Bobbi Meier

Pile-up at The Gates of Hell

2020

Artist Commentary: Remembering formal dinners my mother would arrange in our modest midwestern, suburban home, this piece and it's companion, Conversation Piece...

Artist Commentary: An interactive hybrid of social experiment and sculptural object, envelopes the sitter into it’s cushiony softness, referencing a Victorian courting chair...

Abstract expressionist assemblage with found objects typical of an artist's studio floor by Bay Area artist Michael Pauker (American, b. 1957). Applied paint brushes, caps and tubes of paint, a few letters, putty knife, with splashes of color on wood. Unsigned. From the collection of the artist's work. Unframed. Image size: 11.25"H x 25.75"W Bay Area artist and art educator Michael Pauker was born in New York in 1957 and knew he wanted to be an artist from the age of 15. He earned a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts at SUNY Purchase in his native state of New York. In 1989 he went on to earn an M.F.A at Mills College in Oakland and was awarded the City of Oakland Artist Fellowship in Painting. He has been a Bay Area resident since 1988. His work has been exhibited widely across the U.S., as well as in Japan and Costa Rica, and is included in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Exhibitions include: 2007 Contemporary Art Museum, San Jose, Costa Rica 2007 “The Ebay Art Project,” Works/San Jose, San Jose, CA 2003 “Found Imagery: The Art of Collage,” Fresno Art Museum,Fresno, CA 2003 “Cut, Copy, Paste,” De Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, CA 2003 “20th Annual Exhibition,” Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA 2002 “40 by 40...

Over many decades Loren Eiferman has created and mastered a unique technique of working with wood—her primary material. First, she begins with a drawing of an idea. Then she takes a daily walk in the woods surrounding her studio and collects tree limbs and long sticks that have fallen to the ground. She never chops down a living tree or uses green wood. Eiferman allows the wood time to cure in the studio to make sure it won’t check or crack. Next, she debarks the branch and looks for shapes found within each piece of wood. Using a Japanese hand saw, she cuts and connect these small shapes together using dowels and wood glue. Then, all the open joints get filled with a home made putty, which is then sanded so she can see the newly formed shapes. This process is until the new sculpture appears like the original line drawing but in space. She wants the work to appear as if it grew in nature, when in fact each sculpture is composed of over 100 small pieces of wood that are seamlessly jointed together. Her work can be called the ultimate recycling: taking the detritus of nature and giving it a new life. We have all at one point or another picked up a stick from the ground—touched the wood, peeled the bark off with our fingernails. Her work taps into that same primal desire of touching nature and being close to it. Trees connect us back to nature, back to this Earth. Her work has a meditative quality to it—a quiet, calming energy. Her influences are many; from looking at nature and plant life on this Earth to researching the heavenly bodies in the images beamed back from the Hubble Telescope. From studying ancient Buddhist mandalas and designs to delving deeper into quantum physics. And from researching mysterious manuscripts to studying the patterns inside our brains. For Invocation, we are exhibiting her newest body of work, inspired by the illustrations found in the Voynich Manuscript. This 250-page book, is believed to have been written in the early 15th century, of a mysterious origin and purpose. Written in an unknown language and currently housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, the manuscript has eluded all attempts in the intervening centuries to decode or decipher its purpose and meaning. This enigmatic book is divided into 6 different sections (herbal, astronomical, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical and recipes). Having discovered the images contained in this codex over the Internet, Eiferman felt an immediate, profound and inexplicable connection to this manuscript and its creator. The artist is currently transposing the “herbal” section of manuscript into sculptures. This section has drawings in it of plants and flowers that do not really exist in nature—past or present. These aren’t just pretty images of flowers—they also contain the wacky root systems and seemingly out of proportion leaves, stamens and pistils. Loren Eiferman was born in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from SUNY Purchase. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the Tri-State region including gallery and museum exhibitions in the Hudson Valley and Connecticut. Her work is included in numerous corporate and private art collections. In 2014 she was awarded a NYC MTA Arts & Design art commission to produce steel railings...