Exhibition: walking upstream
Location: South Bay Contemporary at The Loft Gallery, 401 South Mesa Street in San Pedro
Artists: Christine Weir, Clare Graham, Joan Robey, Susan Sironi, Tracey Weiss & Vincent Tomczyk
On View: November 1, 2018 – December 16, 2018
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 4, 2018, 2-5 PM
Never underestimate the power of force and irreverent, obsessive imagination. South Bay Contemporary is proud to present walking upstream, a group exhibition at The Loft Gallery in San Pedro that showcases six artists who defy traditional approaches to creating art. Unlike the grooves in a record that repeat the same refrain, these artists bump the needle to disrupt and surprise, walking upstream and pushing the boundaries of their media with rigorous innovation: they cut, mark, layer, repurpose, wire, redact and string together their creations through exhaustive and often playful transformation.
Disregarding convention, the resulting work feels alive with the self-assured conjuring of the hand and the power to engage second and third looks. walking upstream, co-curated by Monica Wyatt and David Lovejoy, features a deliberate and painstaking inversion of predictable processes, taking the viewer on a magical journey down a path of transformation and invention.
Curators’ Thoughts
“Our initial concept for this exhibition was to reference the phrase, ‘The more things change, the more they remain the same.’ But while selecting artists and visiting their studios, we were struck by the intensity of process in which all these mark-makers create. None takes the road well-traveled. Instead, the artists in walking upstream transform their materials through rigorous craftsmanship, vision and the devotion to an idea to which there is no benchmark.”—Monica Wyatt and David Lovejoy
About the Artists
Christine Weir’s graphite on clay panel work grew from a fear of flying which led to a fascination with the view from above. Using Google Earth, she scans the globe for river systems which she transforms into visual representations of her thoughts and emotions, her “interpretations of internal landscapes. Like our minds, waterways ebb and flow, change course, and are influenced by their environments. Flowing water can be like thoughts and actions that are deeply ingrained patterns, or newly created pathways. The old path is still there, under the surface, a permanent record of the time that has passed.”
For more on Christine Weir, please visit: www.christineweir.com and on Instagram @christineweirart.
Clare Graham describes himself as a craftsman, where “the journey is the object of making rather than the resolution. Each piece is part of a serial exploration of possibility and intended to become part of a larger cabinet of curiosities that is my studio environment.” Graham’s work enhances the original material into a second existence by “letting the material assume forms which organize and transform it.” The numbers and sequences within his work – whether pop tops from soda and beer cans or buttons by the millions – become organic by the nature of their assembly.
For more on Clare Graham, please visit: www.claregraham.com and on Instagram @sunraytarbaby.
Joan Robey’s creative process begins with seeing old materials in new ways. Her assemblage work demonstrates the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi in which the implicit sadness of discarded, imperfect objects is imbued with renewed purpose and life. She looks for surface and form, then combines elements to become metaphors for psychological situations. Her work balances between poetry and chaos, compositions of line that play with gravity. “My hope is that the viewer feels the dynamics/tension in viewing my pieces, as if coming upon an act of chaos in midstream.”
For more on Joan Robey, please visit: www.joanrobey.com.
Susan Sironi’s fascination with cutting into old books is a way to reengage with items that she feels have lost their usefulness and transform them. She starts by first scanning then planning what will be removed and what will remain from an intact book. Then, with a surgeon’s scapula and precision, her re-envisioned book sculptures become multicolored planets, interlacing grids, mounds of razor thin strips: “It’s a matter of seeing something in an old book that no one else does.”
For more on Susan Sironi, please visit: www.susansironi.com and on Instagram @susansironi.
Tracy Weiss’ installations originated as a way to elevate ceramics from misconstrued craft to Fine Art. “It started with ceramics acting like paintings and evolved into ceramics doing things that paintings can’t do. The minimal surface treatments on some of these ‘paintings’ allow them to be seen more as objects, taking the attention from the surface to the entire object and allowing the painting to be seen as sculpture.” Repetition plays a big part in Weiss’ work. “I’m often asked if my work is cast, and then, ‘Why not?’ For me, art is a joy to make as well as being slightly tortuous.”
For more on Tracy Weiss, please visit: www.tracyweissart.com and on Instagram @tracyweissart.
Vincent Tomczyk replicates commonplace objects out of paper and cardboard. “There is no class you can take to learn what I do, it’s all an experiment. I started to apply what I had learned in the packaging industry, from structural design and printing alike, then pushed forward past the perceived limitations of paper and cardboard.” By reconstructing objects into realistic paper sculptures, Tomczyk seeks to alter the context of viewing. “My work is not intended as a demonstration of skill, but to allow an emotional experience to unfold.”
For more on Vincent Tomczyk, please visit: www.vincenttomczyk.com and on Instagram @vincenttomczyk.
