Artists’ Reception: Tara Esperanza, Christine Meuris, Dalar Alahverdi, Leah Korican, and Elizabeth Sher
Mercury 20 Gallery
475 25th St.
Oakland
June 22, 2024
I was wilting under the heat of the East Bay sun when I stopped by Mercury 20 Gallery in the early evening, just in time to find a seductive bowl of bright red strawberries beckoning me from a refreshment table set up outside. After a minute of delectably mindful respite as I gorged on a few, succulent pieces of fruit, I found more nature to reflect on inside: Oakland artist Tara Esperanza’s own sun-drenched succulents, in the form of larger-than-life paintings of the desert plants she found thriving in the area.
Along with Esperanza, the gallery also fêted the work of Christine Meuris, Dalar Alahverdi, Leah Korican, and Elizabeth Sher. But on a hot Saturday in Oakland, Esperanza’s nature-themed exhibit was the first to greet artgoers.
Esperanza’s exhibit, For the Love of a Butterfly, shows that, just like plants, no painting is the same as another, even when reflecting on the same subject.
Esperanza lost her mother while creating the works in this exhibit, and you can sense the calm thoughtfulness unfolding in the pieces, each a meditation on life from every shade and angle. Her photo-realistic tableaus were big and bold but also organic and natural — the desert plants came at you from all sides, splashed in swaths of green and yellow, hints of blue and pink, some plants curiously edged in red as if dipped in blood. The paintings were their own kind of mindful meditation on the wonder of nature, and how it’s a dynamically replicating puzzle of color and light, not cognizant of birth or death or time. I came away with gratitude at this respite of the beauty of every living thing that exists like we do, thriving in nuance under the same heat, shade, and sun.
In the adjoining room, Christine Meuris’ floral artworks — her own artful meditations in the face of the loss of her mother and a dear friend — seemed twinned in tragedy, but of a different texture and color. Her works of thread woven into linen and cloth, focus mainly on flowers in vases, but deconstructed to look simpler, more studied, and more intellectual. Carefully stitched threads in blue and red and ochre, of larger and smaller circles with threaded fringes, lie against a background of organic beige, in elegantly pleasing works recalling a Nordic minimalism like you might find in a mid-century home. Sometimes there are a few lacy leaves in dark green, or a starburst of a flower. Meuris also displayed deconstructed quilt patterns on gauzy panels which hung in the middle of the room. People moved in and around them as light filtered through the negative space, the patterns of thread outlining a sort of ghost quilt of color that was barely there, in what she described as “symbols of home and hearth, beautiful, sweet even if potentially fleeting.”
