New Work by Clare Szydlowski

(March 31st-May 6th, 2012)

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 31st, 6-9pm
Closing Tea & Artist Talk: Sunday, May 6th, 3-6pm (Talk at 4pm)

Buy American: New Work by Clare Szydlowski opens March 31 2012. In addition to Szydlowski’s solo work, the backroom of the gallery will features Things Fall Apart, a selection of work done by Compound Studio artists addressing the theme of fragmentation. Szydlowski’s solo exhibition continues her ongoing exploration of the American Dream. She often refers to the visual relationship between the areas she grew up in—from the towering industrial decay of Buffalo, NY to the sprawling antiseptic tract houses and strip malls of Orange County, CA.

In this show, she takes on the bargain store: a land of great buys, exclusive offers, giant values, money back guarantees, chances to win, last chance savings and free trials. Packages hang on peg hooks and sit on shelves, patterned with ribbons, banners and starbursts–trappings inherited from the traditional awards presented at county fairs. There is something comforting about this place. Something assuring in the symbols and terminology present in these packages, in the movements of shoppers as they lift products off the walls, examining prices, ingredients and claims.

However mundane, curious, or bizarre–this setting is uniquely American. In America, outlandish daydreams become manufactured realities, just as perfectly manicured lawns pepper the Arizona desert. If American promise is limitless what about our desires as Americans—is there something we are looking for amongst the claims: security, guarantee, and value–assurance that our choices are good ones? Szydlowski follows this inquiry through cut paper, multilayer screen printing and repetition. By borrowing the language of packaging, in Buy American, she illuminates these inarticulated desires that fuel our compulsion for material acquisition.

(February 11th-March 25th, 2012)

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 11th, 6-9pm
Closing Tea: Sunday, March 25th, 3-6pm

Featuring work by: Lisa Berman, Matt Chase, Tim Fite, Rachel Foster, Vanessa Huang, Jemmy Joe, Claire Kessler-Bradner, Bryan Kring,  Mary Laird,  Studio Lorzig, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., Rebecca Peters, Lisa Rappoport,  Two Fine Chaps, and more.

Co-curated with Rebecca Peters

The Compound Gallery in Oakland, CA is pleased to present The Art of Letterpress, an exhibition celebrating the bygone era of letterpress printing.  A visual panegyric in honor of this distinctive form of artistry, The Art of Letterpress features some of the finest letterpress artists in the Bay Area and beyond.  Today, we text, email, and print at the touch of a button, making it easy to forget how labor intensive it was to simply make a sentence and reproduce it multiple times.  In an increasing digital age, people long for something that is tangible and tactile—analog. The characteristic texture, ink, and surface of letterpressed text declares it an antiquated champion of typography.

Typography was once used to express both language and visual imagery, and the process involved in producing prints involved both craft and artistry. This exhibition features the work of artists who work in letterpress using both traditional type setting and modern polymer and magnesium plates, and was co-curated with exceptional Bay Area letterpress artist, Rebecca Peters.  Although the Bay Area is home to a lively, active scene, which promotes the revival of letterpress printing, letterpress printing is often overlooked as a form of fine art.

Renowned letterpress artist Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. lives and works in Alabama and is known for his bold, boundry pushing prints.  Kennedy has been commissioned by CB2 to create a series of limited edition letterpress prints for Gay Pride Month, and he is the feature of a recent documentary titled Proceed and Be Bold!  (Screening at The Compound on March 22nd at 9pm) Lisa Rappoport is a Bay Area artist who publishes poetry broadsides and artists’ books and has produced a series of broadsides by the poets who teach at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers; she has also printed poetry broadsides for Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books, Lyric Poetry Review, and many others. Tim Fite is a Brooklyn artist best known for his original music.  Esquire Magazine called him, “one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most subversive renaissance men,” but he is also an amazing visual artist. His letterpress printed linocuts are playful, telling images of love and strife.  In addition to a display of various letterpress prints, bins of small prints, books, and broadsides, this exhibition will feature timeworn letterpress paraphernalia, ephemera, equipment, and more.

THE BASICS OF HAND-SETTING TYPE FOR PLATEN PRESS 101

Saturday, April 28, 2012 1-5pm

$75 per person. No prior experience necessary. You’ll be walked through the basics of hand-setting type as we make awesome postcards that you’ll be able to take home. We’ll also be printing from a photopolymer plate. You’ll get some hands-on experience in feeding the press, but this will mainly be instructional. There will likely be a future class, where those of you who have taken this one can come in and set up your own type to print.

-Price of workshop INCLUDES material fee.
-Each student will also be able to take home 10 letterpress cards made in class.
-No previous experience is needed.
-Delicious Numi Tea and light snacks will be provided.

POSTER MAKING: HAND-SETTING TYPE ON A VANDERCOOK PRESS

Saturday, April 7th, 1-6pm

$90 per person. Class size is limited to 6, so please register early to get a spot. Class is taught by the fabulous Rebecca Peters. No previous letterpress experience necessary. Learn basic wood and metal type setting using large type and print a 12″x18″ poster to keep. Some block images available as well. Come with a phrase, text, or saying in mind and design your own poster on the Vandercook 14 & 5 hand proof presses.

-Price of workshop INCLUDES material fee.
-Each student will also be able to take home at least one 12″x18″ poster print. Students will print at least 6 prints and exchange so everyone comes home with multiple prints.
-Come with a phrase in mind to print.
-No previous experience is needed.
-Delicious Numi Tea and light snacks will be provided.

proceed and be bold  Movie Screening

Free Screening for our Art Movie Night on Thursday, March 22nd 2012, 9pm

At 40 years of age, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. abandoned the traditional American Dream to follow his own. Unsatisfied with his comfortable, middle-class life, Amos traded in his computer for a printing press and his white collar for a pair of overalls. Armed with life, liberty, peanuts, and a meager yearly income of $7,000, Amos cranked out a new, mutinous declaration of independence.

Proceed and Be Bold! joins Amos for a titillating retelling of his story, while examining the pretensions and provisions of the art world. The work of this self-proclaimed “Humble Negro Printer” raises emotionally-charged questions and reveals remarkable depth beneath the bold print. By learning the rules and then choosing to break them, Amos redefines what life (and letterpress printing) can be: exhilarating and subversive.

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(October 15-December 4, 2011)

Closing Tea & Artist Talk: Sunday, December 4, 2011, 3-6pm
(Talk starts at 5pm)

Katherine Sherwood continues the series Healers from the Yelling Clinic with the introduction of  new multi-paneled, mixed- media paintings at the Compound Gallery.   Brain imagery from neuro-anatomy from the 16^th. Century to the 21^st. make up these  figures.  Hats, faces, jewelry and breasts are constructed from the illustrations of Vesalius to Ramon y Cajal to today’s MRI’s.  Unlike previous healers, these clinicians are decidedly male.

The Yelling Clinic is an art and disability collective co-founded by Sherwood.  Their aim is to further global disability studies by researching military pollution and its affect on the disabled population.  In December she will work with disabled artisans in Hue, Vietnam.  Her artistic contribution to the Yelling Clinic is her series of healers.

Katherine Sherwood’s acclaimed mixed-media paintings gracefully investigate the point at which the essential aspects of art, medicine, and disability intersect.  Her works juxtapose abstracted medical images, such as cerebral angiograms of the artist’s brain, with fluid renderings of ancient patterns; the paintings thus explore and reveal, with a most unusual palette, the strange nature of our time and current visual culture.  In addition to showing regularly throughout the United States, she co-curated the exhibition “Blind at the Museum” at the Berkeley Art Museum, and organized an accompanying conference at UC Berkeley.  Sherwood was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship 2005-2006 and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant 2006-2007. Her work was included in the Smithsonian Museum’s “Revealing Culture” and at a solo show at Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco in 2010. Katherine is a professor at UC Berkeley in the Art Department and the Disability Studies Program. She is the artist-in-residence at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the co-founder of the art and disability collective- The Yelling Clinic.

(August 27-October 9, 2011)

Opening Reception: Saturday, August 27, 2011, 6-9pm
Open Late First Friday, Friday, September 2nd til 10pm
Closing Tea and Artist Talk: Sunday, October 9, 2011, 3-6pm
(talk starts at 4pm)

While a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Van Allen researched the layered histories of science in the city, focused on mapping them into three conceptual and physical pathways. Her fascination with the origins of the museum led her outside the city to collections and archives in Bologna and Florence. ‘Zoologia’ is a visual cross-section through the research she collected.

This work represents different aspects of Van Allen’s practice: as an artist and an anthropologist she focuses on the history of science and technology as an object of study. As she researches, designs, and builds various projects, she does not experience these aspects as separate – each is a way of understanding and organizing the world around us through a different lens. For her, these lenses almost always overlap.

Van Allen is interested in the way knowledge is constructed and deployed in and between individuals, communities, and cultures. It is what her work centers around, whether it be the reconstruction of Galileo’s first telescope in exact detail, observing interactions in a synthetic biology lab, or portraits of taxidermy in 18th century natural history museums. Through observation and classification of the natural world, we attempt to know, contain, and control the universe we inhabit. Van Allen’s projects are a series of attempts at transcribing that knowledge construction – to recreate her own scientific methods, collections, and displays that parallel scientific research, both historical and contemporary. She considers her art projects to be collaborations with dead natural philosophers, and her anthropology work as the observation and analysis of living scientists. The ways in which these overlap and intersect provide new perspectives into the construction of art, science, and anthropology.

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Thomas Haag and Martin Webb
(July 23-August 21,  2011)

Artist Talk and Closing Tea:
Sunday, August 21st, 2011 3-6pm
(talk starts at 4pm)

“Making the road by walking” showcases new work by two painters whose work is heavily influenced by their own travel experiences. For both Thomas Haag and Martin Webb the process of creating work is an open-ended process and exploration of images and ideas guided by a mix of strategy, reflection, and intuition. With a nod to the Magical Realists, the work of both artists features humans and animals as protagonists, symbols or metaphors in their oblique narratives.

The roles of the migrant and traveler are central to Martin Webb’s work and this new group of mixed media paintings draws partly from recent time spent in the coastal towns of Senegal.  For some time, Webb’s work has reflected the belief that there’s more that makes us similar than makes us different, and this body of work looks closely at the necessity of work; the desire to travel for opportunity; the centrality of water in supporting our lives. In this new collection of work, an anonymous cast of animals and people play out these ideas to the accompaniment of spirituals and work-songs.

Gathering the symbols, iconography, and discarded materials of the various cultures in which he finds himself participating, Thomas Christopher Haag’s new work fuses various religious and spiritual traditions into a vague contemporary mythology.   Using discarded books and “reclaimed” house paint taken from chemical disposal facilities, Haag constructs multi-layered collaged paintings which reference mythical beings or creatures having a spiritual “event”.  These new works explore the idea of the neo-pilgrim, the modern wanderer and seeker of the vaguely spiritual.

(April 30th-June 5th, 2011)

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Open til 10pm on First Fridays
Artist Talk and Closing Tea: Sunday, June 5th, 3-6pm

The Compound Gallery is pleased to present Jeanne Lorenz’s solo show “American Vinyl”. Jeanne Lorenz‘s fictitious last record store on the planet, “American Vinyl” comes to the Compound gallery. You are invited to rifle through bins of lushly painted record prints, and listen to the images of impasto oil painted records hung on the walls. Each record is laden with seemingly familiar phrases of a dead American moment.“Epic Tomorrow”, “Incandescent Past”, “Finite” and “Infinite” are titles which are found floating freely on the visual music and prompts human response.

Just as the entire musical experience of a record fabricates a multi-dimensional matrix of cultural reality, Lorenz’s paintings equally inspire the viewer to investigate this reality further— drawing us deeper into a familiar, yet lost America.  Lorenz’s use of textures and monochromatic color harmonically produce music for our eyes, and her paintings imbibe the spirit of American pop culture.  The vinyl record simultaneously evokes nostalgia, the fullness of music, and the simplicity of its own image. The unnoticed space between the grooves, which creates and defines meaning, is always in tension with the opaque and impenetrable nature of its surface.

Lorenz’s paintings layer the digital present under our analog past, so that we may witness the evolving technology that circles back to eternal modes of communication.  Fascinated by industrial materials and cast off technology, Lorenz draws round connections between the cosmological engravings of Robert Fludd and the piles of American vinyl destined for the dumpster.  Celestial and circular.

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Closing Tea, Sunday, July 17th 3-6pm

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This exhibition features work by artists who have studios at The Compound. The Compound Studio artists work in a variety of media including: printmaking, ceramic sculpture, painting, woodworking, metalworking, cement, jewelry, and mixed media. All 20+ studios will be open to the public through the duration of the show during business hours.

Featuring the work of: Alison O.K. Frost, Andreina Davila, Annie Frykholm, Crystal Morey, David Spiher, Eric Sanchez, Faye Kendall, Genessa Kealoha, Giles Goodhead, Jeanne Lorenz, Kiera Heiser, Lena Verderano Reynoso, Mary Marxen, Matt Reynoso, Noah Sakamoto, Ryan McJunkin, Sophie Leininger, Stevie Howell, Take Etani, Tallulah Terryll, Thomas Haag, Zach Clark, Zan Truman

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Charmers by Christopher Romer
(March 12th-April 24th, 2011)

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Artist Talk and Closing Tea: Sunday, April 24th, 3-6pm
(Talk starts at 4pm)

Hailed as the “star of the show” by John Hazlehurst of the Colorado Springs Independent, sculptor Christopher Romer’s The Charmers land in Oakland’s Compound Gallery.   For his second show at this venue, Romer takes viewers into an expansive installation of wooden wall pieces—turnings of various shapes and sizes that are painted, sanded and embellished.  Produced over a 10-year period, this is the largest gathering of The Charmers shown to date.

Inspired by the quintessential American artifact, the wooden fish decoy, these  oblong shapes, randomly scattered across the gallery’s walls, recall common features of the natural world and carpentry.  Together, they resemble swarms of insects released from a jar that have landed on the wall, depositing themselves high and low, singly or in sundry clusters.

Made from North American woods, each piece is fashioned from reclaimed material, such as old baseball bats, chair and table legs, ceiling joists, beams, posts, doors, windows and pallets.   Once shaped, a deliberate process of sanding away the paint then produces fantastic patterns and pigmentation.   For Romer, this process is analogous to “a powerful metaphor for the all-pervasive pounding down of life, the harshness of the elements, and the passage of time.”  Paradoxically, this very notion of the harshness, and the ‘pounding down of things,’ supercharges another powerful and constant aspect of these pieces: the sensuous and erotic associations in the rolling curves and surfaces.

Now living and working in Berkeley, Christopher Romer first studied at Chelsea School of Art in England, where he grew up.  He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and later taught and practiced in New York.  Romer is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the U.S.  For more information about the artist, visit www.christopherromer.com.  The Charmers will be on view at The Compound Gallery in Oakland from March 12 through April 24.  Opening reception on March 12, 6-9 pm; Artist Talk and Closing Tea on Sunday, April 24, 3-6 pm.

(January 29th-March 6, 2011)

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OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, JANUARY 29TH 7-11PM
CLOSING TEA: SUNDAY, MARCH 6TH, 3-6PM
(OPEN LATE until 10pm on First Fridays, February 4th & March 4th)

*CLICK HERE to see if we are streaming LIVE*

The Compound Gallery is pleased to present Outside the Box: featuring work by Art in a Box artists.  Art in a Box, The Compound Gallery’s art subscription service,  was established in 2008 and supports local Bay Area Artists.  Art in a Box has sent out over 700 works of art by Bay Area artists to subscribers all over the world and continues to gain subscribers each month. Our featured artists create original works of art that fit inside our 11″x17″x3″ boxes. Outside the Box gives the public the opportunity to see and purchase full sized work by Art in a Box Artists.

Featured Artists: Alex Rosmarin, Alison O.K. Frost, Alissa Goss, Ben Belknap, Clare Szydlowski, Crystal Morey, Giles Goodhead, Jeanne Lorenz, Kelsey Robinson, Kerri Lee Johnson, Lena Verderano Reynoso, Martin Webb, Masako Miki, Matt Reynoso, Patricia Gillespie, Renee Johnson, Ryan McJunkin, and Tallulah Terryll

GRAND OPENING OF ART IN A BOX HEADQUARTERS!

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Held in conjunction with Outside the Box, is the exciting Grand Opening of the Art in a Box Headquarters on January 29th, 2011!  Former behind the scenes action is now on display in our fully functioning retro communication themed headquarters.

Watch interviews, clips, and other Art in a Box snippets on our black and white tube television and listen on vintage Bell Operator headphones, talk on our CB (channel 21) to other local Bay Area folks, read artists bios, and view all the artwork ready to go out to subscribers.  New subscribers can even choose their first piece off the wall! Experience Art in a Box in an entirely new way.

Featured artist: Martin Webb.

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