Marrow Gallery proudly presents Cumulus, San Francisco-based  painter Hiroshi Sato’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring all new work, Sato’s  latest collection showcases a cumulative fusion of the innovative approaches to form and  perspective he has honed throughout the last ten years. Sato’s paintings unveil themselves  like folded pieces of origami, with interlacing diagonals of negative space drawing  attention to the layers of formal complexity around them. From nuanced oil washes to unresolved grays and shifting stills, Sato’s scenes deftly evade the scrutinizing eye while still leaving careful clues of the artist’s hand. Sato himself has constructed and deconstructed his approach to contemporary oil painting nearly ad infinitum, working back and forth  between academic tradition and modern uncertainty until settling upon his final fold, which  while refreshingly original, also pays homage to the procedural folds and art historical figures that came before it.  

Sato wishes to assert his work as a reminder in our contemporary art world that it is not only how,  but what is painted that is also a radical artistic choice in itself. The core of Sato’s work is of  the everyday person—posed sitting at their desk, gazing out of a window, or waiting  outside of a shop, and often in moments of solitude despite some presence of others. It is  in these scenes of unremarkable mundanity in which we may have a moment of respite to  recollect ourselves amongst the demanding distractions of the modern world and simply  observe our perceptions, which as Sato has adroitly captured, may be far more inventive  than we realize. 

Sato’s figures are intentionally nonspecific, often blurring the lines of gender, race, and  class to allow the viewer to ascribe their unconscious biases onto their personhood and to notice this perceptual process in themselves. His use of abstraction works like a double edged sword, allowing us to both resonate with the eerily familiar scenes and also find  them mystifying to place. As soon as one begins to decode Sato’s scenes of the quotidian,  his formal experimentations refract our gaze yet again, resisting resolution and leaving us,  like his figures, perpetually transfixed.  

Sato’s newest body of work Cumulus is also keenly attuned to the atmosphere of the social  and political landscape in 2024. While the promises of modern technology may have  allowed for more connectivity than ever before, the aftershocks of a pandemic and growing  divides in politics and class have demonstrated its superficiality. Sato’s figures wander the landscapes of modern confusion, peering across seemingly irreconcilable horizons in  longing for a sense of genuine sincerity and community. Like the San Francisco clouds rolling in on a bright day, Sato’s vibrantly colored landscapes are overcast with a mood of deep existential contemplation—a state which permeates into each viewer that stumbles  into the folds of his captivating work. 

Hiroshi Sato was born in Japan in 1987. He spent his childhood in Tanzania but returned to Japan for secondary school. His work has been featured in Visual Art Source and Juxtapoz Magazine. He was most recently Artist in Residence at the Cheekwood in Nashville, TN. His work is in public collections including Cheekwood and Ionis Pharmaceuticals. He has shown extensively across the US and UK.

Jordan Holms is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, textiles, and sculpture. Her practice considers how aesthetic ‘tastes’ are materialized, organized, and made to mean. Mining source materials from the built environment (both physical and online) Holms’s work references commodity culture, folk art, antiques, reality television, boutique concept stores, and so-called aspirational design accounts on social media. Holms’s work addresses how material cultural capital takes shape in the wake of the suburbanization and homogenization of social media advertising. Filtered through the lens of abstraction, her work interprets the things we find in our homes and in the built environment that signal something about how taste produces meaning. Holms constructs irreverent and errant spaces that index their own meanings in an attempt to make sense of what ‘having taste’ might look like in a moment wherein aesthetic trends are dictated by algorithms as well as elites.

Jordan Holms has exhibited in the UK, the US, and Canada, and her work is held in multiple private collections. She has participated in solo exhibitions at Marrow Gallery (2020; 2018), and group exhibitions at Voss Gallery (2023), the de Young Museum (2020), and SFMOMA Artists Gallery (2019). She has attended residencies at the Icelandic Textile Center (2022) and Vermont Studio Center (2020). Holms earned a Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute (2019). She currently lives and works in South London, UK.

Marrow Gallery is pleased to present Pictures Are Stories, a two person exhibition featuring the work of Will Maxen and Jack Tozzi. Both recent graduates, Maxen with an MFA from UC Davis and Tozzi, with a BFA from Kent State. Both artists focus on the narrative element of their work, creating dreamlike paintings where the imagery embraces both memory and whimsy. These snippets of scenes allow the viewer to imagine the stories they tell; Maxen’s personal and intimate capturing of both mundane and seminal moments from his life, and Tozzi’s fantastical look at society and its undercurrents.

Tozzi creates fictionalized worlds that are meant to parallel what we know to be true. His improbable scenes highlight the human condition and society in general. The cartoonish way he represents humanity and the psychology of belonging begs for self examination and an understanding of the collective consciousness. Born in Cleveland, OH in 1998, Tozzi currently resides in Columbus, OH. He has been in several group shows, this being his first outside of his home state. He holds a BFA from Kent State University.

Maxen is taking this opportunity to revisit his time in California, the sense of the landscape and the light that left a strong impression on him. His time at UC Davis was transformative and the experience of being in Davis left an indelible mark on his work. These personal and intimate moments are another catalog of the artist’s life, continuing the considered way his work has represented family and moments that left an impression. Raised in Waterbury, CT, Maxen holds a BA from Central Connecticut State University and an MFA from UC Davis. He has shown at Faith McKinney Gallery, Sacramento, CA, Residency Art Gallery, LA, CA, Chili Art Projects, London, UK, The Manetti Shrem Museum, Davis, CA, Museum of Northern California Art, Chico, CA. He is currently in residence at Silver Art Projects in NYC and recently opened his first solo exhibition in New York with UTA.

Marrow Gallery is pleased to present the painter Charlotte Evans. Working in oils, the paintings are highly saturated, celebrations of color. Figures populate landscapes; though the figures often remain isolated from one another. The work is ornamental, often theatrical; the figures are like actors on stage and making reference to Victorian theater cutouts, employing color and pattern in place of conventional drawing techniques, like perspective, to add depth and define layers in the paintings. Evans references Italian Renaissance art and Moghul Miniatures and frequently borrows both pictorial and compositional elements from each.

About Charlotte Evans

Born in 1981 in London, England, now based in Toronto, Canada. She has shown at venues including Candida Stevens Gallery, UK, First Street Gallery, New York, 3Walls, Brooklyn. She has been featured in London Paint Club, Orion Magazine, RiseArt and the Times Magazine. Her work is included in the Imperial College Healthcare Art Collection, London, UK, Heartwood Wealth Management, London, UK, Targetfollow Group, London, UK, UBS Bank, London, UK.

Marrow Gallery is pleased to present “Flags: Nido,” new works from Ohio based Shawn Powell. In his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Powell will present small-scale reductive abstract paintings on custom-made flag shaped canvases. The works were created while in residence in Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy.

Nido, is the Italian word for nest; which Powell centered around the idea of the nest as it relates to his artistic practice. The works were created based on a selection of the many reductive abstract painters who have influenced his work and he has an affinity with, bringing parts and pieces of their work back to his studio “nest” where they find their new form in these paintings.

Nautical flags utilize a series of shapes, colors, patterns, and combinations to signify varying meanings to other ships. Powell’s implementation of this system to parallel how we read abstraction, and how each of the painters who influenced him or the artistic movements they are associated with, all have their own set of codes. The boat flags and abstract paintings remain aesthetic unless you understand the system and have a key or knowledge to decipher them.

About Shawn Powell

Shawn Powell lives and works in Kent, Ohio. He has presented solo exhibitions at 106 Green, Brooklyn, NY; Chapter, New York, NY; Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, OH; and in Tennis Elbow at The Journal Gallery, New York, NY. His work has been in numerous group exhibitions at venues such as Marrow Gallery, San Francisco, CA; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; NADA Miami, NADA New York. He has been featured in print or online in Vanity Fair, Brooklyn Magazine, Hyperallergic, Artmaze Mag, Juxtapoz Magazine, New American Paintings, as well as in Secret of the Friendly Woods with the Wassaic Project. He was awarded 2021 and 2023 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award Grants. Powell has participated in the Alfred/Düsseldorf Residency in Düsseldorf, Germany and the Poor Farm artist residency at the International Center for the Arts in Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy. His work is included in the Akron Art Museum permanent collection, Fidelity Art Collection, and the Cleveland Clinic Collection. Powell received his BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA in Painting from Hunter College.

Marrow Gallery presents “Soft Fascination” an exhibition featuring the work of Hiroshi Sato, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Stephanie Robison and Justine Di Fiore. The artists consider the body in form and function, physicality and emotion.

Justine Di Fiore is a recent UCDavis MFA graduate. Her work as a nursing assistant caring for the terminally ill influenced her current body of work as she mines the emotional and physical experience of helping patients to navigate their physical limitations. Her large scale paintings represent the distorted, sometimes dark and messy emotions and physicality of the body.

Kimia Ferdowsi Kline distills her subject matter into body-based lexicons as a tool to decipher the expansive mysteries of human relationships. Cut out from the distractions of place, situation, context and even gravity, these emotionally-charged figures take center stage as they grapple with the complexity of self and each other.

Stephanie Robison is the art department chair at City College San Francisco. Her biomorphic sculptures explore materiality in stone and wool. The incongruous nature of the materials are emblematic of the awkwardness of the body and our relationships to others.

San Francisco based Hiroshi Sato’s use of light and color, evocative of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, explores abstracted figuration. Sato disrupts the visual cues by which we identify people, utilizing a sparseness of signifiers to lend ambiguity to his characters’ identities in terms of gender, race, and class.

Marrow Gallery presents “Color Sanctuary,” new works from Oakland based Shara Mays. These works were initially sparked by a vintage family photograph from the 1950’s, capturing Mays’ father as a young child in North Carolina. The image portrays him being held by an elder cousin, flanked by two other cousins. Southern thickets of bushes envelop them all. Despite the era's reality for Black children, particularly young Black boys, the artist found solace in this family photo because it conjures feelings of safety and of a sanctuary.

In gestural and intimate moments of expression, Shara Mays creates visual histories that outline and lay bare her work as a contemporary black artist. As she explores color, the artist represents generational and cultural ideologies of the black experience. The current body of work is a necessary reclaiming of space and access to the transformative aspect of surrounding oneself in the natural environment. For the audience, the complexities of race and visual language are analogous; the tangle and movement of paint as an expression of freedom, beauty and growth. Upon viewing these large scale paintings (72x60”) the viewer is transported in a way that is reminiscent of the Japanese concept of “Forest Bathing”, an immersive and meditative experience, where one is enveloped in the surrounding flora.

About Shara Mays:

Shara Mays (she/her) is an African-American visual artist who creates paintings which take the shape and form of both landscape and intuitive figuration. Her works are performances of both subconscious motions and are in constant conversation with the natural world seen throughout Northern California. Originally from Princeville, North Carolina, her art practice represents an evolution of narrative, from a focus on literal, southern landscapes, and family struggles, to chasing freedom through the act of painting. She received her BFA degree from The Corcoran College of Art and Design at George Washington University, and her MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent shows include solo shows at Mehari Sequar in Washington, DC and Chandran Gallery in San Francisco. Select group shows include LatchKey Gallery in New York, Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Residencies include the Vermont Studio Center, Meta Open Arts, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work is included in both public and private collections, including the International African American Museum, the Green Family Art Foundation, and Art in Embassies.

Marrow Gallery presents “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” Sacramento-based mixed media artist Mercy Hawkins’s debut solo exhibition with a commercial gallery. Featuring a suite of brand-new wall hangings and soft sculptures, the exhibition, which takes its title from 20th century Bay Area poet Robert Duncan’s verse of the same name, is an examination of proximity and distance in a time of increasing isolation that considers environment of myriad kinds, from the climate crisis to the personal interior.

Hawkins’s practice is one deeply inspired by topophilia – love of the land and a sense of belonging in a particular geographical place – and a desire to heal the planet in concert with community. The wall mounted textiles and freestanding soft sculptures that constitute “Often I Am Permitted” take organic forms, reminiscent of their natural inspirations, often depicting anthropomorphic plant-like characters offering intimate experiences of connection to each other and the viewer.

Often performing tender moments of physical touch, the characters in these works simultaneously offer a vision of connectivity and activates the viewer’s body in relation to the artwork, bringing one into an awareness of their own location in space as well as into a dynamic negotiation with those around them and within their shared environment, in the gallery and beyond. The fibrous nature of the work itself further evokes the familiar, sensorial experience of touch which too often becomes lost in an increasingly alienated social environment.

The meticulous embroidery of the Hawkins’s lavishly detailed constructions encourages an attuned viewing experience, emulating the slowness of a mindful and centered way of existing within one’s body and environment. The artist’s signature hand stitching, which holds the semblance of the dash or a percussive beat, also references the steady vibration of the land that intentional perception might allow one to connect with.

The climate crisis and the increasing endemic of loneliness are both global phenomena rapidly accelerated by rampant technological advancement. Fundamentally, both of these environmental threats also threaten communities. But it is also within community that we can locate opportunities to heal ourselves and our environment. Here, Hawkins’s work offers an opportunity to come a little closer together, planting the seed for something greater than each of us to bloom.

Marrow Gallery presents Petrichor, a group exhibition featuring Deborah Brown, Travis Collinson, Dana Sherwood, and Amber Jean Young. The exhibition brings together a group of artists working across genres that ask us to consider our varied responses to nature’s sights, sounds, smells and feelings.

Petrichor presents a dichotomy of work; the mythical and the mystical, the everyday and the unusual, destruction/decay, rebuilding, and envisioning, and the impractical and the standard. The earth after it rains. The inspiration that is found in routine; A daily walk that shifts our vision so we never see the same sight twice. A fantasy world of fables and stories that ground us in the world around us and give us history; without which we have no meaning. A representation of beauty and what it was or is; and how that evolves and changes our ideals and understanding. All of these, are tied to the smell of the earth after it rains. All of these ideas are represented in the varied works in the show, each artist offering a different perspective of the earth we are all grounded to.

Marrow Gallery presents Hard Felt, the second solo exhibition from Stephanie Robison. The Oakland based artist makes biomorphic sculptures in marble and hand felted wool.

Robison’s sculptures are signifiers of the tangibility and transformation of materials; the artist's hand is omnipresent in the manipulation and metamorphosis as two disparate materials evolve into organic forms. Representing body parts, flora, fauna and ideas found in nature, these marble and wool objects become de facto examples of the strange and obscure occurrences that we see everyday. The combination of the physicality of the process and the labor-intensive demands of the materials allows for a focused, slowing down and becomes a meditation on what is happening around and within the artist, her response to the materials, and finding the forms through action and reaction.

About Stephanie Robison:

Originally from Oregon, Robison currently resides in Oakland, California teaching sculpture and serving as Art Department Chair at the City College of San Francisco. Robison holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Marylhurst University and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Oregon. Robison’s work has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Joseph A Cain Memorial Art Gallery and Greater Denton Arts Council in Texas, Whatcom Museum and Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, Marrow Gallery in San Francisco, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in California.

Marrow Gallery presents Knot Garden with artists Gianna Commito and Sarah Hotchkiss. The two person exhibition opens on December 1, 2022 and runs through January 21, 2023.

New to the gallery and exhibiting in their first show together, Commito and Hotchkiss work on opposite sides of the country, while sharing a visual language rooted in geometric abstraction. Commito, an artist and art professor at Kent State in Ohio, paints elaborate convergences of line, arc, shadow and depth. Hotchkiss, a San Francisco based artist and arts editor and writer, paints hard-edged and high contrast graphic compositions. Markedly unique in their subject and execution, the works in Knot Garden share a sense of spatial transaction where both artists use the two dimensional surface to carefully negotiate the tussles and space grabs of their formal pursuits.

Gianna Commito’s latest paintings are both an extension of and departure from earlier subject matter concerning architecture, urban planning and the built environment. Responding to the experience of living through a pandemic with her partner and their blended family, the new works reference the interiority of the built environment and the social dynamics that unfold within the limitations of shared space. Though painted in mostly muted tones, Commito’s angles and arcs are bold and confident in their well-placed collisions. Much like the social tangles of a family, these shapes assert themselves in front of, or politely withdraw behind each other, creating the sensation of a pulsing, four cornered organism or a liquid surface with a roiling undercurrent. Family dynamics are mysterious enough, and represented here as a dance of forceful triangular thrusts and soft curvy cradles, Commito obscures the picture plane further by weaving in sources of light and shadow, as complicated as the warp and weft of any social fabric.

Sarah Hotchkiss makes gouache and acrylic paintings inspired by graphic imagery unearthed in the course of her daily life. Maybe sourced during a trip to Alemany flea market or spied while observing architecture on a long walk, Hotchkiss tends toward the overlooked yet compelling design of puzzles, games, test cards, and everyday patterns. Once the material is secured, translation begins. Sketching, plotting and getting the math right, Hotchkiss solves potential design issues as they come up–lines and mass might be reduced, or patterns made more coherent, and color is often added. The painting technique is exacting; Hotchkiss does not use tape, for example, and spends significant time wrestling the surface into the flattest plane possible in order to facilitate smooth graphic lines. While the process might be intricate and painstaking, the resulting paintings are effortlessly striking, high-impact schematics. The union of frankly brash color pairings with vaguely familiar design elements writ large provide an uncanny viewing experience, drawing attention to the human compulsion toward collecting, organizing, designing and creating in order to look, feel, share and understand.

About Gianna Commito

Gianna Commito has exhibited her work at The Drawing Center, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, Wallspace, New York, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, among other venues. Commito has participated in artist residencies including the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, the MacDowell Colony in St. Peterborough, New Hampshire, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska, and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. She was awarded the Cleveland Prize in 2015 and a Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grant in 2004. She lives and works in Kent, Ohio.

About Sarah Hotchkiss

Sarah Hotchkiss is a San Francisco-based artist and the senior associate editor for KQED Arts & Culture. Since 2020, she has also co-run the exhibition space Premiere Jr. on a billboard in the Inner Sunset. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Friends Indeed, San Francisco and group shows at Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; and Cheymore Gallery, Tuxedo Park. She has attended residencies at Skowhegan, ACRE and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City, Nebraska. In 2019 she received the Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation Grant for arts journalism.

Press:

Max Blue for the San Francisco Examiner

Marrow Gallery presents Tondo, a group exhibition featuring the work of Shawn Powell, Kristin Farr and Travis Collinson. A tongue-in-cheek take on the round canvas, the three artists use the circle as a beach ball, a patterned hex sign and a shooting star racing through the galaxy. The stiffness and seriousness of a traditional tondo subject, historically featuring renaissance portraiture, is traded for the literal and representational. The exhibition runs March 12 - April 16th.

Shawn Powell’s paintings oscillate between abstraction and representation in an amalgamation of these two often divergent approaches to painting. The size and shape of his canvases take on the size and shape inherent in each of his recent subjects: towels, umbrellas, beach balls, and life preservers all strewn across the beach and seen from a top-down, cinematic viewpoint. Combining low brow, kitschy subjects with a rigorous, conceptual framework, the paintings are humorously deadpan, wry, strange, and awkward, rendering the paintings as anthropological and art historical still lifes influenced by artists and auteurs such as Jacques Tati, Olivier Mosset, and Roy Lichtenstein to name a few.

Through her work, Kristin Farr explores magic, rainbows, nostalgia, color psychology and positive vibes. Her signature Magic Diamond design made of multi­colored geometric shapes has been painted on many different surfaces in thematically­ selected palettes, using countless contrasting colors to create structure and dimension. Her round Op Art paintings are a nod to her family’s roots in Pennsylvania Dutch folk art. “Hex Signs” were painted on barns for decoration, good luck or protection, depending on which legend you believe. Her interest in folk magic contributes to her exploration of human ­made objects that are believed to have powers or talismanic properties and she adapts this traditional art practice with contemporary colors and designs. Color is central to her work and she is influenced by a common form of the neurological condition synesthesia in which her mind associates letters and numbers with specific colors.

Travis Collinson has on a number of occasions used imagery of stars in his work; usually as a means of illustrating the concept of night. This group of paintings is composed of heavenly events. They are illustrative and draw heavily from graphic representations of the sun and stars used on tee shirts in the 70’s and 80's. The works also combine the elements of facial features, this personifies the heavenly event and offers a somewhat whimsical representation of the cosmos.

About Shawn Powell:

Shawn Powell has presented solo exhibitions at 106 Green, Brooklyn, NY; Chapter, New York, NY; Tennis Elbow at The Journal Gallery, New York, NY; and at Webster University, St. Louis, MO. His work has been included in a two-person exhibition at Abattoir Gallery in Cleveland, OH and Nada Miami along with numerous group exhibitions at venues such as The Fabric Workshop and Museum and NADA New York. He has been featured online in Vanity Fair, Brooklyn Magazine, Bedford and Bowery, Art F City, Hyperallergic, the White Columns #39; Artist Registry, and Juxtapoz Magazine as well as in print in Artmaze Mag, Secret of the Friendly Woods with the Wassaic Project, and the CAN Journal. He co-curates the project space Gazebo Gallery with his partner, curator Annie Wischmeyer, in Kent Ohio, which was featured in New Art Examiner, and he recently curated the exhibition The Dead Don’t Die at Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, OH. Powell received his BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA in Painting from Hunter College where he was presented a Tony Smith Award Grant. He was awarded a 2021 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award Grant.

About Kristin Farr:

Kristin Farr’s work has been shown throughout the Bay Area at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Bedford Gallery, FFDG, Anno Domini and Fifty24SF. She has created public art and murals in San Francisco, Taiwan, Manila and Hawaii. She is the former producer of KQED's Art School and is an editor for Juxtapoz magazine and is currently a curator at Meta Open Arts.

About Travis Collinson:

Travis Collinson received his BFA from CA University, Fullerton. He has shown extensively throughout the country and his work can be found in major institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Berkeley Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, FL. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Orange County Register and various national art publications.

Marrow Gallery presents Close Contact, the first solo exhibition from Stephanie Robison. The Oakland based artist works in marble and hand felted wool, The dichotomy of the two materials is intentional, its purpose and significance at odds in its awkwardness. The materials allow a certain freedom, creating work that is intentional and purposeful in its happenstance. The exhibition runs February 2 - March 5th, 2022.

Sculpture for me is about tangibility and transformation. Being able to manipulate materials with my hands, transforming it into something else, is an intimate and magical process. My latest series of work consists of wall pieces that combine traditional stone carving (mostly marble) and the process of needle felting wool. The combination of the physicality of the process and the labor-intensive demands of these materials allows for a focused, slowing down and becomes a mediation on what is happening around and within me. I’m responding to the materials and finding the forms through action and reaction; the challenge is keeping the work fresh and not overworked. Each piece is a meditation on form, texture, and color. The exhibition title Close Contact refers to this intimate relationship with materials and at the same time gives a nod to the time we find ourselves in, where close contact with another human holds a heightened level of preciousness and danger.

I have always been attracted to forms that are in direct opposition to each other or challenge their final aesthetic/functional appearance: I intentionally make a carved stone appear soft and sewn fabrics or needle felted wool to appear rigid and architectural. Many of these pieces are marble which is a material that I absolutely love. I find that I can play and experiment with marble in ways that I cannot in other materials. Wool is a fairly new material for me. The process of needle felting wool is amazingly versatile; it can be worked both additive and reductively. I feel stone and wool have much to teach me; skill and material knowledge are an investment in exploration and discovery as well as hard work and practice. I generally use a graphic and bright palette, with highly saturated colors. Although I used color in older works, there has been a change in my thinking about both color and its role. Now with the incorporation of the wool, I am able to blend color on the surface of the forms in a more painterly way by working with gradations of tones or hues so that color becomes an integral part of the visual structure. I use color to emphasize the forms and create a strong edge contrast with the surrounding space thus reconfiguring the spatial relationships between forms. By merging incongruous materials such as wool and marble I am able to synthesize: organic and geometric, natural and architectural, handmade and the uniform industrial, the new and the traditional. And by infusing the work with humor and awkwardness, I can begin to relate my experience of what it is to be human.

Stephanie Robison

2021

About Stephanie Robison:

Originally from Oregon, Robison currently resides in Oakland, California teaching sculpture and serving as Art Department Chair at the City College of San Francisco. Robison holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Marylhurst University and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Oregon.

Robison’s work has been exhibited at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Joseph A Cain Memorial Art Gallery and Greater Denton Arts Council in Texas, Whatcom Museum and Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, Marrow Gallery in San Francisco, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in California, Peter Robertson Gallery in Alberta Canada, Yeiser Art Center in Kentucky, and Site:Brooklyn Gallery in New York.

Marrow Gallery presents Two Moons in Sagittarius, featuring the work of Tahiti Pehrson, Mercy Hawkins and Lindsay Stripling. The New Moon that opens December is a truth seeker. The three artists in this exhibition offer perspectives which seek to reveal the hidden and explore the unknown: Tahiti Pehrson’s representation of the mysterious workings of the wider universe, are represented in finely crafted hand cut paper mathematical forms; Mercy Hawkins, whose sympatico understanding of natural and man made environments reaches beyond symbolic language to create a deeper understand of the natural world; and finally, the folk art wisdom of Lindsay Stripling, presenting contemporary fables, imagery and human truths.

The Centaur is the symbol of Sagittarius in the zodiac, a sociological sign, it is emblematic of the three artists that consider both the cerebral and the physical in their work. The artist's works together play off of each other, examining the relativity of community structures and the development of societal truths. Together these works take a calculated understanding of the transcending nature of art as exploration, revelation and elucidation of society, reflective of the winter solstice, and a search for light amongst the darkness.

About Tahiti Pehrson:

Tahiti Pehrson's hand cut paper works have evolved from his days in art school, tagging with the use of stencils. The cutouts have since morphed to encompass mathematical fractals and geometric sequences based on the Fibonacci sequence, or as many art historians know it, the Golden Ratio; the divine proportion favored by artists from Leonardo to Picasso. Pehrson has shown extensively worldwide and is in public collections including Viacom, Facebook and most recently a large installation at the Hyatt Regency Hotel located in San Francisco International Airport.

About Mercy Hawkins:

Mercy Hawkins is currently a resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is a recent MFA graduate at UC Davis, where she received the Dean’s Research Fellowship, The Fay Nelson Award and the Mary Lou Osborn Award. She will be included in the 2021 MFA issue of New American Paintings.

About Lindsay Stripling:

Lindsay Stripling is a San Francisco based illustrator and teacher. She has a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and a BA from UC Santa Cruz. She has won grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission and done an Irving Street Projects residency. Her work is in the collections of Nike, Target, Adobe and the St. Regis Hotel.

Marrow Gallery presents La Vie en Rose, an exhibition of new works from Los Angeles based-artist, Elizabeth Robb. This is the artist’s third solo show with the gallery and presents a selection of new work made during her 2021 Savannah College of Art and Design Alumni Artist Residency in Lacoste, France. The current body of work is a response to the place and the resources it allows. Fields of lavender, ancient stone and grazing livestock all influence the texture, size and feel of the work. There is a romanticism here that comes from being somewhere new, somewhere different, after being stuck in a place so familiar for so long.

In a statement on the current body of work, Robb writes: “I work sculpturally to capture a moment in time using active processes that become mediations: weaving, wrapping, knotting, dyeing; building structures that are then reconfigured… The repetition of these acts connects my subconscious mind and body, allowing me to connect on a deeper level. The process becomes a cathartic act of deep meditation.

My art practice is heavily influenced by place. All of the works have been sketched, sourced, and entirely created based on my response to place and time living and working in Lacoste, Provence. The scale, techniques, and methods are how I typically work, but overall the feel is very much encapsulated from my here and now.

La Vie en Rose has floated through my everyday life for years- it’s slowly become a mantra of sorts. Featuring the local colors and materials of Provence, I’m working with natural dyes, pigments, and yarns to create these larger than life sculptural woven and wrapped works.”

About the Artist

Liz Robb is currently the Savannah College of Art and Designs Alumni Artist in Residence in Lacoste, France. Robb’s recent exhibitions include, A Beautiful Mess: Weavers And Knotters Of The Vanguard at the Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA, Houston Museum of Contemporary Craft, Eastern Michigan University Art Gallery, and the International Textile Art Biennial in Belgium. She has done residencies in Oaxaca, Mexico, Iceland, Lacoste, France and Hudson, New York. Her work is in the public collections of Twitter, Marriott Hotel Group and the Savannah College of Art and Design. She has her BFA from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from SCAD. This is her third solo exhibition at Marrow Gallery.

Marrow Gallery presents Mother Tongue, an exhibition of new works from New York and Nashville based-artist, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery and presents a selection of brand new work made during the global Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 and 2021.

Mother Tongue marks a significant formal shift in Kline’s oeuvre from oil painting on traditional rectilineal planes to a mixed media approach centralizing papyrus surfaces and incorporating thread, pearls, beads, glitter and ink. Parallel to this emergence of new materials, Kline distills her subject matter into body-based lexicons as a tool to decipher the expansive mysteries of human relationships. Cut out from the distractions of place, situation, context and even gravity, these emotionally-charged figures take center stage as they grapple with the complexity of self and each other.

Mother Tongue opens on May 12 and runs through June 26, 2021.

Shaped as silhouettes but refracting fiery light from luminous surfaces of ink, paint, beads and glitter, the figures in Kimia Ferdowsi Kline’s Mother Tongue are bright tangles of ids and egos. The employment of papyrus-as-canvas in these works is a stand-in for fragile, yet resilient skin. The use of this ancient material suggests age-old human problems and themes, while shiny lakes of glitter and boldly saturated colors situate the work in a shared contemporary moment. Shedding contextual detail and highlighting the body’s architectural form, these new works come at a transformative personal moment: Kline recently gave birth to a daughter in 2018. It is well worth noting that a new direction in creative output was mirrored by the creative process unfolding inside the artist’s body.

The show title, Mother Tongue is a ubiquitous idiom used to describe the language we first learn: the sounds that connect us as children to our caregivers, the words that shape the contours of our early inner worlds through tone and meaning. But while a mother’s words can be the source of complete comfort, they can also carry the potential for harm--a weapon that, when discharged, might inflict lifelong wounds and scars. The scarred and interwoven bodies in Mother Tongue are often arranged in four-pointed configurations that evoke the charts of modern day trauma theory or the psychological mapping systems of interpersonal dynamics. Also map-like are the topographical surfaces of these works.

Lines of beads and dots of pearls build up surface texture forcing the bodies closer to us, into our spatial dimension. While the faces are elemental, archetypal, a visitation from prehistory, the specificity and individuality of these figures' stories come from their stitched up wounds and even their adornments. Much as we adorn ourselves, the artist brightens up her bodies with a dash of staccato glitter or a swoop of pulsing silver beads. The pearl’s presence in Mother Tongue offers a metaphor for how we deal with the trauma we inherit from and inflict upon each other. The pearl’s life starts off as a humble grain of sand; but for the oyster, its presence is unacceptable. Unable to rid itself of the painful irritant, the mollusk coats the sand with a protein rendering the foreign objects' jagged surfaces smooth, a little more manageable, a way to survive more comfortably. The imagery in Mother Tongue illustrates the invisible yet never-ending affairs unfolding in the small spaces of intimacy--the unresolved traumas turned to pearls, the excruciating messiness, the big and small glories of being together.

About the Artist

Kimia Ferdowsi Kline b. 1984 is a New York and Nashville based American artist. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Soulmate, 68 Projects Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2017); Waiting Outside, Marrow Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2017); Breathing On Land, TURN Gallery, New York, NY (2017); As Above, So Below, Elaine L. Jacob’s Gallery, Wayne State, Detroit, MI (2016); Landscapes For The Hungry, TURN Gallery, New York, NY (2015). In 2015 Kline was awarded The Basil Alkazzi Residency through The New York Foundation for the Arts. She was recently honored to be nominated for the 2018 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. As an extension of her studio practice, Kline curates the art collection of Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn, New York. Kline holds an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute, CA, 2011, and a BFA from Washington University, St Louis, MO, 2008 (cum laude).

Press:

Emily Wilson for Hyperallergic