ON VIEW
August 2 - 31, 2018
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Ala Ebtekar · Alice Shaw · Alicia McCarthy
Clare Rojas · Charles Linder · David Korty
Gay Outlaw · Gordon Bryan · Inez Storer
Jasper Sheff · Joe Roberts · Karen Barbour
Lou Beach · Mary Fernando Conrad
Ruby Neri · Stefan Kirkeby · Todd Hido
Tucker Nichols · William T. Wiley
Curated by Jennifer Wechsler
OPENING RECEPTION
Saturday, August 4, 3-5 PM
Toby's Art Gallery
11250 Highway One
Point Reyes Station, CA 94956
> We're excited to announce pop-up kiosks with art-related items from Gallery16,
Workshop Residence, Chronicle Books & DesignFarmProductions at FAULTline.
Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978) is an artist who works between his native San Francisco Bay Area and Tehran, Iran. Born in Berkeley, California to Iranian activist/artist parents, from an early age, he developed a affinity towards various notions of in-between-ness, which has led him to explore the many spaces amongst the two cultures, both shared and separated, momentary and boundless. Such experiences have evolved into a dynamic practice that disquiets dominant notions of identity and complicates cultural difference. For the past twenty years, he has situated his art practice as a multitude of spaces between and even above.
Ebtekar’s recent investigations have created liminal experiences to longer notions of scientific duration beyond human timelines, in particular cosmic travel & the phenomenology of light. These projects bring forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe gazing back through endless collapses of time and physical reworking of centuries old processes of image making. Ebtekar’s practice extends how our contemporary moments both live together as minuscule and paramount amidst an infinite score of skies and stars.
San Francisco-based artist Alice Shaw has practiced photography for more than twenty-five years. Shaw’s recent work centers around humanity’s conscious effort to be less prone to conquer the environment and more determined to actively preserve the planet’s natural beauty. Inspired by how gold and other precious metals were used in Byzantine art to beautify and revere paintings and icons, Shaw enshrines parts of her black-and-white images with twenty-two karat gold leaf to instill a renewed reverence for nature.
Alicia McCarthy (b. 1969, lives and works in Oakland, California) engages with the immediate world around her and uses a decidedly focused color palette on mixed-media panels. Sincere and intense but also playful, McCarthy transforms found wood surfaces into bursts, geometric blocks of color and woven patterns that are often emphasized by text and spray paint. These “paintings” bear a sculptural weight that is juxtaposed by their deceptively simple mark and image making. Although visually abstract, McCarthy's motifs - a weave or rainbow, for instance - are deeply personal and the works often include an indication of physical presence, such as the ring left by a coffee cup, print from a boot or a note written by the artist.
Charles Linder was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Northport, Alabama. Once the fastest white boy in Alabama in the 100 and 200 meters, Linder later came of age in Los Angeles as a machinist and horse thief while eventually relocating to San Francisco in 1988 where he lives to this day. A fully matriculated former student of the S.F. Art Institute and later U.C. Berkeley, Linder was also a well-known gallerist and bon vivant. Today, he is largely an infamous has-been and heretic ( and hermit ) who lives on gravy from once-sketchy investments that eventually proved wise. He's been an underground art dealer since 1990. He enjoys drawing and painting and collecting shot-up items found in rural firing ranges. You may encounter him in person out road-riding on Mount Tam or if you hunt wild boar in the Hollister hills. Online, he can be trolled on IG @linderisms and @fixgalsf and at a sticky little website of his own name.com
David Korty (b. San Francisco, CA, 1971) received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has shown extensively in Los Angeles, in solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, China Art Objects, Michael Kohn, and LAXART, at Derek Eller Gallery and Greene Naftali in New York, and at Sadie Coles HQ in London. Korty's work has been acquired by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts, Los Angeles, the Judith Rothschild Foundation, and the Rubell Collection. His work has been covered in Artforum, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Modern Painters, among other publications. A monograph of Korty's work entitled Blue Shelves was published by Sadie Coles and Night Gallery in 2016. Korty lives and works in Los Angeles.
In a career of over 25 years, Gay Outlaw has examined relationships of sculpture and picture-making, especially photography. She interweaves formal abstraction with 2-D techniques of illusions, opening up possibilities within traditions of artistic production. While respectful of traditional processes—her practice includes educating herself in lesser-known techniques—the artist delights in subverting the expected result. Outlaw realizes her abstract forms in a challenging mix of materials including glass, plastic, felt, and found materials like pencils or rubber hoses; at times, she has employed food in her sculptures. Even as a fan of minimalism, she offers viewers new relationships to formal art, taking them beyond its past rigors.
Outlaw’s work has been shown nationally with exhibitions at the Sculpture Center in New York; the University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach; Mills College; the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; and San Francisco MOMA, where she received the SECA Award. Her artworks are in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, SFMOMA and the Berkeley Art Museum.
b. 1959 in Washington DC. For over 30 years, Gordon Bryan has been honing his craft in ceramics at Blue Slide Art Tile in Point Reyes. His terra cotta vessels and floreros reflect an interpretation of the ancient cretaceous period when flowering plants spread and thrived on earth. These ornately embellished vessels offer a glimpse into the dream world of geologic time. His work considers the imagined and real, a balance of the interior and exterior life. He lives in downtown Point Reyes.
EDUCATION:
UC Berkeley (BFA)
b. 1933 in Santa Monica, California. Storer taught at the San Francisco Art Institute (1981 - 1999), Sonoma State University (1976 - 1988), San Francisco State University (1970 - 1973), and the College of Marin (1968 - 1979). Storer's work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions consistently throughout the United States at institutions such as the Reno Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Monterey Museum of Art, the Fresno Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Missoula Museum of Art, Montana, and The National Museum of Jewish History, Philadelphia.
Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, the Lannan Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the San Jose Museum of Art, The National Museum of Jewish History (Philadelphia) and de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University.
She studied at the Art Center in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of California at Berkeley, and the San Francisco College for Women, ultimately receiving her B.A. from Dominican University in San Rafael, California (1970). She received her M.A. from San Francisco State University (1971).
b. 1993 and raised in Inverness, CA. Jasper’s work comments on the passing of time and the beauty of the everyday, warping reality, appreciating the broken, and finding composition and art in the mistake. In a comical and playful manner, his work also explores the imperfections of humanity and the reality of a flawed individual. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
EDUCATION
New York University (BFA)
Joe Roberts was born in Madison, Wisconsin. An obsession with comic books, skateboarding, space exploration, and his experiences with psychedelics are an influence on his work. Using anything from crayons and paint, to trash and cut paper, his art combines humor with a raw and spontaneous aesthetic, creating a world of cartoon imagery laced with personal symbolism. Roberts has shown in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Mexico City. He currently lives and works in San Francisco.
b. 1956 in San Francisco, CA. Lives in Point Reyes Station, California.
Karen is a prolific painter and a devoted keeper of sketchbooks filled with the thoughts, observations and drawings she utilizes for reference. Her process leads her to work on many pieces simultaneously, visiting them and revisiting them as they call to her. She is inspired by ongoing dreams and memories, both old and new, and the recollections play out on the paper and canvases like a narrative of her subconscious. The imagery is a surrealist mix of figures and abstractions, fluidly rendered with skillful combinations of gouache, ink, oil and collage.
Karen Barbour has a BA from University of California, Davis; San Francisco Art Institute (MFA).
Lou Beach (nee Andrzej Lubicz) was born in Göttingen, Germany in 1947, the son of Polish parents displaced by World War II. The family immigrated to Rochester, NY in 1951 where he attended public schools. He traveled to California in 1968 and began his artistic career by making assemblage art and studying the Surrealists, visiting galleries and museums, and creating collages from pictures cut from old magazines. He worked during this time in bookstores, as a deliveryman, moved furniture, and ran a punch press and forklift. A road trip across country, ostensibly to travel on to Europe, brought him to Boston where he lived from 1972 until 1979, much of the time as the sexton at the famous Arlington St. Church. There he created collages in earnest and had his first one-man show at the new Boston Center For The Arts, as well as being hired for several illustration assignments. This began a long and successful career as an illustrator. Ten years ago he embarked on a gallery career, garnering praise and having two works acquired by the Musuem of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is represented by galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.
Conceptual artist marfeco (Mary Fernando Conrad b.1961 Maryland USA) believes in the power of the object to contain the idea. Using everyday materials, packaging and plastic, as well as traditional artists materials, marfeco likes to use her own two hands. Her work deals with question about how we live now: what is identity, what is useful, what is valuable, what do we care about. She brings to her work her training as a architect, and her life lived in the US and abroad, as a parent, as a painter, as a person.
She has shown at The Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco and Southern Exposure, San Francisco. She received a BA cum laude in English Literature, Cornell University, Ithaca NY and a MArch GSAPP, Columbia University, New York, NY.
She lives on the faultline with her husband and her dog.
Ruby Neri (b. 1970, San Francisco) is currently the subject of a two-person exhibition, Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri / MATRIX 270, at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through August 26, 2018. Her work is also included in the group show The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Objects | Objects Like Us at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut through January 13, 2019. Neri was the subject of a solo exhibition, Slaves and Humans at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles in 2016. Recent group exhibitions include the inaugural installation at The Bunker, West Palm Beach, Florida (2017); From Funk to Punk, Left Coast Ceramics, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York (2017); NO MAN'S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2015); Fertile Ground: Art and Community in California, a collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland (2014); Energy That is All Around: Mission School, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York (2014); Busted, High Line Commission, High Line Art, New York (2013); and Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Neri lives and works in Los Angeles.
Stefan Kirkeby has extensive experience in handling fine art. He has been framing for almost 30 years. He spent over 10 years at the contemporary art museum Louisiana in Denmark as chief preparator, registrar, and traveling exhibition coordinator and worked closely on exhibitions by artists ranging from Claude Monet and Edward Hopper to Paul McCarthy and Kiki Smith. His extensive understanding of materials and applications enables him to provide unique solutions to any art presentation. Stefan holds a degree in cultural anthropology from UC Santa Cruz. He is also a photographer and has a wide knowledge of the process and conservation of photographic materials.
Todd Hido is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist whose work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Wired, Elephant, FOAM, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Getty, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as in many other public and private collections. Most notably, Pier 24 Photography holds the archive of all his published works. He has over a dozen published books; his most recent monograph titled Excerpts from Silver Meadows was released in 2013, along with an innovative B-Sides Box Set designed to function as a companion piece to his award-winning monograph. Aperture has published his mid-career survey entitled Intimate Distance: Twenty-Five Years of Photographs, a Chronological Album in October of 2016. His next book titled Bright Black World will be released by Nazraeli Press in the fall of 2018.
EDUCATION
1996 MFA California College of the Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California; 1991-1992 Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; 1991 BFA Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts / School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
Tucker Nichols is an artist based in Northern California. His work has been featured at the Drawing Center in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, Den Frie Museum in Copenhagen, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
His drawings have been published in McSweeney's, The Thing Quarterly, Nieves Books and the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. He is co-author of the books, Crabtree and This Bridge Will Not Be Gray.
For over 50 years, Wiley has distinguished himself as an artist who challenges the precepts of mainstream art. His work is not readily classifiable into any movement or stylistic trend. Combining humble materials, found objects, personal symbols, enigmatic texts, and references to art history, popular culture, and current events, he has developed a distinctive style that allows for variety, invention, and subtlety.
Wiley’s practices range from drawing, painting in watercolor and acrylic, sculpture, and printmaking to film and performance. One of the defining hallmarks of his work are the texts and wordplay that accompany virtually every piece he makes. These range from stream-of-consciousness rambles to pointed opinions and critiques, accompanied by inflections of humor through the use of puns, sarcasm, malapropisms, and double entendres. Joann Moser, curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, writes “Wiley has created a body of work that anticipated such important developments as installation art, audience participation, a revival of interest in drawing, as well as the use of humor and language as significant aspects of contemporary art.”
Toby’s Art Gallery has exhibited many of Northern California’s most prestigious artists. Bright and spacious, the gallery features a different artist or collection of artists every month. So come and join us for a glass of wine and meet the artists, or drop by any time to enjoy the current work on display.
