Artist Reception: May 11 / 5-7 pm
Jenny Phillips’ work centers on feeling, rather than ideology. Drawn to quietness, subtlety and understatement, her pieces evoke the mood and luminosity that coastal light and organic form inspire. With the interplay of linework, texture and subtle color, her work achieves a balance in simplicity of expression and the rich sensory qualities of encaustic wax.
Jenny has been painting and printmaking for 30 years. She grew up in Eastern Long Island and New York City. Having spent her formative years working as a graphic designer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the combination of theater, dance and music continue to inform her work. A graphic designer by trade, Jenny worked with a variety of design firms before moving to San Francisco, where she launched her own studio. She works and lives in Bernal Heights with her husband and two children.
Over the past four years Jenny has successfully shown her work, in a number of group shows, at Inclusions Gallery. This is her first solo exhibit.
Opening Reception: March 23 / 5-7 pm
Artist Talk: April 4 / 7-8 pm
April Hankins’ abstract work is spontaneous, strong in color, and adventurous in mark and gesture. Her paintings evoke a distinct sense of place, tangentially referencing locale with an evolved and complex palette.
Prior to receiving her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, April Hankins took time from studio practice to initiate and direct the Boston exhibition of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum.
For her work in the Yale School of Art MFA program, Hankins was awarded the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Prize for excellence in painting. Subsequently, she has been twice nominated for an award in painting by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Hankins work is in the museum collections of Yale and Harvard Universities, as well as the print collection of The New York Public Library. Her paintings are in the corporate collections of Pfizer, Inc., and most recently, Host Marriott.
Invited by Le Genie de la Bastille Parisian, Hankins traveled to Paris with a selection of paintings to participate in the collective’s open studios. Upon returning she used photographs taken during her three- week visit to create abstract collages capturing the uniquely beautiful light of Paris.
Through Isha yoga Hankins has learned meditation and traveled twice to South India for intensive practice. The artist observes that meditation increases her awareness of a quiet distancing from thought and perception, in striking contrast to an isolating sense of self, adding an intrinsic dimensionality to her work.
Having lived and worked in San Francisco for over a decade, Hankins’ painting reflects Northern California’s distinctive light and color. Frequent travel provides a contrast of density and mood, further informing her work. Hankins’ process of painting accommodates an altered sense of space, and her painting has become direct, unpredictable and surprising.
Expanded Works is comprised of three Bernal Heights resident artist’s work. Each had shown a very limited, but well received, number of pieces in last October’s show, Inclusions 4 – Art From Within Bernal Heights. We are pleased to have each of them back, offering a much larger selection for you to explore and enjoy.
Pauline Crowther Scott is showing from her latest series, Gardens, Paper Patterns and Structures. Pauline has moved away from painting on canvas and is now layering mixed media on paper. The themes of her work range from organic to geometric. She is implementing use of acrylic paint, tape, stencils color pencil, even linoleum printing. From intimate garden views to a widening scope, including views of the city bridges, her vibrant pieces evoke a sense of familiarity with the neighborhood in which she lives.
Matt Scaroni is showing a series of multi-dimensional photographs. Each piece starts out as a single image. With his eye drawn to spatial contrasts and overlapping elements, Matt hand cuts the image into layers and repositions them back together, leaving spaces between. The layering and depth he achieves with the process help to convey what it is that he likes about the subject, and creates a distinct perspective, which is the signature element of his work.
Susan West is showing photographic images from her Pattern and Two or Three series. With Pattern, Susan chooses several related and strongly graphic images and uses various rules or forms of chance to decide the arrangement and orientation of the images. Though random, the result is harmonious while strikingly graphic. With Two or Three, she chooses atmospheric imagery, all taken under odd weather conditions. She then pairs them together so that the images play off one another creating a dialogue, often reinforcing their atmospheric power.
Inclusions Gallery is pleased to present, San Francisco: New Views on the Iconic, a solo exhibition of new work by photographer Darren Samuelson. In last year’s exhibition, From the Road: experiments in ultra large format film photography, Samuelson captured well known landmarks from across the US with his newly homemade, ultra large format camera. This year’s exhibit will once again feature images taken in that format, as well as photographs taken with various smaller cameras.
Samuelson’s series of San Francisco photographs seeks out cityscapes and landmarks, capturing the detail of the familiar and finding new perspectives on the iconic. This search for alternate perspectives removes the traditional postcard construction of the city. The places, objects, and spaces in this series are ones San Franciscans have lived in and with over time. Lives lived in places affect their state-of celebration, restoration, demolition, or abandonment. In Darren’s photos, familiar images and historical places are tilted, re-scaled, and framed in unexpected ways; everyday views become unique offbeat landscapes; and historical places are captured in states that do not lend themselves to the postcard.
Darren Samuelson is a self-taught photographer who shoots in medium, large and ultra large formats – and always with film. He is Bay Area native who lives and works in San Francisco. This is Samuelson’s second solo exhibit at Inclusions Gallery.
This year marks our 4th annual show devoted exclusively to art created by Bernal Heights residents. Each year the show is comprised of the numerous submissions made by the creative community surrounding the gallery. This year we will be featuring nearly 100 works by 37 different artists. The works are diverse in subject matter, style, size and media including: oil, encaustic, acrylic, watercolor, photography, etching, mosaic, sculpture, letter press, screen printing, assemblage and collage. The work is very accessible, as are their price points. The sheer volume and diversity of pieces make for quite a dynamic show not to be missed. It’s a wonderful opportunity to catch a glimpse of the immense talent and creativity within the Bernal Heights community. Edits: spelling correction – Sharon Steuer, additional artist – Todd Laby.
ARTIST RECEPTION: AUGUST 18 / 5-7 pm
San Francisco artist Qire Ching is interested in the spaces between certain categories of experience such as what lies between stillness and movement, joy and melancholy. He uses images from nature as external reflections of an ever flowing interior process where forces come together in creation of form to dissolve again. Layering oil paint on wood panel Ching creates translucent surfaces. Images appear and fade, delicate and luminescent. He employs pattern as a kind of visual language that transcends mere ornamentation, to express something of the spirit ever present in nature.
Qire Ching was born and raised in Hawaii. He received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MSW from San Francisco State University. He worked in community mental health as well as AIDS services for many years. He has had a longstanding interest in Jungian psychology. He is an analyst member of the C.G.Jung Institute in San Francisco and is in private practice. He has been an artist at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard for the last twenty-five years.
Bay Area artist Sawyer Rose uses glass, metal and LED lights to create glowing, textured lightboxes. Painting with a soldering iron like a brush, she allows hot solder to set organically over thick architectural glass. Behind the glass, layered ink paintings are lit by tiny lights that shine like fireflies or stars. Rose’s current project is a series of lightboxes entitled “NATIVE: California Plants in Glass, Metal & Light.” The show also features a website with details about the California native species in the series. Rose will be donating 5% of proceeds to the California Native Plant Society from pieces depicting endangered species.
Rose was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. She holds a BA in Art from Williams College and is the President of Blackpowder Graphics, Inc, a new-media and design company. Formerly, she was the director of Fothoui Kramer Gallery, East Hampton, NY. Rose’s works have been shown around the San Francisco Bay Area at 111 Minna, arc gallery, and San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau. Her work is in a number of private collections including Parthenon Capital Partners and True Stories Films. This is her first solo exhibit at Inclusions Gallery, San Francisco.
San Francisco artist Kim Smith’s latest body of work, Series for a Better World, encompasses a wide array of global issues. She started the series slowly as an outlet for her frustrations, and to work through some of her fears, concerning the world we live in. As she began to let people see the work she was encouraged, and emboldened in her message, by the nods of agreement she was receiving. The lead piece is what Smith considers to be the most important message – It’s The Planet, Stupid. “In this election year, I wish this topic were foremost on the table.” Though the topic of the work is charged, it is not without charm and subtle humor. Using vintage materials and antique images Smith meticulously and deliberately constructs intimate, thought provoking collage that encourages and inspires the viewer to be kinder to our world.
Smith likes to use antique imagery and text, because it reminds her of her childhood growing up in Germany. As a result of living in and traveling throughout Europe, she is greatly influenced by German and Austrian art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She has earned three college degrees: Design, Economics and an MBA. After an extensive business career, her desire to balance the duality of her left and right brain inspired her to start her own art process. A business owner since 1998, she splits her time between her art studio at Hunters Point Shipyard and her home office where she is a dealer and manufacturer of vintage and vintage-inspired wall décor. In fact, it was remnants from the business that became her original collage materials.
Impromptu closing party: Sunday, May 13 / 3-5 pm.
San Francisco artist Colette Crutcher is probably best known for her large, multidimensional public works. Her career began, however, with two-dimensional works that were shown in numerous in small venues and group shows, through out the city, during the 1980s.
She first broke into public art with a mural on private property, but in a high visibility location, facing the sidewalk on 16th St. near Sanchez. La Madre Tonantsin earned her the Best New Muralist award, from Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center, in 1992. Since then she has collaborated with her husband Mark Roller on a cast concrete relief mural for the Ocean View Branch Library, also on a huge mosaic-clad serpent sculpture in the 24th and York Minipark. She worked with Aleen Barr to create the 80′ high mosaic composite mural on the 16th Avenue steps (at Moraga). Other public works include a series of 100 mosaic panels created for Ping Yuen Housing Project in Chinatown. Another mosaic series, for the Chinese Recreation Center, is due to open this spring. Her public works continue to grow in number and several have earned her numerous honors and awards.
While creating large-scale public works, Colette has continued to draw and paint. Using scrap wood and found objects she developed an ongoing series of wall and tabletop assemblage, pieces she refers to as “constructions.” She also works in paper mache, both for figurative sculpture and in the fabrication of temporary public art pieces (for parades, demonstrations and special events). Her large mosaics are often enriched with handmade tiles and she also creates sculptural ceramics.
Colette is at her best when straddling the boundaries between fine art/decoration, individual/collaborative, profound/humorous, permanent/temporary, monumental/intimate. This show represents a cross section of the diverse media and numerous styles she works in, including paintings, drawings, constructions, ceramics, and two life size sculptures that have been rarely shown.
rss feed
