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Gallery name:  Mercury 20 Gallery
Address: 25 Grand Ave., Oakland CA 94612
Phone: 510-701-4620
Web: www.mercurytwenty.com
Hours: Fridays 4-7pm, Saturdays 12-3pm and first Friday of each month 6-9pm
Contact: Kathleen 510-701-4620

Tarra Lyons:New Work: paintings
Joan Weiss:Reckless Blooms: paintings

Eric Bohr, Margaret Chavigny, Maya Kabat, Laura van Duren:Two by Two: new work

Exhibition dates: October 2-31, 2009

Opening Reception: Friday, October 2 from 6-9pm (in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur)

Reception and Artists’ Talk: Saturday, October 3 from 12-3pm, artists’ talk at 1pm

Mercury 20 Gallery
25 Grand Ave. (at Broadway)  
Oakland, CA 94612

Exhibition dates: October 2-31, 2009

Opening Reception: Friday, October 2 from 6-9pm (in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur)

Reception and Artists’ Talk: Saturday, October 3 from 12-3pm, artists’ talk at 1pm


Tarra Lyons New Work: paintings

Tarra Lyonspaints organic abstractions that vibrate with deeply-felt symbol, color, texture and surface to create a resonant visual poetry. Her imagery includes morulas, embryonic divisions, botanical forms, sprouting seeds, tubers, and plant life that emulate structures in animal and human life. Lyons is fascinated with the coexistence of repetitions and parallel patterns in such phenomena as microscopic cells and plant forms, arteries of traffic and insect trails. Even a paint drip flowing from one end of a canvas to the other creates distinctive patterning that reappears in the veins in the ears of a rabbit or in a marble slab. This interconnectedness of things man-made and natural gives the artist confidence in an overarching plan without human blueprint, and an outside purpose for life’s processes.

Tarra Lyons, Morula (detail), 2009, oil on beechwood panel

Tarra Lyons has a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Boston University and an MFA from California College of the Arts in Oakland. Her work has been exhibited at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA, Oakland Art Gallery and is represented in numerous public and private collections.


Joan Weiss  Reckless Blooms: painting

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.  -Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke

Joan Weiss's recent paintings continue to explore the processes of growth and decay in the natural world. Her large, richly colored works exploit the possibilities of oil on canvas with layers of underpainting and transparent glazes. Packed densely, teeming with plant and flower-derived forms, there is a sense of ripeness teetering on the edge of dissolution. Here nature beckons, and threatens. Beauty struggles with excess, in an overgrowth of reckless blooms.

Joan Weiss, Garden Redux, 2009, oil on canvas

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Joan Weiss received a BFA in Painting from the University of Michigan, and an MA in Psychology from Sierra University. She has exhibited her work locally at ACCI Gallery, Alameda Center for the Arts, and the Berkeley Art Center, and has work in numerous private collections.

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in the back gallery...

Eric Bohr, Margaret Chavigny, Maya Kabat, Laura van Duren:Two by Two: new work

Paintings by Eric Bohr evidence a progression in his work with found objects. Starting with the gentle placement of a single piece of wood, the series moves to a more direct use of wooden planks and finally arrives at a piece made almost totally of found objects with minimal painting. The artist employs new ways of breaking the plane of a two-dimensional canvas, representing three dimensions physically instead of with the traditional manipulation of perspective.

Eric Bohr, Yellow, 2009, painting, wood

Painter Margaret Chavigny works with collage, acrylics, beeswax, oils and alkyd on panels. Attentive to shifting boundaries between order and chaos, intention and chance, knowing and not knowing, the artist creates complex surfaces with multi-layered patterns. Interconnections – nerves, pathways, growth and fragility – are part of her primary vocabulary.

Margaret Chavigny, work in progress

Maya Kabat’s drawings evolve from an interest in language and numbers as systems of symbolic abstraction. Relating to nature and natural laws as well as to the human need to structure and order the universe, these graph-like images play with a fantasy of space-time that is derived from a simple system of mapping words and sayings that express the artist’s search for simplicity, joy, beauty and order.

Maya Kabat  MYBH1, 2009, drawing on paper on panel

Sculptor Laura van Duren works in metal, clay, wood, resin and sugar. Her current work is inspired by Samuel Beckett's 1961 play, Happy Days, in which a woman questions the futility of her existence. In van Duren's installation, a lone ceramic figure emerges from a sea of loose rock salt as ladders made of sugar suspend in the surrounding space. Juxtaposing sugar, salt and human figure, van Duren presents images that imply mortality in the context of a harsh, but also "sweet" world.

Laura van Duren, Ladders, 2009, sculpture

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.   www.mercurytwenty.com