PO Box 937 / 11101 Highway One / Point Reyes Station, CA 94956 / PH: 415.663.1347 / www.galleryrouteone.orgPress Release: For Immediate Release May 17, 2025
Contact: Patti Trimble pmtrim@gmail.com (707) 360-8189
Upcoming Exhibits at Gallery Route One
May 17 through June 22, 2025
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Zea Morvitz: Notebook Archaeology, drawings, collages, and books
Nancy Bertelsen: Praise for the Elements, paintings from a decade-long project
Ellen Vogel: Tactile Territories, mixed media wall pieces
Gallery Hours 11-5, Thursday through Monday
Opening Reception Saturday, May 17, 3-5pm.
Artist Talks at 3pm
In the Center Gallery, Gallery Artist Zea Morvitz’s Notebook Archaeology exhibits gridded collages of her abstract drawings, and a selection of notebooks and altered books. For two decades, Zea Morvitz has been drawing in small notebooks, (seen in this exhibit) often beginning with images unearthed from memory.
Not interested in precise rendering, she collaborates with the form to create unique abstract images, following her curiosity and imagination. After filling dozens of notebooks with hundreds of forms, Morvitz excavated some drawings as digital images and arranged them in grids. She saw how they could be read—in a mysterious wordless way—like hieroglyphs or runes.
Thinking of them as pictograms, she created a second series of collages (both series are in the show) rearranging images, looking at contexts, affinities, and narratives: two heads in conversation; a row of mountains as the days of a journey; thorns pointing to discomfort along the way.
In this exhibit Morvitz shares her fascination with ancient writing, and with how we read early alphabets as “undecipherable yet graphically interesting abbreviations”. And also her interest in archaeological methods: mining ancient sites for artifacts and placing them on tables to puzzle out the meaning.
Zea Morvitz moved from New York to the Bay Area, and then to Inverness in her 30s, trading the world of commerce and achievement for pathways in the woods. Her work is informed by philosophies of Asian mindfulness, surrealist automatism, and the European understanding of art not as a commodity, but as public political and philosophical discourse. Morvitz lives and works on the Inverness ridge: she exhibits her work in the US and Europe. An active member of GRO, fostering philosophical and social discourse, she co-curates the Visiting Artist Program where invited artists exhibit work on social and environmental issues.
In the Project Space, Praise for the Elements, is an exhibition of acrylic paintings on paper and canvas by Nancy Bertelsen, selections from a decade of work. Bertelsen has lived in West Marin for fifty years, surrounded by nature, often walking, gazing, letting the earth claim her attention. She is drawn to paint the dynamics of land, bodies of water, and landscapes including human interventions. She speaks of painting as a way of joining and honoring earthly elements, the sources of our lives — root systems, rock, water, and growing species.
Bertelsen also paints as an inquiry: seeing the act of painting as a meeting ground between earthly phenomena and human consciousness. How does creative expression get close to acknowledging the whole of the human as a Being inextricable from the earth?
Nancy writes: The works express an ever-increasing kinship with the earth in its various manifestations; how it appears in light and darkness, not just through sight, but with felt-glimpses of the ongoing generativity of the Earth?
I ask questions as I go: How to render the feel of a particular tree, or a rocky field, the rocks strewn by weather events? Or the feel of setting out into a large expanse of water? Or offer an imagined view of what lies beneath the earth, images that might inspires a viewer’s curiosity and intimacy with the living systems that gives us life.
Nancy Bertelsen is a retired psychotherapist and a long-active community activist. In 2003, she co-founded GRO’s Latino Photography Project, and has coordinated with a network of other non-profits with the purpose of bringing people together through education and the arts. For the past twelve years, she has intensified a lifetime practice of art-making.
In the Annex Gallery, Tactile Territory exhibits mixed media wall pieces by Ellen Vogel, an artist whose primary sense is touch. These artworks amplify the tactile: layering cardboard with cut and torn papers, paint, wires, etc. For the series, Vogel was inspired by the concept of umwelt. Umwelt is a name for the small subset of the world each species detects and navigates, clearly different for all of us. The limited Umwelt of our own species is also the reason we sometimes mistake our own experience for all there is to know.
Vogel’s experience and understanding of the world, our umwelt, is heightened by touching the world’s layers of texture, density, lightness, weight, roughness, softness. In artmaking, she searches for wordless expressions for this tactility and expressions for the layered and multi-levels of consciousness.
She says: I work with piles of things. I just go, just respond. These pieces are visual poems; like musical compositions they are physical and wordless. They reflect layers of consciousness understood in visceral response. Corporeality and spirit combined.
Ellen Vogel is a graduate of John F Kennedy’s MFA program in Arts and Consciousness, and studied at the NY Studio School, CCA, Ithaca College, and SF State. As teacher and artist, she shares her understanding of art as an innate, unique gift of creativity we all have as humans, in connection to nature, Buddhist philosophy, and the wonder of being in a body in this place and time.
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/