Exhibition dates: October 6-29, 2011
Oakland Art Murmur First Friday Opening: Friday, October 7 from 6-9pm
Artists' Talk and Reception: Saturday, October 15 from 4- 6pm

 

Kerry Vander Meer: The Space Between

In her first solo show at Mercury 20 Gallery, Kerry Vander Meer uses a multiplicity of images to create intricate mixed media works on paper and wood panels. Vander Meer's images come from varied sources: the internet, magazines, and books to which she has added her own drawings. Elements are fused in a network of color, line, pattern, and intersecting forms. The combination and accrual of narratives, memories, and fragments creates an overall composition that becomes another whole form.

Vander Meer seeks the space between the visual images we are bombarded with every second of every day. To explore that space, the artist looks through, or around, or underneath an organized clutter of information where there exists a greater, larger space of calm. In this body of work the negative spaces are as important as the images themselves.

Kerry Vander Meer was born Michigan and relocated with her family to Marin County in her senior year of high school. She completed her BA in Art from San Francisco State University and MFA in sculpture from Mills College in Oakland. Her diverse work has been presented at museums, galleries, universities and honored with multiple residencies in Spain, Ireland, New York, California and Mexico. Her works appear in collections in U.S., Germany, Spain, Ireland, China, and Japan. 

Image: Kerry Vander Meer, Hidden Treasure # 1, 2011, acrylic on wood panels, 22"x44", photo: Don Tuttle Photography

Charlie Milgrim: Stealth Reverie 

Skillfully re-contextualizing roofing tar paper into a squadron of paper planes, Charlie Milgrim presents an installation that seems to harbor a dark half-life, as if to celebrate its creation is to simultaneously invite its demise. The artist points out that so many of the policies in our "democracy" are decided behind closed doors. She calls them "stealth" decisions, as the people don't know what's coming down until it's too late and we find ourselves neck deep in debt with an environment completely compromised. The dreamy success of all these deceptions is the stuff of Milgrim's reverie.

Charlie Milgrim was born in New York City. She received a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MFA from UC Berkeley. She has exhibited her work at OK Harris Gallery in New York City, the Oakland Museum, the Haines Gallery in San Francisco, Works Gallery in San Jose, and has work in many private collections including the Di Rosa Collection in Napa, CA. Her studio is in Berkeley, next to the railroad tracks. 

Image: Charlie Milgrim, Tar Paper Planes (detail), 2011, tar paper, 4'x18"x6", photo: Charlie Milgrim

Julianne Wallace Sterling: New Work 

Julianne Wallace Sterling paints about the realities, complexities and absurdities of life as a woman. With bittersweet humor she explores the places where the gender conditioning of youth rubs up against the expectations of being a woman, wife and mother. Drawing from the rich history of portrait painting, the artist creates a likeness but also muses on cultural norms and ideals of women. Sterling's paintings are about little secrets women keep to themselves. As Cornelia Otis Skinner said "...Women keep a special corner of their hearts for sins they have never committed."
 

Born in Southern California, Julianne Wallace Sterling graduated from UC Riverside with a BS in Economics and pursued post-baccalaureate studies in art at San Francisco State. Her work has been exhibited at Dacia Gallery in New York, A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato and Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland. She was recently awarded first prize at Marin Museum of Contemporary Art's 2010 Juried Annual.
 

Image: Julianne Wallace Sterling, Barbara (Day), 2011, Oil and graphite on panel, 36" x 36", photo: Julianne Wallace Sterling