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Patricia Sweetow Gallery

September 9 - October 17, 2010

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http://www.patriciasweetowgallery.com/
(415) 788-5126

480 23rd Street Oakland, CA 94612

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Whitney Lynn Installation view at Patricia Sweetow Gallery

Patricia Sweetow Gallery is pleased to welcome Bay Area artists, Michael Hall and Whitney Lynn in 2 solo exhibitions. Michael Hall presents Reclamation, paintings and installation. Whitney Lynn presents Doug, video, photography and sculpture. The exhibitions open Thursday, September 9 through October 16th, 2010. Reception for the artists is Saturday, September 11, 3:00 - 6:00pm. Michael Hall received his MFA from Mills College in 2008. For his MFA exhibition Hall presented several large-scale oil paintings depicting animals in degrees of stress as metaphoric stand-ins for corporate malfeasance and social excess. The paintings were oil on canvas, deftly brushed, with a subdued palette. Fast forward to Reclamation, Hall's recent series of oil paintings. His focus turns to surveillance bunkers constructed during WWII, located on what is now known as the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the area proved strategically important, providing the bunker/look-out posts a watch-guard to the East. The buildings came to Michael's attention while he was a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts, located in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area since 1987. Michael Hall talks of his experience, "While a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts, I became fascinated with the bunkers dotting the coastal landscape of the Marin Headlands. The coastal defense structures remain in a dilapidated form today – resting military monoliths in the now public land of the National Park Service. Facing the Pacific Ocean, the bunkers are slowly being reclaimed by the land, giving way to erosion". The look-out posts happen to be located in some of the more spectacular natural landscape that California has to offer. Hall's paintings contrast that backdrop of WWII history with the spectacular environment in which these edifices exist. Michael further explains, "Reclamation is a painterly exploration of the coastal defense structures located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Based in the history of landscape painting, but injected with remains of the complicated military history in the region, the paintings imagine the bunker’s further dissolution into the landscape and highlight thier isolated and largely forgotten past". Michael Hall is a visiting artist/instructor at Mills College, Oakland, California. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Southern Exposure, San Francisco; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum and Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco. He received an MFA Fellowship from Headlands Center for the Arts and a Herringer Foundation MFA Award. Recently his work was selected for inclusion in New American Paintings, Pacific Coast Edition, curated by Lawrence Rinder. PSG is pleased to present Whitney Lynn, who received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007. Her project, Doug, is an installation of video, photography and objects. For this exhibition Whitney records her experience with a rescue rabbit from the San Francisco Animal Control, a rabbit that was found living in the environs of Golden Gate Park. Learning that rabbits are behaviorally similar to feline's, (with the requisite quotient of human interaction, and the possibility of litter training), she eagerly became the adoptive parent. The rabbit proved to have other thoughts of domesticity, proceeding to gnaw on her wiring, nest in her furniture, and use her flat as the litter box. Whitney then read that you could "trance" a rabbit by placing it on its back, while holding it, which led her to recollect Joseph Beuys' "How to Explain Pictures to a Live Hare'. Doug encompasses Whitney's adventure with her rabbit through photographs, video of the rabbit, and items of clothing. Lynn explains, "The process of recording begins with desire. A desire to set something down in physical form, a desire to preserve evidence of a happening, a desire to have a way to relate or tell of an experience. As with any representational process, there are flaws, or perhaps more accurately, gaps, in what can be captured, received and communicated; limits in what can be recorded or expressed. A moment can never be replicated, only substituted or translated." Upcoming and recent exhibitions for Whitney Lynn include Southern Exposure, San Francisco, East Carolina University School of Art and Design, North Carolina, and Catherine Clark Gallery, San Francisco. PSG will exhibit a few special paintings of Markus Linnenbrink as a celebration of his recent inclusion in the Beijing Biennale, opening September 2010.

Whitney Lynn, Commissioned, video

Michael Hall Installation at Patricia Sweetow Gallery