(April 25th- May 31st, 2015)

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 25th 6-9pm
Artist Talk with Ben and Kyle: Sunday, May 31st 4pm

The Compound Gallery is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition Gold Rush.  Gold Rush brings together three exceptional Bay Area artists: Ben Belknap, Crystal Morey, and Kyle Lypka.  Gold Rush is a psychological voyage into human emotion that seduces our sense of reality and reveals each artist’s experience of the zeitgeist. Human figures and animals exist together in an intriguing hypnagogic realm.  The application of gold luster (mostly 22k) combined with Belknap, Morey, and Lypka’s noteworthy technical skills bestows a sense of preciousness to each sculpture, as if the work was an artifact from each artist’s consciousness.

Ben Belknap’s detailed illustrations and mysteriously combined glazes create evocative images of people in various states of being. Expressions tell of love, lust, and longing, while the murky undercurrents of vulnerability and hope percolate to the surface through faded depictions and whirlpools of richly colored glaze.  Belknap continues exploring duality of being in this body of work by combining flat and dimension elements, raw and smooth surfaces, and superimposition. Gold luster adds a mirror-like quality, reflecting the gaze back at the viewer, and inviting them to draw parallels to their own psychology.

Crystal Morey uses clay to build figurative sculptures of humans encased in animals. Morey uses delicate and emotive gesture, rich texture, and subdued, sepia tones to create a narrative, which demonstrates her interest in human relationships with natural environments.  Her sculptures are intimate objects that capture current psychological, environmental, and cultural feelings, particularly her concern with the irreversible changes humans have made since the industrial revolution regarding the effects on vulnerable and endangered species.

Kyle Lypka’s surreal sculptures appear as an allegory of human emotion and precious gold luster highlights the absurd, campy, details in his sculptures. Lypka uses various clay bodies and glazes to capture compelling moments from his imagination.  Lypka sculpts both human and animal figures with delightful irony as his sculptures tell narratives as if they were parables from a fictitious reality.