Opening at Oakland's Johansson Projects this weekend: Collective Compulsions, a kind of "greatest hits" of the gallery's featured artists over the past 18 months. All share an obsession with "intricate visual detail ... Stepping back from the image, the meticulously built forms disappear into the context of the whole. Delicate, dense, panoramic memory maps stretch before us in one piece, only to collapse into spiraling abstractions in the next."
Among the featured artists:
Amanda Hughen (previously blogged here)
Val Britton (previously blogged here)
Anna Fidler
Nathan Cordero
Tadashi Moriyama
Kristina Lewis
Jill Gallenstein
Jen Stark
Misa Inaoka
Andrew Benson
An artists' reception will be held Saturday, January 17, from 4 to 7 p.m., and Collective Compulsions will be up at Johansson Projects through February 21.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Mark Your Calendar: "Collective Compulsions" at Johansson Projects
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
The Artful Home: Amanda Hughen
Wandering through Oakland's Johansson Projects gallery recently (I swear that place always has the coolest stuff), I was immediately drawn to the work of artist Amanda Hughen.
The UC Berkeley MFA, who has exhibited everywhere from San Francisco to Paris to Reykjavik, uses pencil, ink, and paint to layer delicate geometric shapes onto translucent mylar "until the forms reach a critical mass ... mutat[ing] into ... an organic, moving, unidentifiable entity."
The results are transfixing:
Preoccupation
Critical Mass
Regulated Concentration
Crystallized Culmination
Hughen originals are priced at several hundred to a couple thousand dollars apiece, but limited-edition miniprints of "Compulsion," below, are available for $40 through San Francisco's Electric Works.
Take a look at more of Hughen's creations right here. And if you're in the area, do your best to catch her joint show, "Transtructural," with sculptor and painter Michael Meyers, which will be at Johansson until October 5.
