april 2018

Soul Element

April 7 - 28, 2018

Opening Reception Saturday April 7, 6-10pm

Music Performace Saturday April 21, 1pm
Terra Sangue Mare, Sicilian Folk and Roots Music

 

Evalynn Alu Statement:
Evalynn Alu’s paintings pull the viewer into vast, mysterious spaces, where careening vectors of movement embody the forces of nature. With dizzying shifts in scale, she creates sublime mindscapes, dappled with light. Objective, abstract form is a term the artist uses to suggest the tension between her painting’s physical materials, and the riddle of their beauty. A virtuoso painter, she loves to experiment and improvise. She performs complex, technical investigations, building upon her expertise with etching, lithography and watercolor, to create sweeping representations of the universal energies constituting our reality. Alu’s paintings are about wordless thought --- and spiritual longing. Her paint handling, in all its multiplicity, reminds us why this art form persists. In the right hands it can be serious fun, filled with the emotions of the moment, and an unmistakable profundity. Alu’s work gives us the world as a kinetic event, seen by the mind’s eye with the purity of a sudden revelation.

 

 

Jeff Alu Statement:
I often find myself searching for meaning or symbols within everyday items and events.  In my photography, as well as my video visuals, I strive for alternate realities which somehow relate back to familiar origins.  I want these realities to exist visually trapped somewhere between this world and another, so that mixed and crossing signals are sent, with multiple interpretations.  Elements such as impending doom, destruction, survival, and triumph over hardships are common themes and ideas in my work. 

I have a strong belief that when we seek we often look past what is close-by, destroying potential that is very near to us.  We have the ability to create far more often than we realize, usually feeling that we have to wait for special moments or perfect situations, or more expensive equipment.  I find that I constantly have to remind myself of this concept, but that I am usually rewarded in the end.

 

 

Mary Beierle Statement:
Mary Beierle grew up alongside the Los Angeles Mountains and has trekked throughout the terrains of the American West and Alaskan glacial fields.  The trembling of the tectonic plates, climate shifts in this rugged territory and the visual imprint of that geology are major influences in her work.  She merges images of the landscape with abstracted human forms to explore and question our relationship with the natural world.    These ideas are explored through emerging and receding figures, glazing as subject and composition, and contrasts of scale - from miniature to massive, larger than life-sized, pieces. She is interested in creating an experience of form and space that the viewer may touch, peer into, and encounter from various perspectives.

   
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