Laurie Caird

“Digest: Lingering After a Meal”

Exhibition: July 2024 to September 2024

Digest is dedicated to every person and resource involved in the curated experience of dining – those who farmed and harvested, chopped and simmered, selected the perfect glass; the seeds, the water, the earth. Painting the post-meal tablescape extends the invitation to mindfully absorb the experience – the company, the conversation, the sense memories – everything that made this meal one to savor long after the dishes have been washed.

Inspired by the social media impulse to share photos of eating experiences, Digest captures the moments after the meal, rather than before, intending to provoke conversations with themes of gratitude, resource and labor equity, food waste, climate implications, the transient nature of everyday experiences, and core human needs and connections. Digest builds support and awareness for the challenges facing the restaurant industry and existing food systems; to challenge eaters to consider their own interaction with and impact on these systems.

Natalie Ann Peisl-Turner’s
“Pages of Life”

Exhibition: November 2023 to December 2023

Poetic Art … reflecting the multitude of shared relatable moments that connect us all.

A baring of an Artist’s soul. A sharing and exchange of “Emotions” visually nalong with an excerpt of the accompanied writing that is included with each Work of Art. The various pages on display communicate to the viewer that life has no boundaries, it affects us all in many aspects in different ways and yet none of us are exempt from the impact of it. It’s all about how one chooses to react and respond. How we learn and grow from one another’s experience’s if we allow the exchange.

PETER W. HARRIS’s
“STORYBOOK ENDING”

Exhibition: August 2023 to September 2023

The “Storybook Ending” is about what's happening around us, and how these characters choose to live in a world they must accept because it is the world they have.  I like to capture them having the same familiar moments found in any life.  The offering is an existentialist playground, where the viewer provides as much context as the color and line.  I hope to offer some feeling and conversation for the eyes.

Artist Bio:

Dear Oakland,  I fucking miss you.  I’ve been living in Eugene for three years, and I’ve met some awesome people.  It’s cool, but I think about what we had all the time.  I brought you pictures of the things I’ve been working on, and I hope you like them.  Next I’ll bring them to SD, then to Chico, then to Eugene. I’ve shopped them around a bit in SF, but I’ve made some new stuff for you because I love you.

I am always looking for a reason to come back and see you and hold you in all of my senses.  I love your coffee, I love your late night food.  I love that I can spend a bunch of money on food that is stupid good.  I love that I can get gnarly burritos from the crazy skeleton.  Give me hand pulled noodles, give me wrestling in an opera house.  Give me a massive bike protest.  Give me the Art Murmur, or First Friday, or what’s the difference?  I hear people talk about you everywhere I go.  People love to talk about shit that they have no idea about; these people make me itch.  Give me broken SUV windows in Rockridge.  Give me fresh food and BBQ at Merritt.  Get me lost in the Redwoods.  Give me Summer in November.  Give me Coffee, Amazing Coffee.  Give me a total lack of traffic laws up and down Telegraph.  Give me my old slice of heaven in a tiny bedroom in a shared apartment in Mosswood Park.  Give me Hoodcats.  Put me in a synth pop bar converted from an old hole full of moldy carpets and rotten garbage.  The food, mercy the food.  I want a halloween bar year round.  I want hipsters condescending me while they give me flawless creature comforts.  The Music, lordy the Music.  I want an art deco theater with all of my favorite acts coming through.  Oakland, bring me home if only for an evening.  Everytime I come through, you’re always there for me.  Let me see my family take comfort in the embrace of your hills and side streets.  You keep such good company.  I have been so lucky to have you.  I love you, I miss you, I love you,  I know you know, and you don’t have to care.  you’re so fucking cool.  everytime I visit, you bring me home.

Cecee Penney’s
“Meet My Friends”

Exhibition: June 2023 to July 2023

“I've spent the last season creating these portraits: fictional faces of the diaspora. I've enjoyed giving them names and imagining their stories.

Among this collective you'll find queens, aspiring rappers, a model, a dancer. There's even a rising politician: he seems promising.”

Cecee Penney is an Oakland-based mom and STEM educator.

AKEEMRAHEEM’s
“DAYDREAM”

Exhibition: April 2023 to May 2023

Colorful graffiti art on canvas with a pop-art approach.

Akeemraheem is it Bay Area native graffiti artist with ties to Detroit Michigan. From spray painting graffiti-art on walls to graffiti-inspired art on canvas, Akeem’s style and humor translates well into his art and life. This is art that you normally see on walls and trains, that’s been customized for your home.

Growing up immersed in American urban culture, and an avid fan of hip hop music and art, he began drawing in sketch books and doing graffiti art around the Bay Area with friends and fellow artists. He was heavily influenced by graffiti artist like Cieve from the 640 crew and Dream from TDK. Art for art’s sake is the spirit that keeps him creating.

After college, Akeemraheem began the redundant life of going to work and coming home; rinse and repeat. That was when he realized he needed a creative outlet that nourishes the spirit. So he went with the medium most familiar: spray paint.

His artwork is meant ot be fun and bright in a world full of solemn and serious surroundings. He wanted the unique quirkiness of his art to inspire creativity and you in his fans and supporters.

Nicholas Angel’s
“Let Everything Happen to You”

Exhibition: January 2023 to March 2023

"Let Everything Happen to You" is a quote from a book of poems titled The Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke. The title references medieval devotional books used by monasteries and laypeople to designate the appropriate times for prayer. To the artist, it means a pathway to self-knowledge through indulgence. Embrace the suck, and you will find beauty and wisdom. Nurture your demons. Take inspiration from every source. Cartoons, comic books, and cheesy commercials have formed his aesthetic, and he must allow them to manifest.

Nicholas Angel was born and raised in a rural community in Northern New Mexico. He was a nerd who felt utterly out of place, so he retreated to his inner world. He created a safe place by sketching fabricated realities. When he went to college, he started his art journey earnestly. However, he quickly detoured from fine art to graphic design because he listened to people who warned him of the abject poverty that awaited him if he donned the beret.

He thrived in graphic design as there were always new problems to solve. He had to learn all styles of expression without judgment. The design allowed him to travel and see the things he had imagined. But art was always seen as a trifle. It wasn't until the pandemic brought everything to a halt that he was allowed the freedom from distraction that permitted him to nurture the muse.

Adriana VARCHETTA’s “DARKNESS”

Exhibition: July 2022 to August 2022

Adriana Varchetta's style is inspired by darkness and the destructive nature of humankind. What others traditionally find to be unsettling she examines closely. Adriana translates this imagery using pen on paper. Many of her pieces on display were created while sailing on a research vessel in Alaska.

Adriana recently moved to the bay area after working on a federal research vessel mapping the ocean floor in Alaska. Adriana is originally from Seattle, Washington, and has a masters degree in environmental science. The process of creating her pieces is a form of meditation and healing. Throughout her journey she has encouraged others to draw with her.

Paintings by Adriana Raquel Ramirez

Exhibition: June 2021 to August 2021

“Being merely ‘a painter’ without doubt ensures one status of a far greater weight than being “a woman of color who paints” ever does. How I identify and how I am identified are two very different processes that I struggle with. The tension between the two affects my identity as a woman of color and as an artist. Navigating identity with ‘the master's tools’ is how I undermine the automatic discrediting, through gendering and racializing, of my passion and skill. To question identity, the self, and its ongoing processes as an artist, and as a woman of color, is to advocate for a future generation of artists to have the flexibility to define themselves.” Adriana Raquel Ramirez was born, lives, and works in Oakland, California. In 2018 she received her bachelor of arts in rhetoric and art practice from the University of California, Berkeley.

LARA HOKES’S PAINTINGS & PYROGRAPHY

Exhibition: November 2019 to February 2020

Lara Hoke’s passion for art blossomed early. She began formally studying the figure when she was in elementary school and started painting in oil a few years later. For many years her work explored relationships between people, the presence of technology, and the interplay of the two. Now in her late thirties and a new mother, Lara’s artwork has turned to exploring the objects, people, and places that define her everyday life and this exciting, albeit challenging, new role. In her paintings, Lara explores the overlap of drawing and painting, using the two to build form and space. She uses direct painting methods and often incorporates layers of transparent color to add depth and color complexity. Lara lives and works in Oakland, California.

MICHELLE FILLMORE’S “TOTEMS”

Exhibition: August 10th to October 2nd

Michelle E Fillmore’s paintings are emotional metaphors primarily focusing on her upbringing and experience with mental illness. Her work aims to open up a discussion of mental health and to point out the stigmas and challenges inherently attached to it. She paints as a way to confront her past and finds peace in painting with extreme detail and realism. As such, her work embodies strength and beauty in imperfection. Such subject matter also indicates that challenges and adversity, particularly in childhood, are ultimately opportunities to grow. She strives to pick subject matters with different types of surfaces every time, to showcase her mastery with all textures. Her motivation and objective are to portray her personal insights through paint, charcoal or pencil.

MOLLY KARs’ “When We Were Wild”

Exhibition: June 7th to July 31st

There are many essential traits separating humans from animals and much of the Molly Kars’ anthropomorphic artwork is an exploration of this differentiation between us and them. How we create and sustain relationships, how we communicate, our ability to think abstractly, our biological tendencies, cultural expectations, and social conventions (should we choose to agree to them)—these are the underlying themes that direct each of her paintings.

Elizabeth Zunino’s “Perennial Nostalgia”

Exhibition: April 4th to June 5th

Elizabeth’s pen and ink gardens and oceans meander through playfulness, love, loss, struggle, nostalgia, hope. Bound together by throngs of intertwining flora, fauna, and pattern, her portraits and narratives transfigure and transcend, telling abstracted stories within stories. Collages of line interlock and overlap. Colors define spaces and muddle others. She isolates and overcrowds, flattens and distorts, simplifies and complicates. As she creates her sea of layers, she is swallowed deeper into the souls of the depicted, often becoming neither lost nor found upon completion.

Anna Krumpos's "Shallow Night"

Exhibition: January 2nd to March 29th

About this show, the artist says, "I close my eyes and feel my lungs expanded, the sun turned white, my footprints sunk into the mountain. The things of imagination stand in the flesh – in blue and shadow. There is no clock on the wall, only the rhythm of a swirling heart. The climb is not safe, but it’s good."

AkeemRaheem's "Colors of My Mind"

Exhibition: October 20 to December 21st

These works feature the colors of AkeemRaheem's mind and his love of spray painting those things that pop into it. His art is an expression of his unique and creative perspective.

Stephen Loewinsohn's "Town Geometry"

Exhibition: August 3rd to October 19th

When Stephen started photographing his hometown from the air, he was immediately struck by the beautiful swirling patterns of twin black lines that adorn many of our streets, highways, and intersections. These abstract compositions are created on such a grand scale that they can only be fully observed from a great height. Town Geometry is a reference to “town business” a local expression that serves as a kind of shorthand for all the things that go on in the streets of Oakland. When seen from a new perspective, a kind of stillness and symmetry emerges from what can seem like chaos on the ground.

Lisa Sy's "There and Anywhere"

Exhibition: April 6th to July 6th 

Inspired by the California West, these pieces investigate the negotiation between dual forces: such as the natural versus the constructed, stasis versus motion, and focus versus expansion.

Alise & Jack Eastgate's Collective & Solo Work

Exhibition: February 2nd to April 4th 

This month we feature collaborative and solo work by Oakland-based visual artists, Alise and Jack Eastgate.

Brian Strang's "The Kingdom Is Within"

Exhibition: December 7th to January 31st 

The relationship between the human and natural has been ingrained in our psyches for centuries as an adversarial one. But while each of us leaves footprints on the ecosystem, we exist within it. After all, who is not a part of nature? We must learn to be guided by nature more accurately, to listen to its myriad complexity, its interconnection so pervasive that it exceeds our limitations. We must listen with imagination and follow the ancient elemental poetry of the world, even when it seems perilous. Poetry is encoded within the forms all around us; one only has to look closely to see it.

Tim Walters' "Sentinels"

Exhibition: August 13th to October 31st 

Their purpose may be to bar, welcome, or warn—but they are mute and blank, and can only teach us what we would already know, if we had only known we knew it. “Sentinels” is informed by Tim's lifelong love of science fiction, fantasy, and the surreal, and straddles the boundaries between abstract and concrete, dreaming and waking, intuitive and rational, familiar and strange. Each image is generated by its own computer program, using routines from a software library of Tim's own creation.

Henry Riekana's "See Differently"

Exhibition: April 18th to July 26th 

What does the word “seeing” mean to you? For most people, the first definition that comes to mind is either of our abstract visual sense, or a physical process involving photons hitting cells in our eyes and transmitting signals to our brain. With this work, Henry is challenging the viewer to operate in a realm in between those two extremes, shutting off that analytical part of our mind that is constantly narrating our lives, and allowing the subconscious mind to experience seeing as a sensation.

Erin Crociani's "Dark Elegance"

Exhibition: February 16th to April 5th 

This show is about different pieces of Erin and who she am. Most of the art is inspired by poisonous flowers that she has grown in her garden. These pieces came about from my love of the macabre and visiting the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. I fell in love with their poisonous garden and always wanted one. I found it so fascinating that something so beautiful can kill you.

Rick Oginz Drawings

Exhibition: January 4th to February 15th 

As an artist Rick is motivated by science, technology, and my immediate surroundings. He strivse to articulate place in unexpected ways, and activate the inanimate.

Jenn Leighton's "Waxy Improvisations”

Exhibition: October 7th to November 30th 

These multi layered encaustic works are a result of playing with various papers and images along with stamps and hand cut stencils. The word encaustic comes from the Greek word, enkaustikos, meaning “to heat” or “to burn.” Beeswax melted with resin and pigment forms the paint, and it is applied hot. Each layer of wax must be fused with heat to the layer beneath it. Due to the nature of the medium, the works present themselves with a dream-like quality. “Happy accidents” allows for moments of improvisation, problem solving and ultimately a more interesting and creative finished product.

Carol Aust's "All Together"

Exhibition: July 22nd to October 7th 

I work with acrylics on canvas and wood panels. Through my figurative paintings I endeavor to express the human need for connection and belonging and the obstacles in achieving either. Each individual in my paintings is at some critical juncture of a spiritual/psychological journey.

Radio Free Clear Light's "Two Angels"

Exhibition: March 31st to June 30th 

The Two Angels collection features processed photo-collage compositions which incorporate photos, digital manipulations and visual music. With each piece Radio Free Clear Light attempts to transcend the subjective perception of human form while exploring the fractal nature of consciousness. The various circles within each piece (circles of varying colors, size and density) are screenshots of music interpreted into visuals by a program written by Radio Free Clear Light. All of the music you see was improvised by Radio Free Clear Light.

Summer Romasco's "Happy in the End"

Exhibition: September 3rd to February 17th 

Summer Romasco’s Happy in the End explores common pop culture signifiers - their impersonal monotony, their fluid meaning, and their ability to generate aesthetic pleasure. Her subject matter centers on the most clichéd motifs such as skulls, flowers, and mushrooms. Romasco creates patterns and disruptions by repeating, altering, and juxtaposing these symbols examining the flux of signification with a perspective that is both hopeful and ironic. As an exploration in meaning making, the work rejects delineations between high and low art and high and low culture. Likewise, Romasco’s technique includes both fine art painting and industrial screen printing which results in images that are both atmospheric and graphic.