Clockwise from top left: Andrew Moore, Detroit Dry Dock; Kim Anno, Valley Curtain; Donna Brookman, fons et origo IV, Lewis deSoto, Jurupa Valley
Time & Place: Human Impact and our Changing Environment
Artists: Kim Anno, Donna Brookman, Lewis deSoto, Andrew Moore
Curated by Jeff Nathanson
May 1 – September 23, 2018
“Time & Place” is an exhibition about the natural and built environments, human impact, and how a place changes over time.
This is a particularly poignant time to be contemplating these thoughts. The Sonoma and Napa County communities of the North Bay were devastated recently by wildfires that blazed out of control for days. Hurricanes caused massive destruction in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. And, major earthquakes caused incredible damage and loss of life in Mexico.
These are major natural disasters that happened just within the past year, but the pattern is clearly identified by climate experts – global temperatures are rising and weather patterns are changing more rapidly than in any time in recorded history. The reason for this is hotly debated in the political arena, but this project was developed with the understanding that the climate change we are experiencing is caused by the decisions and actions of people living on this planet.
It is also because of decisions and actions that our region of Sonoma County has experienced a major housing crisis, resulting in escalating property values and unprecedented problem with homelessness.
“Time & Place” attempts to place these challenges in a larger global context. The artists were selected to represent various perspectives on the urban environment, the natural environment and how our decisions, actions, and inactions contribute to change, both positive and negative.
This exhibition is presented with generous support by Eric & Debbie Green, Marc & Jeanie Kahn, and Steven & Nancy Oliver.
Kim Anno has been on the California College of the Arts faculty as a painting professor since 1996. She was appointed chair of the department in 2012. Anno’s heritage is Japanese American, Native American and Irish, a mixed-race and cultural background that gives her a truly unique world view. Her recent work includes themes of ecology and climate change, the “joy and consequences of technology”, and “the language of abstraction as it appears in religious and ritual art.” Working on wood, aluminum and canvas surfaces, Anno has pushed her painting practice to explore the limits of abstraction. Her current work allows narrative into her process, revealing her interest in film and leading to her current interdisciplinary practice. Since then she has applied her painterly mark to working in short film and video installations.
Donna Brookman makes paintings, books, and prints that explore “the elusive space between representation and abstraction.” Her paintings create a dematerialized world, suggestive of landscape, but rhythmically organized and inherently musical in nature. Brookman is a long-time resident of Berkeley, California, and holds a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. The paintings in “Time & Place” are from her recent “Palace of Memory” series that evoke a kind of haunting, with disappearing glaciers and eroding forms, but also assert hope and the possibility of survival.
Lewis deSoto is an American artist of Cahuilla Native American ancestry. Berkeley Art Museum Director Lawrence Rinder writes: “deSoto has explored a wide variety of media in his efforts to express the nuances of various social histories and worldwide cosmologies.” The majority of deSoto’s work has been in the media of photography, sculpture, and installation. DeSoto is based in Napa, California and Los Angeles and has been a professor of photography at San Francisco State University since 1988. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, U.C. Berkeley Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY and other museum and private collections internationally.
Andrew Moore investigates the intersections of historical moments found within specific locations. Through his vividly colored, large-scale photographs of architectural structures and landscapes across the world, including Cuba, Russia, Detroit, and the Great Plains of the American West, Moore captures a strong sense of place while also complicating our linear understanding of time. In his Detroit series of decaying and derelict urban structures, for example, the viewer becomes intensely aware of the passing of the years and the impact of economic depression. Moore is based in New York City. Since 2004 he has taught in the MFA photography program at the School of Visual Arts, and from 2001-2010 he was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University. In 2014 he was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
