Andrew Moore's recent saturated color photographs continue his documentation of far away places – blending architecture, interiors, ruins, landscape and weather into complex portraits of different cultures. His visual descriptions of Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam capture the paradoxes and anomalies of cultures caught in the flux of time. In each location one sees evidence - through architecture and adaptation – that the grandeur of the past is both an impossible standard to maintain and a decaying back-drop to be converted, remodeled, or exploited for current use. Whether it is a curtain of scaffolding hiding the rehab of a Russian church hidden itself under a blanket of snow or a palatial former grand-room in a steamy, peeling Cuban residence partitioned and reconfigured as a bedroom, Moore’s eye lets us witness the point where romance and art collide with reality and social change.
A large-format color photographer for thirty years, Mr. Moore has taught photography at Princeton University in New Jersey and the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work is included in many public collections including: the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Library of Congress, the High Museum, Los Angeles County Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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Sam Perry’s lyrical wood sculptures demonstrate both his sensitivity to materials and a willingness to let them lead his artistic exploration. Having spent weekends as a child at his father’s shop in Hawaii building and repairing racing canoes, Perry gained an appreciation for manipulating raw wood into forms that has stayed with him. Years later working at a private sculpture park in Northern California, he found an abundant supply of his medium in the park’s dead trees. Perry says, “What interested me about carving fallen trees was that it revealed a chronology, not only in human terms as a yardstick for life, but also as a chronology of the wood’s own history of abundance, injury, and affliction. Imperfections presented challenges that led to innovations in form. …having to adapt and transform a given shape into a new unrecognizable one that alludes to something other than the medium itself…keeps me involved.” In a literal sense, the sculptures are about how one form interacts or relates to another in a formal composition – they become metaphors for human feelings and relationships.
Mr. Perry was born in Kailua, HI; graduated from the former California College of Arts and Crafts with a BFA in 1986 and with an MFA in 1990. He currently lives and maintains a studio in Oakland, CA. Concurrent with his exhibition at the Rena Bransten Gallery is one at the Oakland Museum of California at City Center, Gallery 555 through May 2, 2008. His sculptures are included in California collections of the Di Rosa Preserve and the Runnymede Sculpture Farm.
