CURATOR’S STATEMENT

In collage, it appears to me that there are two distinct camps of thought: There is the austere form-and-color-driven group, and then there are artists who concern themselves with a narrative sensibility.

By placing these two ideals in the same room, I hoped to generate a discussion, a conversation. I was looking for the frisson that might occur between works that are romantic, erotic, and perhaps even fetish-oriented as they sidle up next to works that are cool in their form-obsessed abstraction.

As I began to look at works that I thought would best offer up ideas along these lines, I started to get confused and ultimately loved what happened. I discovered moments where I felt a bit of shock, like when looking at the work of Victoria May, for example. Her Studies in Convulsion series has a Hans Bellmer–meets–S&M spirit that might be described as a peculiar and uncomfortable hotness. The work, for a lack of better words, left me “cold,” but that is not to say there was no interest. In fact, the interest grew as I started to perceive a space that might be best described as “the peril of erotica.”

What I have come to understand is that there is a fabulous place — a place in between the “hot” and the “cold” — akin to the sweet spot where narrative and abstraction meet and dissolve into one another. In Mildred Howard’s work, the picaresque is overshadowed by the disgrace of slavery. Andrea Borsuk’s collages bring to mind Hollywood’s romantic lies of male domination. And then there’s the disturbing animation by Frédéric Doazan that starts with a few “simple” body modifications and ends in a horrid, deadly disfiguring.

There is another mid-space here where a certain romantic formality found in the work of Katherine Sherwood, Catie O’Leary, and Vanessa Woods plays off the stark abstractions by Ward Schumaker and Matt Gonzalez.

Such spaces are best explored with an open mind, where we are left in a limbo of not knowing how to continue. For me, this is the greatest success a work of art can have. We have been shown an ambiguity that is guaranteed to evoke many questions, and as a result, the work will never suffer the fate of wallpaper.

I hope that this show accomplishes that.

—Jack Fischer

About the Artists

ANDREA BORSUK is a painter whose work explores notions of journey, time, and destiny. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from UC Santa Cruz. She is an Art Instructor at Cabrillo College and a Visiting Lecturer at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, Oregon. She is the 2010–2011 recipient of the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship. Her solo and group exhibitions include Riverside Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and the Monterey Peninsula Community College Art Gallery. Her work is in numerous private collections.

FRÉDÉRIC DOAZAN is an animator and experimental filmmaker living in Paris. His shorts have been screened at film festivals worldwide and have won numerous prizes and awards.

MATT GONZALEZ’s collages are meditations on the nature of equilibrium. They create a balance between the ‘feeling and the syntax of things’ (to quote e.e. cummings), between our sensuous, emotive experience of the world and the rational interpretation of it. Gonzalez was born in South Texas and studied at Columbia University and Stanford Law School. He came in touch with abstract art for the first time when he moved to New York. His artistic outlook is influenced by Dada, in particular Kurt Schwitters and the Situationists. Since 2006 he has exhibited artworks in a variety of Bay Area art venues.

MILDRED HOWARD is known for her sculptural installations and mixed-media assemblage work. In 2015 she received the Lee Krasner Award in recognition of a lifetime of artistic achievement. She has also been the recipient of the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2017), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2004–05), a fellowship from the California Arts Council (2003), the Adeline Kent Award from the San Francisco Art Institute (1991), and most recently, an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts and the Douglas G. MacAgy Distinguished Achievement Award at the San Francisco Art Institute. She has mounted large-scale installations at Creative Time (New York), InSITE (San Diego), the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the New Museum. Howard’s works are represented in the collections of SFMOMA, the deYoung Museum, BAMPFA, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Museum of Glass and Contemporary Art (Tacoma), the Oakland Museum of California, and the San Jose Museum of Art. She holds an MFA from John F. Kennedy University in Orinda.

VICTORIA MAY has exhibited extensively throughout the Bay Area and nationally. Her work has been featured in FiberArts, Surface Design Journal, and By Hand, and she was named a Silicon Valley Creates Artist Laureate in 2015. She is the recipient of the Santa Cruz County Rydell Visual Art Fellowship, as well as an artist-in-residence at the Jentel Foundation, Kala Art Institute, and the Lucid Art Foundation. Her work is in numerous private collections. May holds an MFA from San Jose State University and a BA in Design, cum laude, from UCLA.

CATIE O’LEARY has shown at Jack Fischer and Braunstein/Quay galleries in San Francisco, as well as exhibitions at the Palo Alto Art Center, Bedford Gallery (Walnut Creek), and the Museum of Art and History (Santa Cruz). A California native, she received her MFA from Lone Mountain College and a BA from UC Santa Barbara.

WARD SCHUMAKER has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Shanghai, Los Angeles, and Miami, among other cities. His work can be found in collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), the Zimmerli Art Museum (Rutgers University) and the Joslyn Art Museum (Omaha, NE). As an illustrator, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Washington Post, New Yorker, Poetry, O, the Oprah Magazine, Martha Stewart Living, Enjeux Les Echoes, Le Figaro, and Newsweek.

KATHERINE SHERWOOD’s paintings focus on the combination of historically significant works and her experience with disability. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide, and is the recipient of many grants and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA Artist Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. She is professor emerita at UC Berkeley in the Department of Art Practice and the Disability Studies Program.

VANESSA WOODS graduated with an MFA with honors from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her artwork and films have been exhibited internationally, including Stanford Art Spaces at Stanford University, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Film Arts Foundation Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute's MFA Fellowship. Woods has been awarded residencies at Djerassi, Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, and the Museum of Pont-Aven (France).