popUp Gallery celebrates its first anniversary with another fascinating exhibition, inviting you to get up close and personal with the work of eight Bay Area artists.This highly anticipated collection is a feast for the senses, exciting not only the visual and tactile reflexes, but also delving into the intangible world of intimacy, emotion and personal relationships.
Closing Reception: August 9, 2013, 6pm to 9pm, during second Friday Estuary Art Walk
1517 Park Street, Alameda, California
Meet the Artists:
Estelle Akamine’s woven fiber sculptures beg to be touched. It’s difficult not to. Using recycled materials, Ms. Akamine breaks down cast offs to their elemental parts and creates entirely new art forms from them. She speaks of “designing beauty from the unlikely”, and in her work these unlikely materials spring to life again in sculptures of impressive size and complexity. Her plaited and woven sculptures – some as large as 6 and 7 feet – are not to be missed.
In Gabriele Bungardt’s new series -beneath the surface-, her larger than life subjects appear in complex, emotionally charged scenes like performers in a play. We may have missed the opening act, but we are compelled to imagine the ending. As we stand face to face with these characters, we are drawn into their worlds. They command our attention with an inviting glance, or an icy stare and, at times, with an intensity that forces us to look away so as not to intrude in a private moment. They are strangers to us, yet we seem to know who they are.
Mi’Chelle Fredrick new work explores the senses of sight, sound and touch in her graphite drawings. The viewer is witness to scenes inhabited by figures filled with emotion. We can almost read their private thoughts and yearnings. There is an intimacy about these figures, yet they project a coolness and distance that sets them apart in their own worlds of passion, reflection, anticipation and, perhaps, anxiety.
Dolores R. Gray’s intriguing dioramas offer a very up close and personal glimpse into her own memories of family, revealing “hidden secrets, wishes or dreams.” In her beautifully crafted work, Ms. Gray manipulates photographs to create familiar scenes – some remembered, some imagined – inviting viewers to “reimagine themselves within the narrative constructs and contemplate the secrets they conceal and reveal.”
Utilizing lithography, etching, or woodcut as a base, Carrie Ann Plank constructs richly layered prints that offer the viewer tantalizing bits of imagery and information. The scenes she creates contain familiar references, yet they take us to unexpected places. Beyond deceptively simple surfaces is a wealth of information. Ms. Plank says, “There is beauty in charts, graphs, and other visual detritus that accumulates. My goal is for this informational detritus to take on new roles based on contexts and juxtapositions.”
The art of photography has changed so dramatically in recent years that most viewers no longer know what is real and what isn’t. Photographs by Stephanie Rigsby are, indeed, the real thing. She does not digitally alter her work. She relies on her keen observation skills and a masterful eye to show us what exists beyond the surface. Sometimes it is the flicker of light, sometimes a reflection there for just an instant, then gone. It is these captured moments that lend a surreal and mysterious quality to Ms. Rigsby’s photographs.
Nikki Schrager studies the subtle shifts of sunlight as the seasons pass her studio window capturing the warmth of the summer sun and the subdued light of winter. In her series of photographs that record the ebb and flow of light and the magical patterns it creates, Ms. Schrager is as much choreographer as photographer. The movement of light and shadow in her work suggests the elegance of modern dance with its complex rhythms and changing tempos.
At first glance, Maya Whitner’s sculptures appear to be undulating organisms – maybe plants, maybe creatures. Upon closer inspection the viewer finds that hundreds of nails have been meticulously arranged to give the illusion of soft, organic forms. Her work is truly a sensory experience. Ms. Whitner draws upon a background ranging from classical music to biology to sheet metal fabrication as she artfully integrates the sensual quality of music and the mystery of nature in the permanence of metal.
popUP News 
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