Reception: Thursday, April 9, 5:30-7:30PM
Tara Tucker's exhibit, Foreign Relations, consists of highly representational graphite drawings on paper and an equally detailed textile "drawing" that open a window into the future. Her subjects are new world life forms that have evolved together to survive climactic and environmental changes or some global catastrophe. They are also, Tucker admits, self-portraits incorporating her personal history, relationships, and experiences that may find thematic parallels in the human condition - both emotional and physical. The "humanity" of these melded plant and animal life-forms is reflected in their eyes, postures, and situations. Because of Tucker's exquisite hyper-real draftsmanship, her creatures are convincing harbingers of a post-apocalyptic world, and coupled with her logical symbiotic connections, they have the discomforting veracity of documentary photographs.
Tucker was born in Santa Barbara, CA. She received her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. Foreign Relations is her second solo exhibition at Rena Bransten. She has had solo exhibitions at the Musée d'Honeur Miniscule, New Langton Arts, San Francisco, and OSP Gallery in Boston. Tucker's drawings and sculptures are in group exhibitions currently at the de Saisset Museum's Natural Blunders show in Santa Clara through this month and at the Gatehouse Gallery at the di Rosa Preserve's (un)Natural exhibit in Napa through June 13. Tucker currently lives in Berkeley and is an art instructor at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, CA.
Marci Washington's lush paintings in Dark Mirror work on several levels to build suspicion and to enhance an ominous sense of discomfort and crisis in viewers. She achieves this by depicting ghosts, haunted houses, vampires, dismembered limbs, bloody scenery, and an assortment of sallow young people who serve as metaphors for serious social ills. Washington's model for a doomed society was Edwardian England whose rigid social norms and repressive imperialist vision sparked its decline - a situation Washington feels is mirrored by a present-day America stricken by the same ideological "curse". Her Edwardian era characters and romance novel format allow Washington "to construct an allegorical tale capable of challenging the simplistic cultural narrative of our own time in order to reveal a much darker tale of moral decline, spiritual crisis, and rampant anxiety, all lurking beneath the siren song of material desire fueling the "progress" of a capitalist society in decline."
Washington received her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. This exhibit will be Washington's first solo show at the Rena Bransten Gallery but her work was included in the group exhibition, Dreamscapes and Cream - From the Top at Arts Benicia, last year. Washington currently lives and works in Oakland, CA.
