March 7 – April 12, 2026
“Spinning Time into Form” invites viewers into a living field where sculptural forms and natural rhythms reveal the entangled life of human and more-than-human worlds.
Rainey Straus’s work emerges from a practice of relational attunement with place, materials, and the more-than-human world. Using biodegradable materials such as cast paper, papier-mâché, and bioplastic, Straus shapes forms that dissolve, lean, and respond to one another, inviting viewers to reconsider their place within a living, interconnected field. The work asks us to sense the world not as a static backdrop but as a co-creative presence.
Spinning Time into Form brings together unfurling seed-like forms that investigate edges, borders, and the ongoing flow of natural phenomena, alongside suspended assemblies that map the energetic signatures of Bay Laurel and Live Oak Trees at the nearby Point Reyes National Seashore. Accompanied by a dawn chorus recorded in the park by nature sound recordist Mark Lipman, the installation invites a space of deep ecological attention. Informed by quantum physics, indigenous knowledge, and contemporary eco-philosophy, Straus’s work illuminates multiple ways of knowing and being that shape our entangled experience in the world.
BIO
Rainey Straus is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on cultivating kinship with the more-than-human world through painting, photography, sculpture, and installation. The painting series, The Old Growth Project, was exhibited at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and featured in Forest Unseen at the Petaluma Arts Center, The New Geologic Epoch with Ecoartspace, and Art & Ecology at the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts.
Straus recently returned from the BigCi Environmental Residency in New South Wales,
Australia, and was an artist-in-residence at the Morris Graves Foundation and the Lucid Art
Foundation in 2024. Her work has been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San
Jose Museum of Art, and the Design Exchange Museum in Toronto, and featured in Dark Mountain Journal, Sculpture Magazine, Rhizome, Videogames and Art (edited by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell), the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News. She holds a BFA in Painting from SUNY Purchase and an MFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts.