Event

Places We Call Home + New WorkPost an Event »

Swarm Gallery

March 20 - April 26, 2010

Info

http://swarmgallery.com/
(510) 839-2787

560 Second Street Oakland, CA 94607

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Tia Factor, Ryan Pierce: Willits, Portland, and Everything In-between (2009), Gouache, airbrush, spray paint and colored pencil on paper, 22.5 x 30 inches

Exhibit Opening | Saturday, March 20, 6-8PM We are pleased to present Tia Factor's work in her first solo exhibition at Swarm Gallery, "Places We Call Home." In her paintings and installations, Factor generates personalized maps of what is unseen and intuited in the places she visits. Maps may appear in her art, but the works themselves become larger maps of her subconscious. For Factor, a mental map is the composite of elements of exterior realities combined with instantaneous interior impressions of a place gathered in an intuitive manner. In her paintings, drawings, and installations, multiple and contradictory views of one place will appear, an urban skyline, the un-lettered sign from an abandoned shop, the balloons from a car dealership are combined with uncodified or ineffable information such as diminishing coils of color bands or asteroid-like map pieces shooting out of an exploding star. The paintings help to reveal how our internal landscape is shaped by the external landscape we are surrounded by. In the 2006 series "All My Oakland Homes + Studios," Factor visited the neighborhoods of each of the homes and studios she occupied during the ten years she spent living in Oakland, California. The works are a play between structure, both the organic and man-made type, and consciousness. They were intended as a remedy to what Factor finds limiting, banal and mundane about contemporary American cities. As a result, these small colorful gouache paintings invite the viewer to explore urban spaces in an intuitive, undefined, and fantastical manner. Factor's "Subjective Landscape" series from 2007 was made while at a month long residency at Port Arthur Historical Site in Tasmania, Australia. The series of landscapes act as an enhancement to the more obvious exterior realities of the historic site, the standard postcard-like images of a tourist destination. Using informal interviews gathered from visitors to the site, she produced corresponding "mental maps" for each impression gathered. Factor combined concrete or objectively "real" exterior aspects of the site with the intuitive, psychic, or purely emotional responses of the interviewees. Factor says of her current project "Places We Call Home," "This work is intended as a cathartic experience for me, an incantation to ease me through the troubling transition of leaving a place I called home for twelve years, the Bay Area." Conducting informal interviews with friends in Portland, Oregon - Factor's new home - she records her interaction with the interviewees, asking them to give her their unedited and emotional impressions of the places they call home. She encourages the participants to elaborate on specific details of what makes their home a home: the layout, what they fill it with or how they decorate it, who lives there with them, the outside in contrast to the inside, the shape of the house or yard, the neighborhood, the general environment of Portland or geography of the Pacific Northwest, or perhaps even a reflection of somewhere they no longer inhabit but still consider home. First using a camera to transform the interviews into visual information, Factor then paints corresponding mental maps for each impression gathered. While illuminating the complexity of the individual's concept of home, Factor hopes to both absorb and actuate her own sense of home in her new surroundings. Project space | NEW WORK Sacha Eckes Sacha Eckes' art has always dealt with issues of belonging, identity, the search for love and communication. Rather than just paint a pretty picture, Eckes makes drawings that help people reflect on the absurdities, the little pleasures and the little pains in life. She likes to laugh and really enjoys making people laugh. Stylistically her art finds its roots in comics, graphic art and painting. One of her creative goals is to bridge the gap between 'fine art' and 'graphic art'. Though her art makes many references to cartoons and contains a lot of illustrative elements, she strives to create work that transcends literal picture making. It's no surprise that some of her biggest influences include Raymond Pettibon, Philip Guston, Robert Crumb, Paul McCarthy, Gary Larson, Gary Baseman, Goya and illustrator Henrik Drescher. Currently, Eckes is on a tirade making fun of the art world: its over-consumptive nature, the trials and tribulations as an artist. She takes advertisements from art magazines and leave my mark as it were: like a bathroom graffiti artist, like a dog on the street. The series she is working on is called Fuck Art and uses mostly sexual images as they seem to be the most primal way for her to express her cynicism. Eckes will be showing some works from this series in Swarm's project space.

Sacha Eckes Sacha Eckes, Pick Me! Pick Me! (2008), Ball point on paper, 11.75 x 8.75 inches

Tia Factor, Harrell Fletcher: Babies, Books and Airplane Travel (2009), Gouache, airbrush and graphite on board, 30 x 40 inches