Staff Pick

Lo-Lustre

1167 65th Street, Oakland, CA 94608 (Only one block from our current location) Here are some before photos:[[Show as slideshow]]

Our new address:

1167 65th st
Oakland, CA 94608

Lo-Lusture:
Barbara Holmes
Marie Reich

(February 5-March 14, 2010)

First Friday Reception: Friday, March 5th, 7-10pm
First Friday Reception Streaming LIVE! Click here to view

[[Show as slideshow]]

Opening Reception:  Friday, February 5th, 7-10pm
Closing Tea: Sunday, March 14th, 3-6pm

Barbara Holmes:
The tarnished, stained, devalued, and discarded make a comeback in “The International Color Reference Series”.  These pieces have been plucked-up, rescued, and recontextualized.  For this show, reclaimed cultural objects that lack their original luster are paired with paint chip color samples.  Ever wonder exactly what “Countrified Blue” means, better yet what it looks like?  All, some, or nothing will be explained.

Marie Reich:
This work is about resourcefulness and chance. My contributions to Lo-Lustre were created with found objects, found fabric, and used clothing. Altered patterns, split-ends, and making low or no cost art are direct influences. Making art out of what I have on hand creates built-in limitations, as the supply of a certain fabric is not endless, and helps me take risks, as the materials don’t cost anything.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

 

]]> http://thecompoundgallery.com/2009/12/16/lo-lustre/feed/ 0 http://thecompoundgallery.com/2009/12/15/alissa-goss-tallulah-terryll-march-20-april-18-2010/ http://thecompoundgallery.com/2009/12/15/alissa-goss-tallulah-terryll-march-20-april-18-2010/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:01:41 +0000 Lena http://thecompoundgallery.com/?p=1673 ]]> Round Rhythm

Alissa Goss & Tallulah Terryll
(April 17-May 23, 2010)

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 17th, 6-9pm
First Friday Reception: Friday May 7th, 7-10pm
Tea (Last Sunday of show):  Sunday, May 23rd, 3-6pm

JUNK PIRATE
Pete Glover

(May 29-July 4, 2010)

Opening Reception, Saturday, May 29th, 6-9pm
First Friday, Friday June 4th, 7-10pm
First Friday, Friday July 2nd, 7-10pm
Tea (Last Sunday of Show): Sunday, July 4th, 3-6p

Sculptor Christopher Romer reclaims woodworking.

By DeWitt Cheng
Link to Online Article

Christopher Romer’s “Night Radiant.

Anyone who went gaga over Martin Puryear’s eclectic historicism, stunning craftsmanship, and visual wit at SFMOMA last year should check out Christopher Romer’s small but impressive show, 3AM: Under the Full Moon. An East Bay newcomer, Romer, like Puryear, draws on vernacular subcultures, employing traditional tools, at least in part. But this is no mere artisanship for artisanship’s sake: Romer’s wooden sculptures, which synthesize figuration and abstraction, contrasting the rough-hewn with the polished, make a strong case for informed, disciplined eclecticism.

Romer’s digital-age commitment to woodworking has proven fertile. Novelist Jonathan Franzen (poaching on the art preserve, like the shameless Updike), sees America as a landscape of domesticated lumber, “a riot of wood … whole towns of wood, utility poles hewn from pine trees, towers of hardwood pallets in loading docks, forests of two-by-fours and glades of plywood at every construction site.” “A Bodger’s Bounty” and “Untitled” are wall-mounted sculptures composed of clustered wooden pods suggesting buoys, balloons, grapes, insect eggs, and grains. Their lustrous surfaces are striated through laborious painting, scraping, and sanding to suggest plumage, foliage, and animal pelts. (A bodger was an itinerant woodworker who transformed stands of birch trees in Victorian England into drawknife-shaped, pole-lathe-turned legs, which makers of Windsor chairs purchased. These reclusive rural craftsmen, who lived in wattle-and-daub lean-tos called bodger hovels, were likened to nocturnal badgers; bodging in contemporary slang means doing a job with what is at hand — improvising.)

Romer’s improvisations on the folk traditions of decoy carving, birdhouse carpentry, and barn raising, create “a new world where historicisms collide, erupting into captivating and fantastic forms,” writes J. Susan Isaacs. For Franzen, the works individually and collectively suggest “an unruly and buggy Nature thrusting up through a non-too-solid veneer of civilization … wild things … abuzz with their strange conversations.” The parental pod/potato in “The Woods Are Full of Them,” patched together from various woods, studded with brads, and resting atop a small pallet, hosts a half-dozen excrescent bobbing baby buds, as smoothly enameled in silver and teal as medicine capsules. The “Silver Buds” pieces invoke duck decoys, bowling pins, ratchet handles, and jugglers’ Indian clubs, while the flock of fish forms in the two “Night Radiant” suspended wooden cages, lashed to wooden boulders, combine elegant stylization with a hint of Surrealist menace. 3AM: Under the Full Moon runs through November 15 at The Compound Gallery (6604 San Pablo Ave., Oakland). Tea with artist happens Sunday, Nov. 15, 3-6 p.m. 510-655-9019 or TheCompoundGallery.com

Holidayland is back!
This is the second year we will be joining forces with Blankspace located next door to create a holiday Extravaganza!

This year we are looking to offer more local original artwork, handmade crafty items, accessories, cards, ornaments, tote bags and creative fun stuff.

Holidayland is full of fun, surprises and festive events.  If you or someone you know makes affordable, well crafted items or small affordable artworks and wants to be part of the fun please see the guidelines for submission below.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Send an email to info@thecompoundgallery.com with holidayland submission in the subject line. In the email please include:
1. thumbnail images or links to representative examples of proposed items you wish to sell
2. included proposed retail pricepoints of your items
3. include contact info- first/last name and the best contact email and phone number
4. Please no phone calls for submission, if you have any questions please email at the address listed above.
5. You will be notified by email if your submission has been accepted for inclusion in the sale. Follow-up info will be provided at that time.

PLEASE NOTE: if you are not available during the drop-off or pick-up times and cannot make arrangements for someone in advance to deliver or pick-up, please do not sign up to participate. We cannot store or ship any items, no exceptions.Space is limited so not all inquiries will result in being able to sell at Holidayland.

We will review all submissions to determine if your items/artworks are a good match for our event and audience.

Deadline to submit a proposal to sell in time to have your name included on the card is October 16th.
Deadline for submitting a proposal to be included in the sale (name on website all other collateral materials)is November 1st.

ADDITIONAL INFO:

Sale Dates:
November 27 – December 20th

Drop-off dates:
Thursday, November 12th – Sunday, November 15th, 12-6pm

Pick-up date:
Monday, Dec 21st 4-8pm

Participants do NOT need to be present during the sale, the gallery handles the marketing, sales and installation of items.

ALL ITEMS/ARTWORKS need to RETAIL FOR UNDER $200
Drop-off dates: Thursday, November 12th – Sunday, November 15th, 12-6pm
Pick-up date: Monday, Dec 21st 4-8pm

Artistic collaborations have become increasingly common in recent years as the idea of art as the distilled, hard-won aesthetic honey of suffering worker-bee geniuses has been replaced by a cooler (and possibly more realistic) idea of art as research, or objectified philosophy. With performance and mixed media, teamwork and the division of labor make good sense, and nobody’s ontological survival is on the line any more, at least officially.

This Long Road brings together three ceramic sculptors — Ben Belknap, Crystal Morey, and Derek Weisberg — who met in art school and have worked independently with the figure since then. While their individual styles can be easily discerned in the larger, collaborative pieces, they work together, like musicians playing in harmony or counterpoint. Belknap’s caricatures of a variety of physical types contrast nicely with his colleagues’ trademark figures — prim, skeptical, fine-boned nudes by Morey, and hairless babies or old men, comically melancholic, by Weisberg. (Also on view are solo pieces by each artist, or by various duos.)

Art history meets contemporaneity in these works, some of which recall traditional European carved reliefs, altars and sarcophagi, though invaded, inexplicably, by less-then-exalted modern comic personages. Narrative explanations are up to the viewers, as the titles, e.g., “So Close Yet So Far,” “Forest Families VIII,” and “Into Days Yet Unknown XVIIII,” are suggestively ironic, with their Roman numerals implying obsessive repetition, without being definitive. The large installation that provides the show’s name features more than twenty small works that seem as random and odd as life: heads on stages/shelves or in niches; women with hands sprouting winglike from their shoulders, or extending tendril-like from their necks as fingered bodies. In two untitled works, Belknap juxtaposes surprised-appearing male and female heads that are contained within small roofed cabins; in a similar grouping, three portrait busts set on shelves beneath arched enclosures suggest opera boxes, baptismal fonts, and Renaissance paintings extruded into 3D; and his asbestos-suited oil-field worker stands impassively amid flames that looks suspiciously like jalapeno peppers, an icon of cool (or dumb). In “This Long Road II,” a ruminative Morey heroine stands between two gesticulating Weisberg schlemiels (the Yiddishism is irresistible) while two huge hands offer benedictions; in another, a female Morey Baptism is heralded by a morose angelic Weisberg choir.