GRO Exhibition Press Release: September–October, 2024

PRESS RELEASE. For immediate release
Contact Lisa Foote at 510.730.0594 or lisa@galleryrouteone.org
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GALLERY ROUTE ONE EXHIBITIONS:

Toni Littlejohn – Beholding Healer Archetypes
Amy Yoshitsu, Visiting Artist Program – Terrain in Vain
Kelley Berg – Before Salt and Memory

On exhibit Saturday, September 14 to Sunday, October 20, 2024

Artists’ Reception and Artist Talks: Saturday, September 14, 3 – 5 PM

The gallery is open to visitors Thursday to Monday, 11 – 5 PM

SUMMARY:
Gallery Route One presents three exhibits opening Saturday, September 14, 2024: Beholding Healer Archetypes by GRO founding member Toni Littlejohn, an exhibit offering archetypal healers in a cavernous installation as an essential and existential response to the challenges we are facing on planetary, political and spiritual level; Terrain in Vain by visiting artist Amy Yoshitsu, a photography-based installation of sculptures, collage and imagery that explore how physical contexts and systemic forces undergird our shared and intimate realities; and Before Salt and Memory by GRO artist member Kelley Berg, a suite of paintings emerging out of a desire to focus not on our differences, but rather on the rich experiences we have in common; in this case, moving through the world in aging bodies.

Project Space:
Toni Littlejohn: Beholding Healer Archetypes

Gallery Route One presents Beholding Healer Archetypes, an exhibit offering archetypal healers in a cavernous installation as an essential and existential response to the challenges we are facing on planetary, political and spiritual level.

Healers arise as a recurring theme in the West Marin artist’s painting practice. Spanning four decades, the exhibited paintings and prints represent a “personal pantheon of transmissions from the healers and guides that I have received in various modalities of delivery: through the gently spoken word, through anger, tears, laughter, meditation, physical activity, or within a deep dream state,” the artist explains. “I offer these archetypal healers as an essential and existential response to the challenges that humans now face on planetary, political and personal-spiritual levels.”

In the exhibit, viewers are invited to enter into silence, into a cave within, into a reverie of dreams, to remember oneself and to receive the earth’s counsel. The artist further explains, “the arising healers each offer their particular flavor of guidance, from compassion and clarity, to wisdom, luminosity, and wise action.”

Recalling Robert Motherwell’s personal description of the creative process, the paintings that have emerged through the artist’s experience have “also in some sense painted me. My intention is that others may receive spiritual benefit from my work.”

Toni Littlejohn’s grew up in an artistic, but troubled environment. The trauma in her childhood led her to seek help from therapists and spiritual teachers which, in turn, inspired her to express the inner resources of her discoveries. Littlejohn taught 4th, 5th and 6th grades in the SF School District and then returned to receiving an art degree from California College of Arts and Crafts. She has lived and worked in Point Reyes Station for more than four decades. As a founding member of Gallery Route One, she originated and directed its Artists in the Schools Program, and later became its Board President. She has been leading private Wild Carrots art workshops for more than thirty years and has exhibited her work in Europe, in the United States and in space on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft that touched the asteroid Bennu and is now traveling to the asteroid Apophis.

To learn more about the artist’s work, please visit tonilittlejohn.com.

Center Gallery:
Visiting Artist – Amy Yoshitsu: Terrain in Vain

Gallery Route One’s Visiting Artist Program presents Terrain in Vain by Amy Yoshitsu, a photography-based installation of sculptures, collage and imagery that explore how physical contexts and systemic forces undergird our shared and intimate realities.

The concepts, imagery, and materials of Yoshitsu’s work are informed by infrastructure, which encompasses the act of supporting, the undergirding for creation, and the workforce maintaining our unsustainable global practices. The objects embody the reality that systemic forces are driven by economic and social incentives in power structures that perniciously guide our decisions and interpretations. Sewing and textiles are employed by the artist to interweave the effects of entrenched systems on the body, the delicate, the intimate.

Yoshitsu’s photo-based sculptures are made of photographs the artist has taken in places she has lived and visited. As an Asian-American human, Yoshitsu identifies as being of the diaspora and a product of assimilation culture, and believes that what we see around us—the landscape and buildings, the types of labor and activities, the aesthetic and technological choices and conditions—plays a role in who we are while our lineages inform how we make sense of it all.

The artist explains, “I have lived my life walking and weaving within urban spaces of the US while psychologically contending with generational traumas, motherlands (China and Japan) as simultaneously foreign and integrated, and my own position within histories of speculation, hierarchical race creation and colonialism. By photographing and sewing together places from all over the world that I have occupied or inhabited, I create sculptures honoring the manifestations of histories, shared needs, connected conditions.” The resulting sculptures are psychogeographic maps that miniaturize and deconstruct structured space—a product of human labor, the authority of financialization, and modern survival.

A central theme of Yoshitsu’s work is the toxic—and ultimately futile—desire for control, and its resulting hierarchical structures borne from human fear and trauma. The amalgamation of twisted and contorted images of human-built interventions displayed on delicate, biodegradable material speaks both to the fragility of our physical world and to the swirl of emotions and ideas entangled in our complex society. The placements of these objects, in both real and distorted manners into public and infrastructural landscapes, ask the viewer to consider the details of their surroundings, the inequitable structures that provide our everyday lives, and that our attempts to control each other and our environments are at the core of the crisis.

Amy Yoshitsu (b. 1988), she/they, is a sculptor, designer, and socially engaged artist living and working in her hometown, Berkeley, CA. Yoshitsu’s work has been shown across the US and internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Their solo exhibition, “Amy Yoshitsu: Hedges and Ledgers,” at Satchel Projects (Chelsea, NYC) in 2023 earned them a Must-See in ARTnews. Yoshitsu’s work has been included in group shows at Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (Hyattsville, MD), Herter Gallery (UMass Amherst), Berkeley Art Center (Berkeley, CA) and their work is currently on view at Bedford Gallery (Walnut Creek, CA). In 2010, Yoshitsu received an A.B. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University and later attended the MFA Art program at California Institute of the Arts. Yoshitsu has been in residency at the Vermont Studio Center, the Artist Residency Project at the School of Visual Arts, Esalen Institute, and Kala Art Institute. Yoshitsu is currently an Artist in Residence at Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA) and will be featured there in a two-person exhibition in September 2024. Yoshitsu is a co-creator of Converge Collaborative, a POGM (people of the global majority) digital creative workers co-op and artist collective.

To learn more about the artist’s work, please visit amyyoshitsu.com.

Annex Gallery
Kelley Berg: Before Salt and Memory

Gallery Route One presents Before Salt and Memory by GRO artist member Kelley Berg, a suite of paintings emerging out of a desire to focus not on our differences, but rather on the rich experiences we have in common; in this case, moving through the world in aging bodies.

The artist provides a summary of the exhibition by stating, “I am as guilty as the next person of participating in the current existential and divisive agita…and to be honest, I think it’s largely manufactured. Not that we don’t have differences; of course we do. And? Are they, must they be, the source of such discord? Such vitriol? Tired of the noise, my own included, and seeking alittle respite, I headed to the water. This body of work came out of that. I have waded all my life, on many coasts. I imagine that pretty much everyone who has ever been on a coast of any sort has done the same. Those moments, for me-and I am certain I’m not alone- are full of curiosity, delight, contemplative joy, peace. I thought, knee deep in cool saltwater, isn’t this also, and more deeply so, who I am? Isn’t this true? In my aging body, moving through…and if true for me, also true for everyone else?”

Kelley Berg is a multimedia artist living and working in Oakland and Inverness, CA. Berg’s practice areas are painting, printmaking, and drawing. The artist’s work is largely representational or abstractions thereof and relies heavily on happy mistakes.

A regional landmark since 1983, Gallery Route One is an arts organization located in the town of Point Reyes Station, adjacent to the entry for Marin County’s Point Reyes National Seashore. Besides offering rotating exhibits by member artists, GRO also maintains its various programs as well as exhibitions addressing environmental, immigration and social justice issues. For more information, please visit: https://galleryrouteone.org/