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Artist Reception and Conversation: Fly Like a Spaceship to the SkyPost an Event »

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CIIS Main Building

February 20 - February 20, 2013

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1453 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94103
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Artist Reception and Conversation: Fly Like a Spaceship to the Sky Pat Aveni, Rollercoaster
Fly Like a Spaceship to the Sky: A Reception and Conversation with Artist Pat Aveni CIIS Main Campus 1453 Mission Street (btwn 10th and 11th Streets) San Francisco 5:00-7:00PM Free and open to the public. Please join us Wednesday, February 20th for a reception with artist Pat Aveni, and a conversation about her 20+ year journey through art and mental illness. MORE: Self-described abstract expressionist Pat Aveni is well versed in the history of modernism. With references to Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Salvador Dali reappearing throughout her work, Aveni has spent the last two decades developing her own palette of symbols and a use of color that is vividly expressive. A consumer of the mental health system, and now a Peer Specialist and Consumer Advocate for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Aveni talks openly about the role that the arts have played in her own wellness. First introduced to painting while hospitalized, her visual artwork has helped her navigate a path of healing from an abusive past, and to process the vivid nightmares that have plagued her sleep since 9/11. Her art practice also sustains her faith in herself: “I was ready to crack up at times, but the art kept the glue together. It’s still keeping me going.” Aveni is attracted to an array of symbols that recur in her work: a Southwestern landscape, an ovoid “gay baby” with a heart, ladders pointing towards the heavens, stars. Intricate spaces are conveyed with primary color choices both ebullient and pained. Ordinary objects—a computer mouse or a woman’s shoe—are transformed into vivid symbols conveying the artist’s interior emotional landscape, her struggle, her aspirations, and her deeply help optimism.
Artist Reception and Conversation: Fly Like a Spaceship to the Sky Pat Aveni, Roadrunner
Artist Reception and Conversation: Fly Like a Spaceship to the Sky Pat Aveni, Somewhere I Belong