Tomorrow, November 15, from 5 to 8 p.m. Oakland art gallery Johannson Projects hosts an opening reception for Collapsitalism: The Holiday Recession Sale.
The exhibition "is an attempt to [visually] connect art prices to stock-market fluctuations beyond ... charts and indexes" -- not to mention giving strapped art collectors a break and helping to support working artists who are feeling the economic pinch. Nearly a dozen emerging and established Northern California artists, including Zach Houston, Marci Erspamer, Nathan Cordero, Hunter Longe, Eric Larson, Susie Grant, Carson Murdach, Joan Moment, Andrew Benson, and Alex Case will have new, original pieces available for less than $500 each.
Collapsitalism will be up in the Johannson Projects Project Space through January 2.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Mark Your Calendar: Collapsitalism: The Holiday Recession Sale at Johansson Projects
Friday, November 2, 2007
The Artful Home: Val Britton
As with so many good things lately, I first encountered Berkeley artist Val Britton's work at Oakland's Johannson Projects Gallery during one of the Oakland Art Murmur's First Fridays (if you're around, don't miss tonight's event).
I was transfixed by her delicately traced and layered, softly stained, and intricately cut and stitched paper map collages, which seemed to evoke some strange, unknown -- and unknowable -- geography.
"The impetus ... was my longing to connect to my father, a truck driver who drove eighteen-wheelers across the country hauling industrial machinery. He died over ten years ago," the recent California College of the Arts MFA writes. "Based on road maps of the U.S., routes my father often traveled, and an invented conglomeration, mutation, and fragmentation of those passageways, my works ... help me piece together the past and make up the parts I cannot know."
Call it the terrain of the human heart.
See more of Britton's work here. (And if you're in the area, you can see her pieces in person at the group show There's No Place Like Here, being held at the Sonoma State University Art Gallery through December 9.)
