Continuing through May 26, 2026

Jane Ivory’s crisp black and white nature studies, with their What Hath Man Wrought critique on the (mostly local) landscape, are grouped under the title “A Language of Respect.” Ivory may work in series — she’s published numerous photo books, some of which are on view here — but there is nothing programmatic or polemical about the strong, idiosyncratic, and witty mages that she discovers on her rambles through the humble, unprepossessing outskirts of the urban/suburban landscape. 

Gene Holtan (1930-2016) was a prolific and respected Canadian illustrator and caricaturist who moved from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz in 1974. He began painting virtuosic abstractions in the late 1990s that derive primarily from Abstract Expressionism, and the paintings comprising “Instructions for Arrival” prove that out-of-fashion styles are not necessarily condemned to obsolescence and irrelevance by art-world trends. This writer was shocked that Holtan was only now getting big-city attention, so, in a way, the common thread of the two shows is the discovery of the unexpected or neglected; think of Hilma af Klint, Vivian Maier, et al.

Ivory’s artistic path has been circuitous but also fortuitous. After receiving and MFA in Painting from UC Berkeley, she taught at SFMOMA’s Education Department; worked as sales director for the Grapestake Gallery in Pacific Heights, where she absorbed the work of Ansel Adams, Lewis Baltz, Imogen Cunningham, and Jerry Uelsmann; and co-owned the Ivory-Kimpton Gallery on lower Grant Avenue. Eventually her focus settled on photography — incidentally, the medium practiced by her father and grandfather (the latter well known for his panoramic landscapes).

Ivory’s concerns do not follow in those footsteps. She writes, “I seek out landscapes and urban wastelands which reveal Man’s impact on the Earth … My purpose … is to do my small part in saving Earth from Man. I feel strongly that if you strip off the top layer of reality — color — you get to the essence of the image — the composition, the leading lines, the shapes, the light — which allows the poetry of the image to be revealed.”

“A Language of Respect” draws from two bodies of work: “Confined” and “Elegy for the Forlorn.” The eight photos from ”Confined” examine our dominion over animals, exercised in two ways: sequestering them in ostensibly educational zoos and theme parks, and shooting them then draping their skins over glass-eyed fiberglass sculptures in frozen dioramas, with skillfully painted backdrops replicating jungle creepers, desert cacti, and distant mountains. 

Ivory’s photos from these domesticated zoos and parks wear their animal fellow-feeling lightly, with compositions sometimes dictated by the cropping of an image and the decisive moment at which the picture is shot. In “Giraffe Behind Tree” (2025), the animals’ long, angled necks counterbalance the rightward tilt of the trees, while a pair of palms seem to sprout from one animal’s body. In “Giraffe Reflection” (2020), a rightward-leaning tree echoes the tilt of an animal at the right edge, its head cropped out of the frame, and the dim reflection of another giraffe appears to be standing behind the invisible photographer. In “Siting and Watching” (2025) a mandrill sits stoically on a wooden ledge, framed by the doors and apertures of its concrete dwelling, which is enveloped by late-afternoon shadow. “Menagerie” (2025) is a diorama with a group of animals grazing on grass and leaves, seen from an angle so that the safety rail is visible. This serves as an illusion-destroying Brechtian device similar to the window reflections that appear in other diorama photos.

The fifteen photos from Ivory’s “Elegy for the Forlorn” series examine neglected or decrepit sites of human activity, marrying a love of ruins with the blunt facticity of New Topographics documentarians like Lewis Baltz. Ivory writes, ”I feel a longing standing alone in these places, a sadness, and yet a comfort in remembering earlier times.”  As with the “Confined” photos, “Elegy’s” pain of remembering is visually conveyed without heavy-handedness. “Date Palm Farm, Salton Sea” (2025) and “Sutro Parapet Wall and Trees” (2026) feature compositions of trees rising from a flat base, like archaic columns from single a point. “Light on Horizon” (2025) reverses the elements, playing the horizontal band of light at the top, above a small forest of piers from which fingerlike bolts reach skyward, like broken statuary. “Overlapping Plywood” (2025) and “Light on Wave” (2022) employ triangles. In the former the slanted roofs of the unpainted sheds meet at the center, crowned by a barricade of foliage from distant trees. In the latter a corroded concrete pier recedes, framed by broken guardrails tagged with indecipherable graffiti. “Windows in Window” (2025) presents an oblique, diagonal view into an abandoned warehouse, with the dirty windowpanes on the perpendicular walls creating ghostly halations.

Where Ivory finds poetry in unexpected places, seen and depicted exactingly, Holtan’s twelve paintings are exhilarating geographies of creativity set loose and channeled. An engine doing its proper work should be seen in a lesser light. The gallery press release explains the source of the exhibition title: “[Holtan’s] last words — ‘Follow the instructions to the door. When you get to the door, throw the instructions away.’ — feel like a perfect summation of his art. Each canvas is a door. Once you’ve arrived, you decide.”

The titles of the works convey a sense of their high spirits: “The Relative Importance of Difference,” “Recall the Care We Took,”  “Price Within Bounds,” “Some Are Resisting,” “What Always Escapes,” “Matter of a Simple Sort,” “Incomplete Aspects,” and “The Start of a Plan.” Each is intricately detailed, with scores or hundreds of parts forming landscapes, maps, or obscurely written manuscripts. 

Stylistically they recall works by Willem de Kooning, Fernand Léger, Philip Guston, Stuart Davis, and William T. Wiley, not to mention some borrowing from the great borrower, Picasso. That distinguished list of ancestors aside, Holtan’s calligraphic marks always define forms instead of receding into visually flat but subtext-heavy symbols or signifiers. We’re always looking at an object, however brilliantly colored.

I regard Holtan’s work as worthy of serious attention. Are the paintings, which could have been made in the 1960s, anomalous and irrelevant today? Art is not a linear progression in which new art supersedes old art. A poet friend of the artist reminisced: “Gene said, it’s impossible to be honest with yourself; it isn’t achievable for anyone. The world is incomprehensible, and our senses defeat us. I asked him, isn’t there anything we can believe in? Of course, he said, but it should be something arbitrary. He gazed out the window — ah, clouds.”