Event

AlchemyPost an Event »

A440 Gallery

December 3 - January 1, 2010

Info

49 Geary 4th Floor San Francisco, CA 94108
Google Map »
Alchemy Artist: Joy Broom, courtesy of A440 Gallery
Opening Reception, Dec. 3rd from 5:00-7:00pm The show runs through December 31st. Alchemy, the December show at A440 Gallery, features two artists who’ve been married for 35 years and whose work involves a complex layering of imagery and materials, evoking the natural world and an ethereal dream-like state. Joy Broom’s purposefully wrought mixed media work is inspired by nature yet layered in different hues and reads like lost postcards from an alternate universe. While collage is a starting point, Broom incorporates paint, paper, and pen ink, and then dips the work in purified beeswax to give the surfaces a complex layered quality, evoking memory and distance—almost as if the viewer is peering at the work from behind a gauze curtain. DeWitt Cheng, writing in the East Bay Express said: “Broom's work shows the interpenetration of plant, animal, and human realms, with semi-transparent butterflies, birds, insects, polyps, worms, cocoons, branches, roots, and seeds radiating auras like wave fronts, and answered by juxtaposed and superimposed human hands and faces. The works themselves appear arrested in the process of metamorphosis, half science museum and half sacred grove.” Showing with Broom, is Jerry Leisure, her partner and an accomplished sculptor whose work deliberately depicts the dream-like with commentary on various states of consciousness. Crafted from wood, Leisure’s sculptural forms are figurative heads bejeweled with gestural symbols—some of which evoke vessels with masts emerging from their decks. Included will be Leisure’s small-scale digital work that also combines layering and collage. “Leisure's painted wooden sculptures portray not individuals but dysfunctional psychological states… Pointed and satirical.” —DeWitt Cheng, East Bay Express