Mark your calendars for next Friday, October 1st when Strangerous, an exhibition in collaboration with Rob Reger opens at Creative Growth in Oakland. Reger is a Bay Area artist and the creative force behind illustrated heroine, Emily the Strange (he's also Gallery Extraña's co-founder). Strangerous features artwork by Creative Growth artists: Cedric Johnson, David Albertsen, Dinah Shapiro, Donald Mitchell, Franna Lusson, Gail Lewis, George Wilson, Jade Saren, John Martin, Juan Aguilera, Merritt Wallace, Nick Pagan andRodney Ridge . Also featuring Rob Reger’s own ‘rotating paintings.’ Exhibition is on view October 1 – November 12, 2010.

With an opening party, that will take place during Oakland’s monthly Art Murmur event, Strangerousis a marriage of the strange and the dangerous, a fitting Halloween-season-exhibition.

Curator, Rob Reger comes from a pop culture-neo-surrealist aesthetic in his personal artwork, and naturally gravitated toward the more abstract and peculiar side of Creative Growth artist’s work. Reger says about working with Creative Growth, “I'm blown away by what the artists here in the Studio do, how they approach art making, and their unique visions and explanations, (or not!) for their work. There is an absolute contagious creative spirit living at Creative Growth."

About Rob Reger: Reger’s local design house, Cosmic Debris—grew from a tangle of roots joining the DIY punk scene of the ‘eighties with guerilla art, surrealism, and the psychedelic explosion of the ‘sixties. Reger introduced the world to Emily the Strange—an icon of empowerment for young alternative girls and outsiders of all ages.

Featuring music by the all girl, middle-school- rock-band: Poison Apple Pie and Bar by ERA, Oakland

Also on view: Artwork from the students of Summer Scholarship Program 2010. Check out and collect the visionary work made by high-school aged artists with disabilities who have participated in the Creative Growth studio during Summer 2010.

About Creative Growth: Creative Growth Art Center serves adult artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities, providing a stimulating environment for artistic instruction, gallery promotion and personal expression. Artwork fostered in this unique environment is included in prominent collections and museums worldwide.


WHAT: Strangerous: An exhibition curated by Bay Area artist Rob Reger.

WHEN: Exhibition and opening event during Oakland Art Murmur, Friday, October 1, 2010 from 5:00-9:00pm. Gallery event is free and open to the public. Also open Saturday, October 2, 11am-4pm. On view from October 1 to November 12, 2010.

WHERE: Creative Growth Art Center Gallery, 355 24th St., Oakland, CA 94612, (near 19th St. BART).

PUBLIC INFO: For more information call 510/836-2340 ext.15

PRESS PREVIEW: September 30, by appointment

IMAGES UPON REQUEST:jennifer@creativegrowth.org


FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONTACT:

Jennifer O’Neal, Curator / Gallery Manager:

jennifer@creativegrowth.org

Tom di Maria, Director:

tom@creativegrowth.org

Website: http://www.creativegrowth.org/

... & some press

Long Division

Culture and nature, reconciled.

By DeWitt Cheng for the East Bay Express

detail from Bryan de Roo's "Thought Bubble — Crystal Mesh."

The metaphysical poet Robert Herrick compared artists to amphibians, since they both live in dual realms, wet/dry and real/imagined. In recent years, art theorists diagnosed our schizophrenic condition as a split between nature and culture (no doubt due to Original Sin), and most artists found the new, exciting media frontier infinitely more fascinating than tired old nature, already done to death in more ways than one. Then things unraveled. Nowadays, socially engaged art practices are lauded, and even though 1930s-style social realism is still scorned, opining that art can be more than flippant nihilism no longer causes sighs and rolling eyes.

Gina Borg and Bryan de Roo are former Boston University classmates who are showing their paintings under the umbrella title, Temples of Transition, which some might construe as endorsing critic Suzi Gablik's goal of "re-enchanting" and re-sacralizing a fallen art world. Both construct fields of repeated (but varied) abstract marks that explore pattern, structure and growth; both create in order to explore process, but their paintings become metaphors for psychic integration — not exactly the Prime Directive of capitalist or postmodernist sophisticates.

Borg's nearly monochromatic paintings call for and foster a becalmed meditative state. Their carefully modulated tessellated brushstrokes suggest lustrous tapestries and embroidered brocades, subtly changing in texture and sheen, and natural structures like waves, tree bark, and field grasses — or scientific specimens, magnified. She describes her paintings as "process-driven experiments in color, light and the power of incremental change ... [created by] mutating the tones and temperatures of just a few colors ... the nuanced, physical remnants of ... slowing down ... perception." "Big Pink," "Floe," "White Mountain, "Berg," and "Balm" are minimalist nature paintings that ask the viewer to perceive change in the changeless, and vice versa.

While Borg's ethereal works seem to have been breathed into existence, de Roo's indeterminate structures suggest improvisation and evolution. Borg discerns "UFOs, architecture, crabs, robots and insects"; others might discover road maps, origami papers, botanical and biological slides, engineering diagrams, circuit charts, and plan views of archaeological sites. The ambiguity is deliberate: de Roos says he seeks "a pregnancy, a fecundity, like this could be so many things." What his twelve "Thought Bubble — Crystal Mesh" paintings depict is more elusive and abstract: how painting and thinking operate "by way of crystallization and interweaving." They're portraits of the creative process. Temples of Transition runs through June 19 at Gallery Extraña (2912 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley). 510-845-3645 X217 or Gallery-Extrana.com

Reposted from:

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/long-division/Content?oid=1792120&mode=print

Masako Miki and Chris Russell

We start installing the show this weekend, look back for install pics in the next day or so!



Deer Contemplating Plan B, Masako Miki

Inside the Universe, Chris Russell