12 January-8 March 2015
Artist reception: Saturday, 17 January, 7-9:30PM
“Hybrid: A Collage Show by Four Bay Area Artists”: Ken Graves, John Hundt, Catie O’Leary and Vanessa Woods
“Hybrid” highlights the work of Ken Graves, John Hundt, Catie O’Leary and Vanessa Woods, combining disparate elements to create new visual systems. Using original paper ephemera and found material, each artist in the show reconfigures the human body in some way to generate new narratives that explore identity, surrealism, and the subconscious.
The title, “Hybrid”, refers to the ways that heterogeneous images can be combined into fluid entities. The title also refers to the medium of collage, which in of itself is a hybrid—made by layering found images and their fragments to form a seamless whole.
In the show, each artist’s work is distinctive but shares a common theme. All exploit and distort the use of symbols and the human body to appropriate and reassign meaning. In John Hundt’s work for example, the formal strategy of totems is employed to create figures that are built up with a combination of human, machine, animal and object parts. In Woods’ work, new iconography is generated through bundles of fabric and body parts that become historical allegories reimagined. In Graves’s work, the male figure is re-contextualized in surreal landscapes that emphasize the body’s ability to fascinate and threaten. In O’Leary’s work, towers of fragmented objects, scientific tools and body parts become reinvented human still lives. Thirty-six collages made from 1988-2014 will be included in the exhibit.
(adapted from the gallery’s press materials)
INFORMATION
a.Muse Gallery
614 Alabama Street
San Francisco, California 94110 USA
(415) 279-6281
Hours:
Most days, 11AM-4PM
or by appointment
Image:
left: John Hundt
right: Vanessa Woods