PO Box 937 / 11101 Highway One / Point Reyes Station, CA 94956 / PH: 415.663.1347 / www.galleryrouteone.orgPress Release: For Immediate Release February 4, 2025
Contact: Patti Trimble pmtrim@gmail.com (707) 360-8189
Upcoming Exhibits at Gallery Route One!
February 22, through March 30, 2025
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Bruce Mitchell: Coming Attractions
Karen Rose: Border Paintings
Zulu Heru: Rule #2
Gallery Hours 11-5, Thursday through Monday
Opening Reception February 22, 3-5pm.
Artist Talks at 3pm
Upcoming Exhibits at Gallery Route One!
On Saturday February 22, Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station opens three new exhibits of sculpture and paintings. In the Center Gallery, Coming Attractions is a selective retrospective by Gallery Artist Bruce Mitchell, showing freestanding abstract sculptures, wall sculptures, and geometric woodblock prints. In the Project Space, Visiting Artist Karen Rose shows Border Paintings, paintings and prints that consider natural landscapes at sites of human political borders. In the Annex Gallery, GRO Fellow Zulu Heru (also a Burning Man Artist) exhibits Afrocentric (or Post-Afrocentric). masks and sculptures created with repurposed metal. The public is cordially invited to meet the artists and have a glass of wine at the Opening, Saturday, February 22, 3-5, with artists talks at 3pm.
The Center Gallery: Coming Attractions
Gallery Artist Bruce Mitchell assembles a selection of his wood sculpture and prints, an evolution of work from two decades of work, 2006 to 2025. It’s a retrospective look, presenting abstract wood sculptures— freestanding totemic forms, pedestal sculptures, and some recently crafted wall sculptures—wood-inlay abstractions and finely-carved fish. The most recent work, a series of woodblock prints on rice paper, is focused on the triangle, circle, and square,
Here, Mitchell takes a new direction, creating a new language of forms. He shapes complex printing blocks on the lathe, then transfers their patterns to colored papers with ink or by making rubbings with crayons and adding details with colored pencils. This series reflects his longtime interest in abstract motifs in textiles, pottery, and painted border art from cultures around the world. His wall sculpture Random Weave pays homage to the “wedge weave” created by Navaho weavers in the19th century.
Mitchell began acquiring wood working skills in his late teens as assistant to sculptor JB Blunk. Then, inspired by a Japanese aesthetic, he created hand-carved, wooden, sculptural vessels for 25 years, many of which are now in museums. His fine-art sculpture is varied and imaginative, inspired by excursions into dreamworlds and reverence for nature. Mitchell writes, The central focus of my work in wood has been to use the language of sculpture to bring my ideas about form into life.
The Project Space: Border Paintings
Karen Rose exhibits paintings and prints of the natural landscape in places now marked as political borders. Some of the artworks show barbed wire or fencing, but in most, the artist has removed human structures and machines that refuse access across. She paints these regions as simple landscapes—territories that were once naturally open and expansive—to point out to viewers what has happened. She wants us to think how political boundaries are chosen and built; how borders signify ownership and emphasize difference, solidifying “us and them”, separation, inequality, and often, violence.
Rose began this series to honor her grandparents who immigrated to the US from Mexico. During the pandemic, unable to travel, she painted the Mexican border from film stills, looking at landscapes in Westerns. Other Border Paintings are based on photos from the news: borders of Ukraine/Russia, Israel/ Gaza. Rose also travelled to Morocco to reflect on peaceful coexistence and paint the utopian vision “beyond borders” of the Atlas Mountains. She also looks at the treatment of borders in film. Three prints are drawn from Clint Eastwood films where “the Mexican border” was actually filmed in Spain.
Rose’s palettes honor Mexican and Ukrainian textiles, and present electric pinks with black to express horror at near-apocalyptic events. She works to “to process what is actually happening, feelings and thoughts about wars and confusion.” She says her position is one of an outsider looking in; her Border Paintings are visions of peace.
The Annex Gallery Rule #2
Gallery Route One Fellow Zulu Heru shows scrap metal Afrocentric masks and sculptures—ritualistic objects that tell stories of urban environments with an ancestral aspect. The mask Lazer Cut announces Interstate and wears street signs for a hat; his spirit is about setting an intention and staying focused. In other works, body parts are made from repurposed propane tanks, tractor blades, shells from anti-tank helicopter rounds, and tracks of an M1A1 Abrams tank.
Heru first gained metal skills while doing shop chores for Afrofuturist metal sculptor Uzikee Nelson. Now a master builder and engineer, he’s built giant sculptures for Burning Man, and says, I’m not intimidated by materials. American construction is built off centuries of the work of Black people, everything found in manufacturing and industrial materials. My skills are a result of ancestral privilege. When I touch these materials, I touch the story of my ancestors, the people who made the prototype of this item, and the materials are still speaking to me now.
Like his mentor Uzikee, Heru merges African aesthetics with contemporary art, honoring the religious and medicinal aspects of the African. Heru is a war veteran; he began designing sculpture to heal from PSTD, and soon realized he was speaking for a community:. I was becoming a culture bearer with a responsibility to speak for people. I know people who worked in the trades for fifty years and they are invisible. I want to make faces, to identify people that carry the lineage of building this country. After 400 years of slavery and the diaspora… I still have my core DNA culture to make this.
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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/