Group Exhibition: Looking Glass
Laura Burke, Melissa Dominguez, Maya Fuji, Isabella Innis, Emily Silver & Kieu Tran
Dates: March 5 - 26, 2022
Reception: Saturday, March 5 | 4-7 PM
Glass Rice is proud to present Looking Glass, our fifth annual women’s group show featuring sculpture, painting, drawing and mixed media works by six eclectic artists new to our program. The term ‘looking glass’ first came to use as another way to say ‘mirror’, however, after Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass was published in 1871, ‘looking glass’ gained new meaning. Instead of simply mirroring back your reality, it came to mean ‘the opposite of what is normal or expected’.
The artists in this exhibition offer unique perspectives. Ranging from biomorphic abstract sculptures of emotions actualized to larger than life contemporary interpretations of traditional Japanese paintings, each artist challenges their viewer to question how we perceive, feel and connect with one another through a highly stylized practice. Looking Glass celebrates mysterious and novel ways of interpreting the world around us through the lens of insightful and emotionally perceptive women.
Laura Burke is a Portland, OR born artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her colored pencil and oil pastel drawings utilize fantasy and memory to reshape everyday scenes into surreal snapshots. Each piece has a contained element to it, holding expressive and painterly marks inside a deliberate edge. Vibrant, mushy pastels contrast with saturated and precise pencil, mirroring landscapes contained within windows, vessels and flowers. The process of making each piece is meditative and unplanned. The work is built out and balanced as it progresses, prioritizing pattern and color theory. Burke’s main intention behind the work is for the viewer to be held in something familiar but unknown, questioning the line between inside and outside.
Melissa Dominguez aka Malicia or Domino is a multidisciplinary artist hailing from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Being born by the border of El Paso, Texas, she is strongly influenced by both American and Mexican cultures - two contradictory worlds she experienced while growing up. She describes her artwork as a fun, surrealistic, terrifying, and sometimes as ‘a hilarious Mexican dream’. She is also deeply inspired by her passion for rock-n-roll, film and childhood. Her process is often intuitive, spontaneous, and she hopes, at its best, is full of duende (a Spanish term for a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity).
Born in Japan and raised in the Bay Area, Maya Fuji is inspired by both her cultural heritage as well as the local microcosms of the Bay Area. She is fascinated by themes of traditional Japanese mythology and folklore, and blends these with her own experiences of being issei (first generation) in the United States. A recurring theme in her work is the exploration of what creates our sense of identity, and how that can shift over ones life. Soft feminine figures float through her work, encompassing abstraction, texture, vulnerability, and mystique. She layers pops of color and shape to explore themes of passing time, and to contemplate hidden meanings in the lore of her ancestors. Each piece has a story to tell — historical legends, lessons and ghost stories of the floating world era, reimagined through the lens of the digital age. The inspiration behind her most recent series come from traditional Japanese paintings called Hyakki Yakō - an idiom in Japanese folklore that refers to a night parade of supernatural creatures/demons known as yōkai or oni. Some of these creatures are tools or possessions that obtain life after being used for over 100 years by humans.
Isabella Innis lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her abstract paintings explore the multiple realms of nostalgia, at times sentimental, at times playful, yet both evoking the joy and grief of passing time. Reminiscent forms juxtapose with chaotic charcoal lines and lyrical color gradients, connecting shared histories to the personal through constellations of color, line, and shape. Innis’ paintings have been acquired by collections across the United States, Europe, and the U.K. Her most recent solo exhibitions Red Valley and Notes on Nostalgia showed in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Los Angeles respectively. Innis currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Emily Silver lives and works in Joshua tree, CA. Her work examines the sensuous space between the comic and the tragic, what is real and what is fictitious, what can simultaneously exist and be at odds in the life of an event or virtual space. Throughout her work it's important that she accept, embrace, and celebrate human vulnerability. As subject matter, Silver looks to social media, funerals, parties, parades, and carnivals, in their finite nature, for the work to be actively a part of these sensual celebratory practices. The materials hold a metaphor of the ephemeral and the cherished, creating objects and videos, that play with what is monumental and decorative, comic and tragic, and begs her viewer to reconsider their relationship to these ideas and realities.
Kieu Tran is a first generation Vietnamese American artist based in Oakland, CA with a bachelor’s degree in art history from UCLA. She creates elegant, sensuous, biomorphic ceramic sculptures that exist somewhere between the abstract and figurative through a strong ceramic practice. In her work, Tran strives to give expression to emotion, to allow the aesthetic of the form to tell you something about the inspiration behind the piece on a wordless, instinctual level. She considers her sculptures to be an effort that gives form to the human soul and to remind us of our shared humanity. Her work has been featured in Interior Design Magazine, Surface Magazine, Sight Unseen, EST Living and Design Anthology Asia.
__________
The opening reception will run from 4 - 7 pm on March 5th and is open to the general public for walk-ins. Private appointments can be made on our website to view the exhibition after the opening reception through March 26th. Masks are required inside the gallery if you are not enjoying a beverage. Thank you for your cooperation in keeping us all safe and healthy!