Seager Gray Gallery presents their 7th Annual Material Matters Exhibition

Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, presents Material Matters, their 7th yearly examination of artists and how they interact with their materials, often pushing boundaries and demonstrating a fascinating variety of artistic expressions. This year’s exhibition features 23 artists working in wood, cast glass, pastel, clay, encaustic, oil, aluminum, weaving, resin, stainless steel, graphite, glass powder, steel, shredded money, paper, glass beads, mica, wire, hand blown glass, beeswax, limestone, photography, thread, cardboard, latex iridescent watercolor and ceramic.

Artists include Robert Adams, Dean Allison, Gale Antokal, Adrian Arleo, Kay Bradner, Joe Brubaker, Lia Cook, Stephen Paul Day, Daniella Dooling, Jane Hambleton, Michael Janis, Lisa Kokin, Dana Lynn Louis, Jann Nunn, Emily Payne, Sibylle Peretti, Ross Richmond, Jane Rosen, Liz Stekettee, Susan Stover, Tim Tate, Jessica Williams and Aggie Zed. The exhibition runs from March 3 to March 31, 2020. A reception for the artists is on Saturday, March 7 from 5:30 to 7:30pm.

Included in the exhibition are an outstanding group of artists working in the glass medium. These include Dean Allison, Stephen Paul Day, Michael Janis, Sibylle Peretti, Ross Richmond, Jane Rosen and Tim Tate. Allison, who has made a name for himself in glass portrait sculpture often creates actual life casts of his subjects, capturing intimate details. In Kitchen Floor Series 2, a portrait of his young daughter, he used a scan-and-print technique due to the inability of his subject to actually sit still for that long. The result is a work that is intensely personal and universal at the same time. 

Stephen Paul Day’s “Soulphides” are a contemporary reexamination of “sulphides” (objects encased in glass – as in cameos or paperweights). They go back to the late 18th century in Bavaria and Day has collected different variations. His own riff on them is to make orbs that can stack one upon another, creating a loose narrative. 

Sibylle Peretti, renowned glass artist collaborated with Day in her double-paneled sets of eyes in kiln-formed, engraved, silvered and painted glass pictured above.

Tim Tate and Michael Janis from the Washington School of Glass in the nation’s capital combined separate bas-relief plaster molds, sgraffito glass powder drawings and lost wax glass castings to create a nine-panel experience of nature that includes dragonflies, nests, bees, birds, leaves, water and flowers unified by the pleasing olive tint of the transparent glass. Janis also contributed “Spirit Animal” using his “sgraffito” technique – a way of drawing with tiny beads of powdered glass that requires extreme patience and skill.

Ross Richmond is a master of blown glass, as is evidenced by his amazing blown glass horse works, Gaze and Repose. Both in surface and shape, these exquisite figures of horses, transcend general ideas of what glass can do. Richmond was also involved in working with Jane Rosen for her “Little Petfinders”, miniature little snouts of dogs the Rosen encounted when searching the web for a new pet.

We take three different looks at drawing this year in the works of Gale Antokal, Jane Hambleton, Jane Rosen, and Emily Payne. Antokal creates pastel drawings on paper of simple subjects – a red egg on a black box, a cannister, a sphere- and refines them to their purest essence until they seem to vibrate with being. Her drawings refine each object until they take on a meditative quality. They are a kind of transcendent photo realism.

Jane Hambleton’s drawing is based on a photo taken of the artist’s mother the day she got her braids cut. She was 12 turning 13 - a passage from childhood to adolescence captured in a moment. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the Japanese idea of Mono No Aware for the last few years,” explains the artist. “Roughly translated it means the beauty of passing things and this piece encapsulates that idea for me on so many levels.”

With the fluid grace of a daVinci drawing, Jane Rosen has captured Asian horses in the background with a beautiful chestnut Hanoverian stallion that belonged to a friend. Known for her sculpture, Rosen’s work has always had drawing at its core. She creates multiple drawings of each subject, refining and determining just the right shape to achieve that presence that is consistent in everything she does.

Emily Payne uses graphite to capture the shadows and imprints of shapes she creates in her wire sculpture. Her “tresses” series was inspired by a residency in Vermont, where she found long pine needles and began to consider the clumped shapes on the pine branches, so perfect for her wire work and perfect too for the shadow and light they create around them.

This year we have the pleasure of introducing two clay artists we have not shown before – Adrian Arleo and Aggie Zed. Some years ago, Arleo created a dozen or so figurative wasp nest sculptures out of clay and began to wonder about the more succulent quality of its counterpart, honeycomb. After taking a 7-8 year hiatus from making the honeycomb sculptures, she recently began to revisit the series with a sense that the passage of time, and all the ensuing changes in the world, would bring something new to the imagery. Her intention with the first was to render the face of a very young child. What began to emerge inadvertently was a close likeness to Greta Thunberg, and Arleo felt compelled to bring her out. “The idea of connecting her to pollinators seemed very apropos,” said Arleo.

Aggie Zed’s humorous clay works merge man and machine, man and dog, man and horse, man and fish . . Her small figures have become prized collectibles and her larger sculptures speak to a world where man has been morphed by his own creations.

The quirky sewn photographs of Liz Steketee come from composited imagery from her family archive and her daily photographic diary. “I cut out, obliterate, and cover up elements of an image to draw attention to what is missing, what may have changed, or what needs to be considered.” Pieces are sewn and dyed to congeal the elements and ideas together. In her “Traces” series, the backs of photographs are actually the primary works, speaking to the way that memory fades. Steketee sews on the front side of the image to reexamine the shapes as memory.

“Denominate”, Lisa Kokin’s current series of collages made with shredded U.S. currency, is an outgrowth of her “Lucre” series. Each collage is made on 9 x 12 Canson watercolor paper and features an image taken from contemporary society. “As political events become more convoluted and disturbing,” says Kokin, “my work has evolved into a more minimalist response. Gluing tiny pieces of money together using a tweezers and miniscule gluing brush, I find comfort and serenity in lining up edges and staying within the self-imposed lines.”

We are excited to bring back Dana Lynn Louis to the gallery with her dramatic glass bead and mica hanging sculpture, “Constellation III.” Louis makes work that honors the interconnectedness of being and explores the timeless, magical reality of biology in the natural, personal, and constructed worlds we inhabit. Her work merges physics (or metaphysics) with microscience, instinctively channeling patterns in nature in any variety of media.

Jessica Williams iridescent watercolors on black paper have an uncanny lifelike quality. “Having worked largely with sumi and walnut ink in the past,” says Williams, “I loved discovering black cold press watercolor paper and iridescent watercolors for the way the remind me of daguerreotypes and other early forms of photography. There’s a static feeling — a moment frozen in time. Like the plants I’m painting, I like how the painting changes depending on the light.”

Aggie Zed's comical clay works portray man and machine and man as animal. Her small figures of Cowman, Hammer Puppetman, Dogman,Dog Costume Man, Horse Costume Man, Horseman, Horse Puppetman and Ratman are 4 to 5 inches tall and have become collectibles in places that show her work. Zed grew up, she notes, "on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, a barrier island outside of Charleston, with seven brothers and sisters and so many dogs, donkeys, ponies, and other animals that her neighbors wished they grew up on a farm."

The exhibition includes three artists who are working in wood, Joe Brubaker, Robert Adams and Jann Nunn. Brubaker's wall work Yin Yang 2 has organic forms made of yellow cedar that create and abstract sense of waves upon the wall. Robert Adams takes the folk tradition of carved animals a step further with Watcher and Ranger.

“The driving force behind my work resides in conjoining idea and aesthetic," says Jann Nunn, "Often described as a draw-you-in kind of beautiful, my art embodies a strong physical presence with carefully considered and often laborious craft, yet the ideas remain paramount.” Wild Cherry is no exception, meticulously crafted from a cherry tree branch that has been skinned and charred and cut into quarter inch sections and reassembled onto a spiral stainless steel rod with spacers in between.