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pt. 2 Gallery is proud to current a two-person exhibition that includes the work of Isaac Vazquez Avila and Paige Valentine. Primarily based inside San Francisco and Oakland respectively, the 2 artists have solid distinctive aesthetic languages, every pulling numerous threads from cultural, artwork historical past and conventional craft strategies, fusing these with particular symbolic languages all their very own.
As an outgrowth and a type of respite from the artist’s vibrant portray, drawing and sculpture practices, Isaac Vazquez Avila embarks on meandering walks that take him from his reside work studio in Bernal Heights by San Francisco’s metropolis streets and again as soon as once more. Avila’s favourite route brings him down the lengthy stretch of Mission St., previous avenue distributors and fading signage, bustling corners and deserted storefronts. Avila sees the apply of portray in an analogous mild, with a completed portray consisting of a free framework or vacation spot, but fully open and alluring to coincidence and probability guiding the artist’s hand by the method. Working from a potent combination of unconscious and intuitive modes of constructing, but influenced by improvisational drawings, Avila builds work that pulse with power and dynamism. The artist’s largest work within the exhibition, Solar Stoned, is a compendium of earth tones, yellows and oranges, verdant greens and funky pinks and greys all radiating from a central level on the canvas, a tough cranium outlined in white returning a toothy smile. The symbolism of the cranium in all of its sides and references all through artwork historical past are contained inside that easy gesture–the ever current sense of finality and the passage of time underlying. And it’s with this distinction, Vazquez Avila’s wealthy tapestry of colours, wrapping vines and abstracted flowers, transferring textual content hinting on the artist’s signal portray background, all pulsate with a vivacious spirit set in opposition to the cranium in concord.
This sense of contrasts–unabashed exploration set in opposition to the embraces of symbolism and custom, are equally at play inside Paige Valentine’s newest ceramic works. Working at a smaller scale with no piece measuring bigger than a cubic foot, the artist created a sequence of vessels sitting upon structural ceramic cabinets that affix to the gallery partitions. Persevering with with the artist’s investigation of intensive ceramic processes, on this case the custom of soda firing, wherein sodium carbonate is sprayed right into a purple scorching kiln immediately coating the wares and making a bevy of experimental surfaces. The vessels and the occasional canine figurine sit on their very own, with others in-built tandem, handles frozen in interlocking embrace. Valentine affixes photographs to the edges of the pots, these small billboards hooked up in a trompe l’oeil vogue full with ceramic nail heads or staples, sometimes inserting two on both aspect of a pot as in “Tommy’s Horse”, or stretching a picture throughout a number of vessels. The scenes that the artist chooses to color on these clay canvasses at all times trace at a way of private connection and nostalgic sentimentality. Whether or not it’s a portray reproduced from San Francisco’s iconic Tommy’s Joynt, or the panorama as seen from a automobile taken on a drive from Carpinteria to the Bay Space in “6:42 Goleta”. The arduous firing course of burned out loads of the brighter colours within the work, yielding a cooler palette that forces the viewer to note all of the nuances in every ware’s variegation, and gives a gratifying shock after we’re struck with the luxurious colours in a bit like “6:42 Goleta”. And very similar to Vazquez Avila’s work, Valentine’s mixture of ceramic cabinets that really feel industrial in nature, beset with coiled vessels every layered with a special portray or sequence, creates a commanding combination of interlocking symbols and relationships. The works function as vessels not for utilitarian use however for reminiscences, mementos to moments each deeply private and common, every in-built a novel manner by the artist but inviting the viewer to position their very own sentiments inside.
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