Peter Honig & Kathleen King: The Last Waltz
Photography, paintings, sculpture
 
Exhibition dates: November 6-28, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, November 6 from 6-9pm (in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur)
Artist’s Reception: Saturday, November 7 from 12-3pm

Peter Honig’s photographic images of ragged and intimate assemblages resonate with a nervous laughter. His highly technical, playful, and somewhat morbid artistic activity is funny and horrifying. 

Peter Honig, Dream of Flight, 2009, photograph

In Honig’s universe, the reclining nude is reinvented as a skeletal bird in bed dreaming of flight and a lone wildcat with a head fashioned from a fishing weight rusts in a field of wilted leaves. Inherent in his work is a conflict between the monumental scale of the imagery and the fragmented scenarios of psychological intimacy depicted in his “model worlds”. This reflexive, self-conscious blurring of the distinction between internal dialogues and external realities is a central and recurrent theme in both his sculptural and photographic work.

A native of Boston, Peter Honig has a BA in art history and fine art photography from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.  He has exhibited his fine art widely in the Bay Area, has worked for numerous publications as a photographer, and taught photography at UC Berkeley’s ASUC Art Studio.

Kathleen King is fifty-three years old. She’s losing her balance. Her bones are dissolving. Her ongoing experience with her own vulnerability, as well as with the precarious global future has brought her to the awareness that reality can be measured by objects in the process of change: disappearing and becoming something new. Past work has explored complexity but currently King has begun to make reductive paintings and painted objects, finding the possibilities in an eccentric minimalism. The artist corresponds in earnest empathy with newfound materials—PVC pipe, painter’s tape, scrap wood, spray paint—normally relegated to urban walls, building sites and dumpsters. She seeks to create a material display that makes a poetic connection to the adjustments we all make between present and future.

 
Kathleen King, Future Perfect, 2009, spray paint, wood

Kathleen King was born in Oakland, CA and has a BA in Art from UC Berkeley. Her work has been exhibited locally at Pro Arts, Hang Gallery, and 66 Balmy and is represented in numerous private collections.
 

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in the back gallery...

Jo Ann Biagini, Chela Fielding, Tarra Lyons, Charlie Milgrim: Swan Song
paintings, sculpture, mixed media
 
Exhibition dates: November 6-28, 2009
 
Opening Reception: Friday, November 6 from 6-9pm (in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur)
Artist’s Reception: Saturday, November 7 from 12-3pm
 

Jo Ann Biagini, Black & White, 2009, mixed media

Jo Ann Biagini combines image transfer, drawing and collage to create works on paper that merge multi-layered images with nuanced surfaces. Biagini’s pieces create a visual poetry uncovering connections and relationships among juxtaposed elements from the biological and natural worlds.

Chela Fielding, Oakland Rolodex, 2009

Chela Fielding is a sculptor fascinated by the cast-off elements of peoples’ lives. She conjures up narratives by giving castoffs new identities and inspirations.  Her sculptures speak to the universal experience of our discarded layers and today’s detritus that once was a daily part of our lives.

Tarra Lyons, Morula (detail), oil on panel

Tarra Lyons paints organic abstractions that vibrate with deeply-felt symbol, color, texture and surface to create a resonant visual poetry. Current imagery includes morulas, embryonic divisions, botanical forms, sprouting seeds, tubers, and plant life that emulate structures in animal and human life.

Charlie Milgrim, Piece for Monroe (ladder ball music), 2008

Charlie Milgrim sees the future through a lens of the shaken up past, beyond the precipice of the present. Using materials that would otherwise become landfill, such as discarded bowling balls, Milgrim re-contextualizes them to function as conceptual reminders of delicately balanced or potentially destructive forces both natural and political.
 
Mercury 20 is an artist-established and operated gallery located in Oakland, CA. A collective comprised of 20 members, Mercury 20 exhibits high quality, innovative work from emerging and mid-career artists, and promotes art in the community. Gallery hours are Friday 4-7pm and Saturday, 12-3pm, and by appointment.

Contact: Kathleen 510-701-4620