Gallery

Local 123 believes in exhibiting stimulating and interesting work by local artists.

UPCOMING EXHIBIT
MARK PETERSEN: Game Changer
March 9 – April 23, 2012

Artist’s Reception: Friday, March 16th, 6-8:30pm

www.markpetersenart.com

For more information on the show or jpegs, contact:
Janet Delaney/Suzy Barnard, Curators, Local 123
Email: suzy.m.barnard@gmail.com, janet@janetdelaney.com
 

CURRENT EXHIBIT
ArtUp! Berkeley Group Show

Local 123 gallery is thrilled to offer up its expansive white walls to the burgeoning and effervescent talents of student/artists participating in ArtUp! Berkeley. ArtUp! Berkeley Group Show is comprised of students from the Young Artists Workspace (YAWS) and Westside Studio. Both of these programs have been founded by art educator Jennifer Burke. The show features the work of artists of all ages from 5 to 55++.  The artists have used a wide range of media to create a vivid collection of paper cuts, hand-sewn portraits, glowing metal blossoms, and flora inspired drawings.

The mission of ArtUp! Berkeley is to expand opportunities for the community to make, experience, and be transformed by art. By combining the work of students at YAWS and Westside Studio, ArtUp! taps into an incredible outpouring of creative excitement, characteristic of Berkeley’s artistic heritage and the love its residents have for art making.

Local 123 is pleased to showcase the artists involved in ArtUp! and  to honor the local creative energy that has been unleashed right in our neighborhood at Westside Studio on Allston Way and at the Young Artist Workspace, located in Totland Park on Virginia St. Enjoy this wide assortment of highly crafted work made by both youth and adults who call Berkeley home.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE SHOW OR JPEGS CONTACT:
Janet Delaney/Suzy Barnard, Curators, Local 123
Email: curator@local123cafe.com

PAST EXHIBITS
Nature Studies
Susan Felter - Mimi Plumb   

November 4, 2011 - January 4, 2012

Local 123 is excited to present an exhibition that brings a touch of wilderness to the urban juncture of San Pablo and University Avenue. Mimi Plumb and Susan Felter explore natural beauty as it brushes against the edges of our man made environment. In Plumb’s images, we discover the sublimely confusing but equally exquisite horizon line of a horse’s back, seen up close. From afar, these could be mistaken for a view of the undulating hills of California, or white sand dunes, all blissfully untouched by encroaching developers.  In Felter’s digital concoctions, nature’s dazzling beauty is juxtaposed with a sense of unease: reptiles are flying, tossed blades of grass loom large, a minuscule distant helicopter hovers in the sky above, birds flap among tiny electronic components.

Mimi Plumb’s large-scale color photographs of horses are part of an ongoing series, “Horse Backs”. Plumb writes, “ In these uncertain times, I’ve found myself asking--What is worth embracing? What is worth preserving? Horses, the line of their backs, the wind in their manes, the cold blue light of the late afternoon sky...”

The horses embody the landscape in their backs. They become the horizon and the horizon line, at times transforming into the rolling hills of the California landscape where I grew up, before tract houses and strip malls became the norm.”

Felter describes the beginning of her “Hunting and Gathering” series thus, "Flowers on a flat bed scanner look like 17th century “tromp l’œil" still-life paintings by Dutch masters who created fictional but hyper-realistic scenes that twisted the laws of nature.  Assembling my own "post-natural” digital montages is disquieting but alluring. Words that come to me are ... visceral  predatory  delicious  convoluted  alien  bejeweled  camouflaged.... a thousand centuries of collision and collusion between nature and culture.”

Susan Felter was born in Oakland, California.  She earned a BA in Psychology and Art from UC Berkeley, and an MFA in Motion Pictures from UCLA.   In 1980 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her photo project “Rodeo Work.”  Susan’s photographic art is in museum collections, and has been exhibited and published internationally. She was an associate professor of art at Santa Clara University from 1983 to 2010.

Mimi Plumb was born in Berkeley, received her MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute, and currently teaches photography at San Jose State University. Her work is in the permanent collection of museums nationally. She has received grants and fellowships from the California Arts Council, the Marin Arts Council, and the Phelan Art Award in Photography. Other projects include photographing for the California State Department of Housing and the United Farmworkers Union.
 

Vanishing Point
Works by Bay Area artists Troy Bayless, Alex Case, Jennie Lennick and former Local 123 barista and friend Julia Sackett.
September 25, 2011 - November 1, 2011

Limina: galactic paintings and textiles
Rosalie Z. Fanshel
August 12 - September 24, 2011

Fanshel's galactic paintings and textiles engage in representation of abstract subjects, like the cosmos, but the effect is personal and intimate. Intricately crafted scenes on both canvas and fabric, which then are ornately framed, allow the mind entry to both the poetics of space and the wonder found in explaining these spaces.

Fanshel explains that she is drawn to "the paradox between the micro and the macro, the physical and the ephemeral." And in her current series, Limina, "takes up the challenge of representing the visually unrenderable: gas, light and the movement of celestial bodies so vast that they appear formless."

Fanshel bravely and consciously delves into the murky territory of deep space data representation, and in particular the images published by laboratories of elusive astrological phenomena: "My paintings challenge the scientific authority of the popular Hubble Space Telescope images, which claim to provide accurate views of galaxies but in their structure actually recapitulate cultural representations of a longing for the divine familiar since the Renaissance."

Indicating her own structure, "[t]he window or frame in each piece signals a portal between the defined world of the viewer and the expanse of universe beyond,"  and her own methods for construction, "[i]n my textile painting An Inside View, for example, I constructed the central galaxy figure from over 15,000 French knots, taking more than 300 hours to complete," a tangible universe comes to the forefront. 

Fanshel's process fascinatingly combines cultural history, new and ancient art techniques, and personal reflection, as she describes; "Limina is a formal as well as conceptual exploration. I use archival materials, protractor and compass to carefully recreate the abstract geometric patterns employed by Islamic astronomers to map the infinite. Each piece goes through multiple iterations of hand-drawn and digital sketches. Though I take full advantage of Photoshop in preparation for a piece, I feel an urgency to master the immediate language of painting in the context of a cybernated world. Thus the series is also a serious study in the Old Master use of glazes, brushstroke and composition."

We are honored to show Fanshel remarkable Limina series at Local 123, as she aptly remarked, "in a space that focuses on local community and the local food shed, even as the imagery is of the REALLY BIG (cosmic) community."

-Emma Spertus
Curator (thru August 2011), Local 123

Janet Delaney and Suzy Barnard will be co-curating the Local 123 Gallery with the launch of their first exhibit on November 4, 2011. Stay tuned for more details.
Please contact curator@local123cafe.com for more information or if you would like to feature your artwork at the cafe.

This page is currently in development. Information on past and upcoming exhibits will be available soon.