May 4 – June 9, 2024
Gallery Route One’s Visiting Artist Program presents The Poetry of Water by Beth Fein, an exhibit of prints on paper and silk are an abstraction of natural habitats and water reclamation, integrating art and science as visual poetry.
The photo etchings in the exhibit are an abstraction of natural habitats and water reclamation, integrating art and science. These artworks emphasize the importance and future of water in the overall context of the environment and global warming. Climate change is making water shortages occur more frequently. Clean, reclaimed water that is put back into streams and aquifers will help mitigate the competition for water and preserve the natural environment
needed by both humans and wildlife.
This work was inspired by a specific California central coast power company’s water project that was designed to introduce reused clean water into a stream, so that steel head trout could continue to spawn.
The artist explains, “These etchings derive from my observations of many different environments. I deconstruct photos of diverse locales. The new imagery is blended with abstracted scientific data of water reclamation. With my feet firmly planted on the earth, my art practice is a collage of personal experiences within the world that we live in: magnifying the unpredictability of time and outside forces that permeate the essence of my artistic intent.”
Beth Fein’s works transverse the figurative to the abstract and her practice encompasses printmaking, performance, sculpture, and installation, investigating how movement and flow combine in art and life: while exploring the impermanence of living.
Beth Fein is an interdisciplinary artist who lives in Berkeley,CA. She works in her Oakland studio and as an artist-in-resident at KALA Art Institute in Berkeley. Her art practice includes installation, sculpture, printmaking, video, and performance. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is in the collections of: the Yale University Library, the Oakland Museum of California, Taller Grafica Experimental Havana, and the San Francisco Art Commission. She has been awarded artist residencies in Cuba, Spain, Argentina, Basel, Switzerland, New York, Vermont and California. Fein is a professional member of the California Society of Printmakers, the Los Angeles Society of Printmakers and the Boston Printmakers.
