia; County Operations Center in San Diego, California; the Bellevue Art Museum, Washington; and the Rosewood Abu Dabi Hotel, UAE, to name a few. Her work has been the subject of multiple exhibitions including at the Boise Art Museum, Idaho; Bellevue Arts Museum; Katonah Museum of Art, New York and at the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. Gardner’s works are in multiple important museum and private collections here and abroad.
Heather Gaudio Fine Art specializes in emerging and established artists, offering painting, works on paper, photography, and sculpture. The gallery provides a full range of art advisory services, from forming and maintaining a collection, to securing secondary market material, to assisting with framing and installation. The focus is on each individual client, selecting art that best serves his or her vision, space, and resources. The six exhibitions offered every year are designed to present important talent and provide artwork appealing to a broad range of interests. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday; 10:30am to 5:30pm; and by appointment.
