Peralta Colleges District-Wide Faculty Invitational
June Steingart Gallery
Laney College, Tower Building Lobby
900 Fallon St.
Oakland
Sept. 18, 2024
Ever lost hours in search of a sculpture you saw a decade ago and only vaguely recall, both online and among your own poorly archived history? She’s bronze, just smaller than life-sized, arms behind her back, facing the vista, standing on the side of a hill. She may be getting ready to swim, or bathe, I cannot recall. Is she in Italy, Fiesole, overlooking Florence? Or have I manufactured her, a compilation of delicately rendered women and girls I have encountered, set to patina in the elements?
Logan Wood’s “Crossroads 2” stands on a white pedestal at waist height, her porcelain skin and Prussian blue-painted bathing costume smooth and creamy, her short dark hair crackled, her face pointed, her feet yellowed. She is small, perhaps 18 inches tall, and her toes seem larger than necessary. I love them and their dirtied toenail edges, nail beds clear and clean, skin jaundiced. Wood, adjunct professor at Merritt College, is one of 12 faculty members exhibiting the district-wide Faculty Invitational, on display now at Laney’s June Steingart Gallery.
“Crossroads 2” had drawn me right across the gallery, but once my period of excessive peering was over I straightened to start to take in the other pieces and marvel at my timing. The afternoon’s rays had made the gallery quite warm, but as it began its turn towards the golden I was caught between simply appreciating the glow and trying to capture its glory for you all. Alex Echevarria’s paintings, in oils and acrylic, seemed to soak in the sun, radiating back the light in its simultaneously cheerful and unsettling sunset hues. In all three the scale is slightly warped, swapped, inverted, elements juxtaposed in unusual ways, such as in “Daydream,” in which a shopping cart and hedge occupy the right half of the canvas, a blue-and white striped tablescape with a bowl of peaches bathing in moonlight through fluttering curtains the other.
Minoosh Zomordinia’s iPhone collection, three fashioned in porcelain and three of MDF, sit below Carolyn Martin’s trio of canvases, washed in gold leaf and gunpowder. The phones, titled simply as “iPhone [x]” or “Satellite Maps [coordinates], fashioned with such precision, sat in stark contrast to Martin’s “Destructive Character” and “If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed,” two of the explosion-infused wall works, each feeling cheeky, or perhaps just subversive, in wildly differing ways, and I only wished for some information on their creation, some insight behind the choices made and pairing of these pieces. Maybe seeking meaning where there was none, I moved on.
The final pieces I spent real time with were created by Laney’s own Mary Catherine Bassett, three woven ceramic forms in various shades of flesh and steel scattered throughout the small gallery. The smallest and smoothest, “Bound” had me crouched, kneeling, trying to dissect its skeleton and color range, while its brothercousin “Large Rain Cloud,” leggy and nestled in the front window and gazing at its own reflection, has continued to leave me perplexed at its construction, in the best of ways. The third, “Sora,” is smaller than the others and appears a combination of the two styles and forms, borrowing the coloration and smooth woven texture, swooped organic form of “Bound” and glass baubles, spindly steel legs, and sultry light bath from the Rain Cloud.
The strands of glazed stoneware of “Bound” and “Sora,” woven, static, initially read as chainmail, so I was slightly disappointed at the lack of kinetic possibility. But the sturdiness of the shapes coupled with the softness of the rosy taupes and sharkskin grays left me satisfied in their immobility and longing to stroke them lightly, feel their slippery cool silkiness. The cloud’s glass bubbles, or rain droplets, are suspended at various heights below the gray, hollow and surprisingly light-looking ceramic sculpture, catching stray rays, or the paintings or people behind them. Look closer, and you’ll find twin baubles inside, ready to drop, pour down, let loose shards of light. The twisted, bulbous mass is pocked, matte, coral-esque and concrete in one, a piece of the sky rent of mud and sand, a sterile and grayscale piece of Fine Art For Your Space handled with such care as to render it deeply approachable, bursting with individual meaning and potential for each viewer.
So go stare at it yourself.
Additional exhibiting artists include: J.Braman (BCC), Drew Burgess (CoA), Cynthia Horn (CoA), Barbara Obata (MC), Erik Parra (BCC), Fan Lee Warren (LC), and Barbara Obata (MC).
June Steingart Gallery is open to the public Monday-Thursday from 11 – 2, with this exhibit on view through Oct. 15, 2024
