Group Exhibition: Lifeforce
Amelia Briggs, Maja Dlugolecki, Kate Greenberg, Sahra Jajarmikhayat & Utharaa L Zacharias of Soft Geometry
Dates: March 4 - 25, 2023
Reception: Saturday, March 4 | 4 - 7 PM
Glass Rice is proud to present Lifeforce, our annual female-identifying group show featuring sculpture, painting, and one-of-a-kind furniture. This exhibition is not only a celebration of female visionaries, but also highlights the special and impactful nature of the objects we choose to dwell amongst.
Objects carefully placed throughout the gallery form spatial vignettes - each “scene” feeding from one to the next. Lifeforce calls attention to the energy objects emanate. As creative extensions, the works in this show are infused with the “life-force” of each artist - embedded with their individual ideas, unique forms of expression, and identities. Sustainability, humor, softness, ephemerality, regeneration, and challenging old schools of thought make up only a fraction of what these pieces convey.
Despite being seemingly inanimate, the presence and influence objects can have on our spaces, both physical and mental, are profound.
Amelia Briggs
Amelia Briggs is a multidisciplinary artist working between fiber, painting and installation. Driven by questions regarding the link between childhood and identity, Briggs constructs objects and images that operate as whimsical characters from an unknown, animated universe. Comprised of satin, fiber, latex and oil, puffy shapes take on shiny, colorful surfaces that appear as though they could float. Pliable, each subverts notions of worth and humor while generating an abstract sense of familiarity and longing. Like the mystical experience of adolescent play, Briggs seeks to conjure a surreal experience that sparks recognition — bringing us closer to the identities we cultivate for ourselves over time.
Maja Dlugolecki
Maja Dlugolecki (b. 1992) is a Polish-American painter and curator based in Los Angeles. With a background in design and music, her paintings draw from experiences and impressions in her own life through an abstract lens. Dlugolecki’s intuitive works feature layered washes and a variety of textures, creating movement and emotion through bold pigments. With an ever evolving palette and method, Dlugolecki enjoys experimenting and challenging new ways of expression through technique. each piece reflects a specific personal moment in time. In lieu of a daily journal, Dlugolecki assigns past recorded thoughts to her titles. She feels this process best reflects the elusiveness of an ephemeral moment and the value of time when deepening the understanding of self.
Kate Greenberg
Kate Greenberg is a Furniture Designer and Maker based in Oakland, California. Her work challenges the standardized idea of domestic furniture, blurring the line between art and design. By using seemingly stark materials to create subtle and atmospheric pieces, Kate questions preconceived notions of what makes a space intimate and comfortable. Her work re-contextualizes motifs from the natural and built environment, reflecting back an obscured version of reality.
In 2021, Kate launched her own studio practice, formalizing her unique view of the world through a design lens. She combines typical and off-road methodologies to pay respects to the history of domestic furniture while challenging traditional functions. In 2022, Kate made her first appearance at Milan Design Week as part of the distinguished group show This is America.
Sahrah Jajarmikhayat
Creating an intimate and sensitive dialogue with nature is the main focus of Jajarmikhayat’s art and design practice. The exploratory and experimental nature of her work leads into projects that are research-based and concept-driven with an emphasis on multi-disciplinary collaboration.
Jajarmikhayat experiments with different materials, processes and methodologies to create objects/systems (physical or digital) that encompass all the aspects of her obsession with material form and its physical properties. She looks into unfamiliar concepts to discover new modes of interpreting fragments of the natural world. Engagement from both a scientific and artistic point of view provides her with opportunities to gain profound understanding of matter and its surrounding ecosystems.
Themes present in her work are full system thinking, material research, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), biophilia, regenerative design and plant intelligence. Citizen science movement and the latest implications of the bio-materials have both had a direct influence on her work.
Utharaa L Zacharias of Soft Geometry
Founded in 2019 by Indian designers Utharaa L Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary, Soft-Geometry is a collaborative design studio creating collectible objects around a central theme of softness. Their work intersects texture, transparency and color, with slow hand-worked techniques, imperfection and intricate craft. Zacharias and Chaudhary often reference these ideas from the rich visual culture and hand-crafts of their home towns in India, and derive opportunities to bridge traditional and modern ways of making and seeing.
They currently live and work between San Francisco, USA and Kochi, India.