Archives for February 2026

“Connected” adds up to a celebration of uncanny juxtapositions through otherwise disconnected subjects and materials. This premise gathers a broad range of sculptural practices under one umbrella so that we are free to form our own connections.

Picture a dark, windowless room, sealed off from all but three projectors. The floor of the room is appointed with freshly laid industrial carpet — not visible, but sensible through one’s feet. It absorbs sound and twinges the air with a curiously acidic industrial smell. Black walls and ceiling otherwise absorb any available light.

Marie Wilson became an unofficial sixth member of the Dynaton group after developing a relationship with Wolfgang Paalen, the Austrian-born leader and chief theorist of the Dynaton group of artists.

Henna Vainio’s “Opposite Knots” is a group of eleven tinted and glazed ceramic sculptures in which she spells out specific words, transforming them into linear tangles, like unfurled typewriter ribbons.

Carrie Hott’s “years ago” was inspired by a residency at the UC Davis Center for Spaceflight Research where Hott accessed ongoing research into sustaining human life in outer space. The installation is like a stage set awaiting the arrival of the actors.

Stephanie Dinkins’ immersive video installation “Data Trust” presents a scrolling display of compelling images of human, animal, and plant life in a variety of settings. Created using generative AI, the narrative behind the images is informed by shared stories of the lives of viewers in the Bay Area.

The title of Wayne Armstrong’s exhibition, “Between Here and There,” is a play on J.R.R. Tolkien’s subtitle for “The Hobbit” and is also in the spirit of Paul Klee’s definition of a line as “a dot that went for a walk.” Armstrong’s aesthetic posture is that art is an adventurous journey through obstacles and trials.

Elmer Bischoff’s late-career return to abstract painting was not only courageous, but prescient in that it anticipated what would variously be called Provisional Painting or Discrepant Abstraction three decades later.

There’s something ineffably attractive about a line drawn on an opaque ground, and the same applies to a beam of sunlight on a dark green hill. Most of the photographs in Chris McCaw’s “Reversals and Revolutions” explicate that sentiment.

David Deweerdt’s “Excessive Body” is a presentation of eighteen images of solitary figures that are partially or fully stripped of flesh. They recall the plaster flayed figures from which academic painters used to learn anatomy.