2441 Magnolia St., Oakland
East Bay Open Studios
December 6, 7, 13. & 14, 2025
Behind a folding doggy gate (guard dog level: extreme), with late afternoon sunlight streaming onto the gray walls glinting off of Stephen Galgas’ fused glass “Limerant Objects”. A table in the center, scattered with small ornaments, offered more accessible art objects to take home, their lines and colors echoing the larger, more complex counterparts surrounding them.
On view to the public for East Bay Open Studios, Galgas’ glass works echo his background and proficiency in a variety of other media: on a tabletop sat a sweet and intricate gouache painting, in front of a sewing machine. He’s teaching himself to quilt—a logical next craft, imho—pulling directly from the geometry of the painting and glass. Strong lines built through layering, the gentle tonality of whites and grey, yellows, oranges, and umbers, in clean but sometimes haphazard configurations flow from one piece to the next, the five triangles (Prayers No. 1-5) keeping watchful eyes on every corner of the room.
These objects are just a handful in a series, offshoots of an installation that has yet to transpire, and I, for one, cannot wait to see them en masse, holding more light and encompassing a person in their complexities.
But it was Box: Subdermal that drew me in most deeply (sorry). Its translucency hinting at the immense fragility of the medium, its blood and bruising old and new at once, veined and urgent, essential and also forgotten. Small cracks allowing light, but also for leakage, forever frozen in a moment of pain, alive and preserved in unison. Painterly in his approach but true to the media the works are cast in, the panels ooze feelings, just barely contained within their frames. A sort of beautiful horror, a distortion of form and expectations, delicately designed and intricately rendered.
