301 Jefferson St, Oakland
December 7 & 8th, 2024
If you live in the Bay Area you’ve likely seen something by John Casey’s hand around town, his playful but haunting eyes and disfigured critters, born of his life-long “obsession with the figure….show not only the distorted perceptions of a child…fascination with skulls, teeth, spirographic eyes, and invented body parts.” The warped and worrying creatures are dementedly loveable and darling. A chubby raccoon clutching a can of Schlitz beer (“Precious”, 2019, below) stares, red-rimmed eyes sparkling sweetly.
A pigeon (“Pea(ce) Pigeon”, 2022), winged rat of the city, holds a vibrant orange nasturtium in beak, delicately, inquisitive. A more orange fish (detail of “Golden Girls”, 2023), swimming with hands in place of fins, grins, leers, yellow chompers dulled and crooked. A postcard of Casey, entitled “Woof (Selfie),” with the artist’s collared and spotted head, beard neat and nose shining, sitting atop a splayed small dog’s body. A pink tongue and rocket tip, eyes and leash leading out of frame.
These works were on display, sort of. This month Jack London’s Jackknife Studios, workspace to an incredible 18 artists under one roof, showed works by members Laura Mitsu and Carla Golder, as part of the biannual East Bay Open Studios. Mitsu and Golder hung abstract paintings and large colored pencil drawings respectively, sharing use of bright, fun colors and dashing movement within the frames.
In person, the works were just as vibrant and joy-inducing as their internet minis, but the cropped and shrunken images that had brought me to the gallery imbued a different sort of feel than their digital avatars.
Mildly disappointed, I took to narrow indoor alleys to explore, lighting up on delightful hallway-hung pieces by John Casey and Steve Javiel, and ending in Golder’s personal studio space to examine a larger cross section of her works.
Javiel’s eye-popping burst of palette knife-painted florals came next, the yellow ochre background filled with layer upon layer of textural tidbits, the artist’s interest in patina and surface wear, the decay, in the world around us. Stenciled dots in hot pinks and oranges mingle with floral schmears in lilacs and periwinkles, eggplants and indigos. Electric oranges and wine reds, tempered by turquoise, and tiny blossoms of white, spotted centers sunflower yellow, barely contained in a clear glass vase, what might be a hibiscus bloom splayed at the base. Javiel also channels his lively strokes into “contemporary pet portraits,” an excellent gift for a fur-loving friend (or, you know, yourself).
Golder has held her studio space as Jackknife for about three years, but has been making art for more than four decades and in Oakland so long the connection to her childhood home of Ohio is “tenuous.” Her drawings on display for open studios are a portion of a series of botanical and figurative pencil drawings, “The Divine Feminine,” heavily featuring magnolia flowers, sun-warmed faces, and the female form, continuations of prior botanical works in combination with her earlier figures-in-landscape pieces.
These early 1980s watercolors and etched prints boast warm and watery undulating waves of color in the first and clean, clear, high-contrast black and white lines in the second. Nude figures recline, indoors and out, architectural lines giving way to home decor, to mountainous features, the sky. Their ambiguity, layers, and intersections melt and diverge, gridded and agrarian. I needed the deep saturated blacks of the ink and loose, soft waves of the watercolors, but perhaps Golder’s current pencil pieces will melt your mind instead.
