Artists Reception: Jessica Cadkin, Leah Korican, Monika Mayer, and Various Artists
Mercury 20 Gallery
Oakland
Feb. 25, 2024
I have a friend who loves touching objects that look like they have interesting or pleasing textures. If we’re at a friend’s house and she sees a furry rug, she’ll make a beeline for it and run her hands over the fabric, cooing with pleasure. I have a history of tactile and sensory intrigue myself. One early evening as spring approached, I smelled the fragrant buds of the magnolia tree on my block, stopping to caress its delicate, pink-hued petals as they hung above me like soft jewels suspended in air. I smiled to myself in delight.
The current exhibitions at Mercury 20 Gallery in Uptown Oakland evoked that same desire for sensory exploration. A large crowd of guests wandered through the main room of the gallery during the opening reception, stopping to gaze at and study the textures and shapes on display. Of course, I didn’t touch anything, but the impulse was there — to figure out through touch, what is this thing, how is it made? There was a code I wanted to crack, trying to understand with my eyes at the puzzle of texture and shape before me.
Flow, Monika Mayer’s exhibit, showcased some captivating conundrums. She began working on canvas with coffee, ink, and stitching, creating pieces that look like three dimensional works flattened into two, and blown up from a cellular level. Organic splotches of browns and blacks from far away were, upon examination, made up of delicate, skin-like threads that look like what you might find under a microscope. Then there were the actual three-dimensional pieces, made with materials like inner tube linings and plastic. These were hung from the front window or from hooks on walls, or thrown on mannequin torsos like a widely thatched second skin. I watched a lot of guests stepping forward and away from some of her pieces, exploring the same questions I had. Trying to understand the make-up of her pieces from different angles, working out in my mind how they came to be, I unconsciously mirrored the themes she meant to explore, of “identity, connectedness, and a sense of place.” What a neat trick, I thought.
A complementary exploration was found in Leah Korican’s exhibit, Bramble & Bloom. Large discs flanked a corner of the room, made up of the whites and grays of smaller circles of different sizes, composed of lace, stencils, and spray paint. They were off-set from the wall, allowing for the bright pink undertones painted on the back of the discs to color and shade the circles on the front. More walking up close and looking behind and under ensued — you’re compelled to investigate for nuances of shade and texture. Korican aims to evoke “how memory and early experiences color the present.” It was another neat trick — an investigation of art prompting an investigation of self and perspectives, how what we see and feel depends so much on what came before.
Korican also hung parallel strips of fabric that hung down from the skylight in the gallery, punched through with lacy patterns and colored with pink and orange on both sides, with words forming sense poems as the eye gazed up and down — a jumble of color, text, and texture. I’ve read about the mind forming neural pathways of ways of thinking, of memories and thoughts we may go over a million times in a day. This felt like a snapshot of that process, blown up to life size, forcing us to reckon with and respect it.
