PO Box 937 / 11101 Highway One / Point Reyes Station, CA 94956 / PH: 415.663.1347 / www.galleryrouteone.orgGallery Route One 11101 CA-1, Point Reyes Station, CA 94956
(415) 663-1347 www.galleryrouteone.org
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Press Release: For Immediate Release November 18, 2024
Contact: Patti Trimble pmtrim@gmail.com (707) 360-8189
New Exhibits at Gallery Route One!
December 7, 2024, through January 5, 2025
Dreamgirlz Taryn Möller Nicoll
Accumulations Sofia Gonzalez
The Grand Façade: A Reverence for Water Jeff Downing
For The Birds EA Zappa
Gallery Hours 11-5, Thursday through Monday
Opening Reception December 7, 3-5pm.
Artist Talks at 3pm
On Saturday December 7, Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station opens exhibits by four artists. In various styles and mediums, the exhibits express contemporary topics: identity, love of place and creatures, and concern for the environment.
The Center Gallery: A two-person exhibit by the current Fellows of GRO’s Fellowship Program, a program to include Bay Area artists, age 21- 40, in gallery operations and exhibitions. Taryn Möller Nicoll shows Dreamgirlz, oil paintings and mixed-media work on paper. She describes them as Pop-inspired renderings of clandestine love affairs between one’s actual self and an imagined ideal. Sofia Gonzalez exhibits Accumulations, a thoughtful series of abstract and symbolic wall sculptures. The mediums are natural dyes, silk, and oak galls: and the theme is a visual reckoning through a year of becoming a new human’s home.
The Project Space: Visiting Artist (GRO’s With the Earth Series), Jeff Downing presents The Grand Façade: A Reverence for Water, expressing the artist’s concern and hope for drought and wildfire conditions in the American West. Boldly colored bas-reliefs made of ceramics, found objects, and resin, serve as reliquaries for precious water.
The Annex Gallery: GRO Artist Member EA Zappa exhibits For The Birds, lively oil paintings of birds, framed with sparkling mix-media frames; all to celebrate a joyous fascination and connection with birds, nature, and the passage of time.
The Center Gallery hosts a two-person exhibit by Taryn Möller Nicoll and Sofia Gonzalez, current Fellows in GROs juried Fellowship program for Bay Area emerging artists, age 21- 40, offering experience in the nonprofit’s artist community and exhibition cycle.
Taryn Möller Nicoll: Dreamgirlz presents oil paintings and mixed-media works on paper, Pop-inspired renderings of clandestine love affairs between one’s actual self and animagined ideal. Under Nicole’s skilled hand, the images can be read as courageous comments on female identity that, (as she says) “embrace techniques and images unfit for the gallery walls.”
As a young girl Möller Nicoll admired Britney Spears and the Spice Girls as signs of ultimate female achievement, powerful women and consumable sex symbols. Also an admirer of pop artists Alex Katz, Kehinde Wiley, and James Rosenquist, Möller Nicoll expertly merges skilled cartooning and realism to create visions of her “self” beside an idealized fictitious self. Her ideal self is “a hyperbolic flirtatious babe self, unhinged and undignified, representing superficial ideals established by the pop icons, supermodels and mass media of the late ’90s and perpetuated by reality-altering social media filters and AI machinations”
In thinking of herself as woman, friend, daughter, and mother, Möller Nicoll wants to share things she doesn’t want people to know about her. Her process is deliberately undignified: “I know I shouldn’t be holding myself to these idealized values, but there is a value of being desired like that, there’s something that’s pleasing to me.”
The portraits include other women with their aspirational avatars. Möller Nicoll says “I learned that my sister, sister-in-law, and mom could tell me instantly the iconic women they still admire from childhood. They were images from branding and advertisements that promote definitions of beauty, value, and achievement: pop art archetypes, comic book babes and desirable damsels, spun sugar, with incessantly wind-swept hair: all aesthetic achievements impossible to reach. These images are not healthy, but I like them.”
GRO Fellow Taryn Möller Nicoll is a South African visual artist, Arts and Culture Program Administrator for the City of Healdsburg, and adjunct professor of Art History at Sonoma State University.
Sofia V Gonzalez: Accumulations brings a new series of wall sculptures to the gallery, thoughtful abstractions created with natural dyes, silk, and oak galls. The work reflects her studio practice while pregnant with her first babe; a visual reckoning through a year of becoming a new human’s home. Her transformation to motherhood expands her thoughts about place—and about climate change.
Gonzalez says: “I feel an urgency to record places I have known, from Northern California to Central Arkansas to San Diego, to embody the ways that locations shape me and the way I feel within them. Also to respond to the fear of climate change, what may happen when a place changes. My idea of home is expanding as I become a home for another person within our shared greater home of our outside environment. How can people be a place or hold an idea of place in addition to our physical surroundings? When do I become as local as the oak tree?”
The sculptures are objects of time and place, created in mindful collaboration with nature. Gonzalez walks in landscape, in place, foraging sources for natural dyes; plants, hulls, and bark. Then she dyes, stains, sews, wraps, and layers fabrics and textiles in earthy tones. Fallen oak galls—the result of wasps’ parasitic relationship with the oak—are both dye source and sculptural inspiration. Gonzalez wraps the galls in dyed silk as a ritualistic act, to quell her anxiety and suffocate the gall in a protective hug.
GRO Fellow Sofia Gonzalez was born into a family of quilt-making, stitching, embroidering, and crocheting women. Her textiles evoke the comfort and nostalgia ofquilts as well as her appreciation for abstraction as seen in fine art quilts from Gee’s Bend, post–minimalist art, color field painters, and artists working with land. She earned her MFA at CCAC, and since 2014, she has taught community workshops on making natural dyes from waste materials and local plants.
www.sofiavgonzalez.com, @sofiavgonzalez_
The Project Space
Jeff Downing: The Grand Façade: A Reverence for Water is an exhibit of boldly colored bas-relief sculptures in ceramics, found objects, and resin. These assemblages are reliquaries for water, inspired by the artist’s concern for drought and wildfire devastation in the American West. Using forms of historical and contemporary reliquary boxes, he created diptychs with imaginative symbols—hands, branches, fires, buildings, plants, and animals—surrounding antique apothecary bottles of precious water. The titles, such as Brachylagus Reliquary –Columbia River, WA list his sources for the water samples, along with Latin names of flora or fauna that depend on local water for life.
Downing traveled to collect each water-relic from a drought-threatened lake or river. So, a walk though the exhibit is a visual conversation about the artist’s travels and his reverence for threatened resources and environments.
He writes: On a road trip across the American Southwest, I became focused on water or, increasingly, on the lack thereof. The evidence was everywhere I turned, dried-up lake beds, dead fish, and acre upon acre of brittle, dying trees – the tinder of inevitable wildfires. This journey inspired me to produce a new series of diptychs in the form of bas-relief wall sculptures that address the effects of climate change, specifically the current droughts and wildfires occurring in the broader American West.
This work invites viewers to question our perceptions of the impact of climate change, imagine new paradigms for adapting and coexisting. There is nothing more sacred than the water that sustains us, and these pieces stand as a dire warning and solemn memorial for an irreplaceable, precious resource.
Jeff Downing is on the faculty at San Francisco State University where he is a Professor of Art and the Head of the Ceramics Area.
The Annex Gallery
EA Zappa: For the Birds In an exhibit of colorful paintings, EA Zappa celebrates a newfound fascination with birds, telling a story of his joyous connection with nature and the passage of time. An avid outdoorsman, the painter is also a trained musician, a self-taught artist, and most recently, a birdwatcher. Known for his portraits and landscapes, he works in water-based oil paint, working with photographs, his own and others, always with an imaginative touch. The elaborate frames are assembled by Zappa, using bright sparkle glue, colored pencil, beads, cloth, burlap, felt, and toothpicks, expressing the artist’s creative joy and enthusiasm For the Birds.
Zappa writes: Birds have a unique way of bringing us joy, especially during uncertain times. My interest in them took flight, literally and figuratively, during the Covid pandemic. Like many, I was working from home and my studio. I placed a bird feeder ten feet from the window overlooking the front garden and I was captivated.
I am on a never-ending journey to find new ways to innovate and add extra depth to my life and work. The process of making music and art brings me joy, humor, and purpose. My goal is to inspire those feelings in others when they hear and see it. I like thinking of my work as realism that is innovative, creative, imaginative, and most important, pleasing to the senses.
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/