May 28 – July 3, 2022
GRO continues to offer a professional venue for artists and visitors alike, prevailing as a vital force in West Marin through its contemporary shows and community outreach since 1983.
In the spirit which characterizes the gallery’s presence as a collaborative organization of artists, this gallery-wide exhibit embraces the universal human need to find our way past the trauma of our recent times, and to embrace a more expansive view as we discover the openness needed in order to move forward. This process not only indicates the path for personal growth within the human community, but also confirms the need to be ready for the inevitable decline of our changing world. Within this theme, the exhibit features a diverse variety of artwork by the gallery’s artist members, whose innovative pieces have been executed across a wide spectrum of media including painting, artists’ books, drawing, photography, mixed media, and sculpture.
The works in the exhibit reference the myriad social, political and environmental transitions that surround us, and demonstrate a profound commitment to the creative process as practiced by sixteen Gallery Route One artist members, as well as the gallery Fellow currently enrolled in the GRO Fellowship Program. Deeply relevant to the problems of our current times, the exhibit not only considers our human capacity to negotiate adversity, but also explores the quest for renewal through the personal practice of artmaking. The artwork suggests how a larger view of human adaptation can occur through an experiential relationship with our global culture during this entirely unique time, as we tentatively emerge through the COVID era.
Change itself is the exhibit’s foundational theme. Opening Up / Looking Forward references the dynamic role of creative ideas which lead forward to new explorations, much like the evolution of the artmaking process itself. Whether gestural or lyrical, figurative or abstract, the works collectively articulate many diverse stages of change, realization and growth, compellingly demonstrated in a pantheon of engaging visual forms.
The artists in the exhibit include Nicole Irene Anderson, Pat Augsburger, Charles Anselmo, Austin Buckingham, Robin Dintiman, Mary Mountcastle Eubank, Jenny-Lynn Hall, Steven Hurwitz, Bruce Mitchell, Zea Morvitz, Steve Pring, Igor Sazevich, Bernie Schimbke, Will Thoms, Vickisa, Ellen Vogel, Xander Weaver-Scull.