Léonie Guyer, Wayne Smith, and Lynne Woods Turner | Flower(s) in Concrete
Fourteen30 Contemporary
March 11, 2018, through April 21, 2018
Opening reception: March 11, 2018, from 11 AM—1 PM
Fourteen30 Contemporary hours: Friday & Saturday 12—5 PM
EXHIBTION INFORMATION
Fourteen30 Contemporary is pleased to present Flower(s) in Concrete, a group exhibition featuring Léonie Guyer, Wayne Smith, and Lynne Woods Turner. Drawing heavy inspiration from the work of concrete poet Mary Ellen Solt, the show will run March 11, 2018 through April 22, 2018, with an opening reception Sunday, March 11, 11 am to 1 pm.
Best known for her collection “Flowers in Concrete” (1966), Solt’s poetry braids both the literal meaning of words and their visual qualities on the page, occupying a place between poetry and visual art. The artworks in this exhibition occupy a similar place by approaching poetry through quiet abstraction, playing with the roles of media and materials, and the mark made by the artist’s hand. The exhibition is particularly inspired by Solt’s poem “Dogwood: Three Movements”, in which she manipulates the form of the word “dogwood” to evoke the shape of the flower itself, and examine the ways in which that word and that flower live in space. Flower(s) in Concrete will mirror the poem’s second movement by placing the artworks along a shelf that wraps around the entire gallery, so that they resemble notes on a staff, music on a sheet, linear and rhythmic.
Léonie Guyer’s paintings, drawings, and installations consist of diminutive, esoteric shapes surrounded by vast, still, white fields. These forms, reminiscent of familiar, but unnamable silhouettes, distill the space around them, becoming formal representations of the energetics of the environment they inhabit, barely containing them. For Flower(s) in Concrete, Guyer has created several paintings on marble, in which the paint seems to be absorbed into the substance of the marble itself, as if the image were inherent to the material. Guyer’s work is currently on view in Way Bay at the Berkeley Art Museum, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally, at Feature Inc. (New York, NY), lumber room (Portland, OR), Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College (Portland, OR), the Shaker Museum (Mount Lebanon, NY), PLUSkunst (Düsseldorf, Germany), and other venues. She is an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts, and has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California at Berkeley.
For this exhibition, Wayne Smith has created a series of small ink drawings on wood. Smith uses a repetitive grid-based approach to mark-making, developing carefully crafted, monochromatic forms, imposed by the artist on the surface of the wooden board. However, those marks are also informal conversation with the natural grain of the wood, almost merging with it, giving the works a vibratory visual quality. Smith is a San Francisco-based visual and sound artist. He has performed at Grace Cathedral and Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, and at Schindler House, Los Angeles. Working in a variety of media including drawing, installation and scanner-based technology, his work has been shown throughout California and internationally. In 2011, Smith scored the soundtrack for D-L Alvarez and Kevin Killian’s The Visitor Owl, that was screened with a live performance at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Smith is also a member of San Francisco’s “Right Window” collective at Artists Television Access (ATA).
Speaking the language of geometric abstraction, Portland, OR-based artist Lynne Woods Turner’s works in pencil and oil draw the viewer in close, creating an immersive experience. The delicacy and intention of her lines, paired with a muted color palette, suggest a fluid relationship between figure and ground, and a blurred boundary between positive and negative space. The intimacy and focus of these works cause them to burn with the transformative power of meditative focus. Turner is the recipient of an Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship, and was the 2016 Bonnie Bronson Fellow. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), and the Hammer Museum at UCLA (Los Angeles, CA), among many others.