Winter Salon 2010 :: Mark Leibowitz

Winter Salon 2010. Mark Leibowitz. You Don't Say, 2009. AP (Ed x/5) 48 x 62 in.

Winter Salon 2010 :: Nicole Schmoelzer

Winter Salon 2010. Nicole Schmoelzer. Staining 132, 2010. Oil, ink on linen. 60 x 55 in.

Winter Salon 2010 :: Eugenia Pardue

Winter Salon 2010. Eugenia Pardue. Anne of Bohemia, 2009. Acrylic on panel, 36 x 36 in.

Winter Salon 2010 Opens Nov 2

Micaëla Gallery is pleased to announce the Winter Salon 2010 exhibition of artwork by artists Kathleen Elliot, Grant Garmezy, Scott Kildall, Mark Leibowitz, Silvia Levenson, Prema Murthy, Eugenia Pardue, Lorraine Peltz, and Nicole Schmoelzer.

Opening with a private reception co-hosted by Leibowitz and Ruinart Champagne (a Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy company), the exhibition presents work unified by ideas of extravagant beauty and thoughtful indulgences.

Images by California-based photographer Mark Leibowitz's portfolio, an ongoing series titled, "Backstage" will be featured collaboratively with Ruinart (LVMH) and Whitewall Magazine at his introduction to Art Basel Miami at the Betsy Hotel on December 2. Plan to read Whitewall Magazine’s post-Art Basel Miami commentary.

The Winter Salon 2010 opens for viewing November 2, 2011.

We're very excited that Mark Leibowitz joins us for the reception on Thursday, November 4, from 5 to 7.30 pm. We hope you will help us welcome him and discuss his globe-trotting work for the fashion avant garde and haute couture houses such as Vogue and Galliano.

You won't want to miss seeing Leibowitz’s exquisite images, so please mark your calendar now.

Scott Kildall is at Eyebeam

On October 13, Scott Kildall began his two-week residency as Eyebeam's guest reblogger. Among other things, he will conduct a brief study of common points along a number of disciplines, including art interventions, astrophysics and virtual worlds. He will examine concepts of 'space' and its understanding (and change) over the last 10 years. Wow. The complete compilation of one of his works, 'Video Portraits,' is on exhibition as part of our Winter Salon 2009 through January 2, 2010.

David Yun

David Yun examines how photography and video alter the content and manner of our memories. Three intertwined, unique bodies of work comprise his study, and mirror the three stages of memory: "Encoding", "Storage", and "Recall".

"Encoding" examines the first stage of memory making. David erases most of the background in select photographs, allowing the photo's subject and a hint of where they are to remain, suggesting our reliance on photographs supports our memories. In "Storage", David isolates single frames from found VHS home movies, and uses the premise that we assume our memories are eternal (but our lives inevitably change and our relationship with the memories change as a result). For example, why would a home movie of a wedding or the birth of a child lose its value? David creates a visual metaphor to memory by exploiting the low fidelity and short lifespan of found VHS tapes, and using selected, photographed pieces of the tapes where information began to degrade. His choices and retention of select parts of the original tape, become, like a memory, remnants of the original event. The images impart an illusory feeling of something universal and familiar, like a common memory. Finally, with "Recall" David studies the idea that organic, unadulterated memory is impossible to achieve, because anything we recall from our past is inevitably colored by experience. He seems to say, "We store memories, that change over time, and are affected by the relationships we create from one memory to the next." David illustrates this process of recall with a video installation of a floating screen, that could be viewed from all sides.

David's strength in video lies with his choices of imagery. He consistently shows beautiful and lyrical images (previous videos: "Hug", "Flowers") that flow seamlessly one from the other, creating a strong visually pleasurable experience. His successful achievement of this experience is repeated with "Recall" - a quiet video, a collage, of images that could have come out of anyone's family archive. And while the floating screen seems a gimmick, it's minimal and sensitive to the slightest movement of air. The result is a video presentation of sweet, softly moving images pendent on the environment - much like our memories.

Thomas Scoon, Ron Starr

Thomas Scoon creates figures from sequences of stone and cast glass. Arising from the external landscape where he lives, which is filled with remnants of stone walls and random boulders too large for men to move, he gathers stones from quarry rubble and from New Hampshire neighbors and friends who allow him to choose stone from their land. His sculpture, combined with these “found objects,” suggest human figures and evoke the feeling and gesture of human forms. Thomas claims he does very little to the stones, and that is probably true, but his choices of rock - to find the pieces that most resemble a human head or torso - prefaces his sculptural vision, as he emphasizes qualities he believes are already naturally present. Use of kiln-cast glass around the stones allows for qualities of light, and a certain spiritual element, to pass through the forms.

In contrast, Ron Starr takes a freestyle approach to his work, enjoying the organic nature of sand and its 'magical' transformation into glass. Ron's work - highly gestural - results from years of study with high-fired ceramic methods. Exuding fluid energy, Ron exploits the properties of glass under intense heat to produce richly decorated surfaces that are imbued with particular dark attraction for their shape, color, and organic texture. Inspired by nature's trees, and perhaps in response to global concerns of our forests, Ron's work can be read as allegorical to ancient tree forms - illustrative of certain decay, watery light - and possessing mythical power and vigor through his expression of gesture, ideas and process.

We close our inaugural Winter Salon 2008 with many, many thanks to all our artists, with pride and a warm au revoir to our new friends at our new home! We look forward to seeing you again, and again, at our new home and abroad!

Google Gremlins...Grrrr...Good News and Scott Kildall

Look! Yes, I know, we're back 'on' ... thanks to the confluence of puzzled emails from readers asking why a password was necessary to read our blog, it's finally free from the bonds of password protection! Sure, I might like to say our blog is the exclusive domain of those of us who know where to find it (and it is), but it will never be password protected. So, what happened? As anyone close to me knows, I'm a gadget freak. The latest tech toy is putty in my hands - the world could be in meltdown mode while I ply the secrets of the new. My confession: seduced by the promise of Google's new slideshow widget, I embedded it to David Ruth's latest blog entry. Voilà! The &%^*# widget caused the entire blog to acquire password protection status. That widget is gone, and David's new slideshow is up.

Last week, Linda Goldstein, Randy Strong and Susan Longini led a fabulous visit from about 20 members of GLANC (Glass Alliance of Northern California) to our Winter Salon 2008. Present to speak about their artwork were David Ruth, Michelle Knox, Gary Clemenceau and Scott Kildall. I am happy to write that members were impressed with discussions presented by our two artists present who don't work in glass - Gary Clemenceau and Scott Kildall. A recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in Art and Technology Studies, Scott discussed his video, Future Memories, and his work intersecting media culture with human memory. Using appropriated material to bend rules of consent, his artwork depicts collapse between what is simulated and real, and expresses desire for human connections by changing media landscapes. Scott employs Second Life - an online world with simulated physical space - for artistic inquiry by remediating iconic performances and realizing 'imaginary objects' as paper sculptures, the resultant collision of traditional and new media become hybridized into a new artform where human emotion and memory are expressed in a new topography.

and yes, Hillary Clinton was confirmed as Secretary of State by our Senate.

Kristiina Uslar

Last night was an opening reception evening for many of our neighbor galleries (our building hosts openings on the first Thursday of the month regularly - making it easy for everyone to find the party!). As a result, even though we weren't hosting a reception for our current exhibition, we love a party and want to be good neighbors, so we stayed open a little later than usual ... wow ... what a crowd! Is it the après-holidays effect, or is everyone just tired of groaning about the economy? It was neither ... just lots of lovely, lovely crowds of art aficionados browsing every beautiful artwork by every gallery on every floor of our gallery-packed building!

Kristiina Uslar's work was a consistent favorite with its visual play of exquisitely delicate appearance (it looks like lace) and obvious industrial inspiration. Working in pâte-de-verre (literal translation: Fr. glass paste, it is actually a very fine grained leaded glass medium), Kristiina sculps her forms in a classic manner: creating a wax sculpture, a mold, rendering the wax, and pouring the pâte-de-verre into it before kiln-firing the work. The resulting sculpture, in the refined hands of this Estonian artist (yes, she lives and works there), is an object that is immediately recognizable as an industrial turbine of some sort, but has such fragility one wonders if a breath of air will make it move, or blow away ...

Michelle Knox

Michelle Knox is a New Jersey native who relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1997. She attended and graduated from The California College of the Arts in 2000. Michelle won both the Saxe Family Scholarship for Pilchuck Glass School and the Richard Ritter Scholarship for Penland School of Crafts. Most recently, Michelle was nominated for the Corning Award from Pilchuck Glass School, after a session as an Artist Assistant in the summer of 2007. Over the past several years, she attended other glass institutes such as Public Glass (San Francisco), Urban Glass (Brooklyn), and BAGI (San Jose). In 2008, she won her first Public Art grant with the Richmond Art Center, to produce a permanent public art piece in the city of Richmond CA. Michelle is currently the Executive Director at Public Glass in San Francisco. She is emerging into her career and shows locally throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Some of her venues include the Oakland Museum, The Museum of Craft and Design, and the National Liberty Museums’ annual auction, along with other fine art galleries. Trained classically as a glass blower, Michelle has recently ventured into sculpturing and painting on glass. She has several different bodies of work that have multiply ranges of topics and materials. She states, "The motivation behind making my artwork comes from a deep-rooted desire to affect my world and create a positive sense of self. I completely enjoy the feeling that creating something unique brings to me. I choose glass as a medium because it is so alluring, so fragile and so representational of the human condition. The combination of material in my work allows me to play on the tension and fragility of glass as a metaphor and the rigidness of metal as a foundation to balance that fragility."

Naoko Okabe

Born in Japan and now a San Francisco resident, Naoko Okabe's porcelain sculptures carry a fascinating appeal, imbued as they are by their maker's philosophies of life. In her statement, Okabe states she is the destroyer and healer, using classic teddy bear forms because of their inherent representation as messengers of our childhood memories. For reasons that seem very personal to the artist, she perceives the act of art making as a redemption from the 'bad' aspects of her life for which she suffers guilt. The resulting sculptures, in their forms and in the process of art making (from concept to firing to destruction, and occasionally, the video recording thereof) become a cleansing, soothing and balancing activity.

A newly graduated MFA student from the California College of Art, Okabe's work is fragile, but possesses considerable universal visual appeal, transcending the delicacy and fragility of her sculpture.

David Ruth

David Ruth's excellent adventure in the Antarctic was chronicled in an interview published in a recent GLANC newsletter by San Francisco Bay Area glass artist Susan Longini, where he humorously details the voyage from receiving a national grant, to the company of filmmaker Werner Herzog, to the minutiae of daily south pole life.

To hear David's story (read his blog), the Antarctic was a veritable mine of artistic influence that resulted in a new series of sculpture based on the Antarctic ice, where form and color are pure and (forgive the pun) glacial. This collection of work, and first issue of David's work in a limited edition series (nine per casting), remains true to his formalized tradition of forming an inner work captured within the outer confines of his sculpture, and is spectacularly imbued with light, as he captures spectacular, glittering optical effects rendered by labor-intensive polishing (and decisions where not to polish). David's concept behind the series studies and delivers samples of crystalline formations found only in the rarest circumstance, and demonstrates what may forever be lost under changing planetary conditions. Two works from this series, Norsel and Gamage, were recently shown to considerable acclaim at SOFA Chicago 2008 and our newly launched Winter Salon 2008. Bravo, David!

Chantal Royant

As the new kid on the block at 49 Geary Street, San Francisco's reputed den of art activity, our introduction of glass sculpture to art aficionados continues to draw surprising response - from congratulations to outrageous curiosity. For our first Winter Salon, a group exhibition of blown and kiln-fired sculpture, digital art, and video, one of the artists whose work has elicited some of the most interest is Chantal Royant.

Born in France, Chantal Royant's work infuses personal philosophies and poetry, creating a lyrical visual work, dynamic with color, drama, and form, yet infinitely delicate. Chantal's work possesses fascinating exchange of light and optics, which forms the sculpture within a sculpture, a classical hallmark of polished cast glass artwork.

Questions about Chantal's work range from the ubiquitous, "What is it?" (It's kiln cast lead glass, commonly known as crystal), to "How did she achieve such a distinct bubble pattern?" (The bubbles are formed by gases trapped during the kiln-firing process).

According to her editor, Edith Herlemont-Lassiat, Chantal's sources of inspiration are infinite and permanent, everything brings her back to the creative act: a moment of particular light, a work of art, an emotion, a look, a promise of beauty. Nourished by childhood in Brittany and memories of granite and rain, the paradox between materials and matter influence an attentive sensibility of space. Presenting contrasts of shape, color and clarity in tandem with formal presence, Chantal's work of highly polished sculptural mass is belied by effervescent air bubbles suspended in surprising clear forms. Strands of glass thread in unlikely silken weavings, colors are saturated or transparent, always intense - her sculpture, with its definitive interior and exterior shapes, capture a moment that is forever suspended in light and delicate space.

David Yun

David Yun's work was shown with great interest Bridge Art Fair New York and Miami, with Micaela Gallery this year, and he is rapidly climbing the ranks of young video artists to watch on collectors' lists. He will show his work, with Gerald Cannon and Jenna North, at Micaela Gallery next month beginning January 20. His work will also be included in an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. You can see his piece "The Pain with Being Thirsty" on display starting at the end of January.

I Do It For My People (January 23, 2009 – March 8, 2009) - The Museum of the African Diaspora's new exhibition, I Do It for My People, examines how contemporary artists articulate demands and issues unique to their groups: ethnic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, and religious. Issues specific to people of color serve as a starting point as we draw connections to concerns of other minority groups. Within such a rich and complex society, we must reach outside our own silos to both understand ourselves as well as seek a broader view of the people and cultural values of our world.

The jury at the Alternative Film/Video Festival in Serbia recently chose Yun's piece "The Pain with Being Thirsty" for the List of significant achievements of the festival. The award includes the right to realize a new film/video produced by the Academic Film Centre (AFC) with full use of all production facilities and technical equipment. The authors will be provided with accommodation and restaurant service within for a period of 1 month. Their awarded films/videos will be published on the non-commercial DVD ALTERNATIVE FILM/VIDEO 2008.

In addition, Yun's work has been showing regularly within the Bay Area and around the world. Here is a partial list of recent screenings of Yun's work:

- 22nd Stuttgart Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media Stuttgart, Germany,

- Platforma Video 8 Athens, Greece ;

- Jordan Short Film Festival Amman, Jordan;

- 21st Dallas Video Festival Dallas, Texas;

- 6th Detroit Docs Detroit, Michigan;

- 2nd Oblo Film Festival Lausanne, Switzerland;

- Document 6 Glasgow, Scotland;

- Austin Asian American Film Festival Austin, Texas.

His work was also included in the film/video screening at the 10th APAture Festival of Emerging Asian Pacific American Artists which took place at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Yun was recently the recipient of the annual Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship awarded by the San Francisco Foundation to the most promising MFA students in the Bay Area. As a result, his Digital Scratch Films were included as part of the Immediate Future exhibition at the SF Arts Commission Gallery this fall.

Gary Clemenceau

Gary Clemenceau's successful gallery debut last summer was a precursor to our first Winter Salon (2008) and his first exhibition at Bridge Art Fair in Miami earlier this month. A prolific artist, his work is based on digital media and complicated (and dangerous, he tells me) electromagnetic and engineering processes. A trained photographer, Gary manages to create consistently irresistible visuals compelling the viewers' approach. His first series, 'City of Glass', presented squares of electric, saturated colors printed on archival papers and sealed within a slick matrix of polished polycarbonate (I think that's plexi) and aluminum. For the Winter Salon, Gary presents a concurrent series, 'Tough Audience,' a sinister world where pseudo-figurative shapes are dark, menacing, and an undercurrent of oppressive control pervades.

Winter Salon 2008 Opening Reception

Micaela Gallery's inaugural reception of Winter Salon 2008, and of its new home at 49 Geary, was a fabulous success! Attended by collectors, artists and a surprising number of gallery followers, the reception featured local San Francisco Bay Area artists, Gary Clemenceau, Naoko Okabe, and David Ruth's presentations of their newest works to the public. (images: Opening Reception, 12.04.08)

Micaela Gallery began its Salon program in the summer of 2005, to offer invited artists a curated exhibition venue and promote an active exchange of ideas in an informal setting. As the Salon d'Ete grew, Director Micaela Van Zwoll expanded the Salon program to offer a broader, more formal direction featuring contemporary fine art emphasizing conceptual artwork in drawing and digital art, glass sculpture, paintings and video art. Invited artists share a commitment to conceptual discipline, formal methods, rigorous process, and mastery of their chosen medium. Today, Micaela Gallery hosts COLD+HOT and Winter Salon - two annual group exhibitions that introduce, and open, the gallery's following program season. (images: Winter Salon 2008 installation view)

Happenings...exhibitions, art fairs, news...

Stig Persson's opening reception was a wonderful success! For more images of the reception, please click the image below. Alan Bamberger took some beautiful images and comments that Stig's work, while possessing an industrial aspect, captures a strong aesthetic. Many thanks, also to Niels Agersnap for his opening and installation photography, now online, too.Other news, the gallery is a hive of activity lately, with kudos to Lorraine Peltz for her successful exhibition, 'Ahh... Decadence!' with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Curated by Lisa Wainwright, Lorraine's work graced the catalog cover and her painting, 'Grape Punch, 2008' continued 'the chandelier motif as a symbol of splendor and privilege, decadence's handmaidens.' (Lisa Wainwright, Ahh... Decadence, page 14).

Ivan Mora is wrapping up a commission of his corset sculpture for one of our favorite clients in Baltimore, and Taliaferro Jones is in New York espousing her beautiful ideas to fledgling glass sculptors. David Ruth is polishing (literally) up his entries to SOFA Chicago 2008...and we're preparing for our first Winter Salon 2008 (replacing our former Salon d'Été, opening November 15) and Bridge Art Fair, Miami Beach.