Tara Tucker - John Bankston
dal 4/1/2012 al 27/1/2012
Segnalato da
4/1/2012
Tara Tucker - John Bankston
Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco
Two exhibition. Tara Tucker "If wishes were horses..." consists of drawings on paper and paintings on hand-woven linen and John Bankston "Smoke and Mirrors" features new paintings and small sculptures.
The Rena Bransten Gallery will host two exhibitions opening December 15, 2011 through January 28, 2012. Tara Tucker: If wishes were horses... will consist of drawings on paper and paintings on hand-woven linen and John Bankston: Smoke and Mirrors will feature new paintings and small sculptures.
While Tara Tucker's new works continue to showcase her rendering skills in both graphite and acrylic paint, she has broadened the metaphorical base of her animal characters. Instead of mutating and merging with the plant kingdom to enhance survival opportunities, they now represent human emotions, the artist's autobiographical experiences, and an awareness of the importance of proportion in balancing wants and needs, success and failure, risk and progress.
The title "If Wishes Were Horses..." refers to a frequent admonition by Tucker's mother in response to her childhood requests for anything considered too out of reach or too outlandish. In the drawing that inspired the show's title, a miniature horse is her emotional stand-in - an "oddity" bedecked by friends (the spider monkeys) braiding her mane as she awaits her transformation into a beauteous creature. The hope that embellishment and clothing would transmogrify insecurities seems ironic to the adult Tucker who acknowledges the existence of a global industry promoting not only the "fashion is art" concept but also the transformative powers of designer clothing. In her raw linen pieces (hand-woven by artist Valerie Gnadt), Tucker has the spider monkeys fashioning exotic plants into stylish jungle couture and modeling the results.
Tucker was born in Santa Barbara, CA. She received her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland. Recently her work was included in Animal Instinct: Allegory, Allusion, & Anthropomorphism at the John Michael Kohler Center in Sheboygan, WI that ran from September 2010 through July 2011. Also this year, she was selected as participant in the JB Blunk Residency program for artists in Inverness, CA. Tucker lives in Berkeley and is an instructor at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, CA.
John Bankston's sculptures and paintings begin a new chapter in his on-going narrative of life in the Rainbow Forest. The story picks up as the creators of the Abstracticators (machines invented to transform whoever looks at them) find their inventions have taken on a life of their own and are growing in both size and number. With this proliferation, inhabitants of the Rainbow Forest begin sprouting huge beards and big hairdos. Are the changes mutations caused by smoky pollutants from the machines, or distorted reflections from their mirrors, or a disguise?
Bankston does not answer these questions, but brings them up for us to ponder. Inspired by a visit to the Sloss Furnace, an old steel plant in Birmingham, AL, Bankston imagined the plight of steel workers laboring amongst enormous machines in the hellish heat of molten steel compounded by the heat of a racially charged South. He started thinking about the workers, literally and metaphorically, caught up in "a machine." Besides advancing his narrative, the giant mechanisms also allowed him to expand his visual vocabulary, explore new shape-making, and work out ideas about space and depth within the picture plane and in 3-D. Combining abstracted elements with figures added a satisfying complexity to both his narrative and the images.
Bankston was born in Benton Harbor, MI and obtained his MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL. Recent exhibitions include Watching Hands: Artists respond to KEEPING WELL at the David J. Spencer CDC Museum in Atlanta, GA, the SECA Anniversary Exhibit at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, and 30 Americans at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. He currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA.
December 15, 2011 - January 28, 2012
Reception: Thursday, January 5, 2012 5:30 - 7:30 PM
Rena Bransten Gallery
77 Geary Street San Francisco USA
Gallery hours are Tuesdays through Fridays 10:30 to 5:30 and Saturdays 11:00 to 5:00
Please note that the gallery will be closed for the holidays from December 22, 2011 through January 2, 2012.
Admission free