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Northern California Art
In Shaghayegh Cyrous’ multimedia installation “Breathe the Sun” a vivid cast of characters perform ritualized movements in a wall-length video projection. This is an immersive, ritualistic space that acknowledges and bridges the physical and cultural distance between North America and her native Iran.
Is it possible to be nostalgic about nostalgia itself? This question is explored by Stefan Kürten and Sarah M. Newton, both haunted by the forlornness of the now, thus undercutting if not outright mocking any aspiration for a utopian future.
“Light Beneath,” draws together three decades of work highlighting Richard Sheehan’s longstanding focus on the urban landscape, particularly his two major sources of inspiration, roadway architecture and commercial signage.
An old art-world joke defines sculpture as the thing you bump into from behind as you back away to better view a painting. The mixed-media wall sculptures of Chris Dorosz turn that trope on its head: to take in the entirety of these works you must get up close to these intricately crafted figures.
From his Iranian roots, Yari Ostovany retained a love of poetic spiritual themes, among them the doomed flight of Icarus, brought low by hubris, and Attar of Nishabur’s epic 12th century Sufi poem, ”The Conference of the Birds.”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, “Running Fence at 50 Years,” commemorates the monumental 1976 intervention in the Sonoma and Marin County landscape. It documents a moment when individual artists began making their own cultural structures rather than waiting for established institutions to give them permission.
Fiber affords Terri Friedman a meditative medium for processing the too-muchness of contemporary life, and even a place of joy and healing in which carefully planned shapes, colors and textures coalesce into llyrical, brightly colored dreamscapes.
“Poetics of Memory” gradually reveals stories from Mildred Howard’s life as seen through her art, while leaving room for us to construct narratives of our own. The work has a specific personal and historical references.
Viewed through a rain-splattered windshield, the road ahead is swallowed by the dark woods that surround it. The trees’ twiggy crowns reach upward, precisely focused when they’re not visually smudged by the damp glass.
