The last few years have, until recently, forced us all to stay put. My daily path has become much shorter, and my usually frequent travel around the country has been slow to resume. I’ve turned to studying the intimacy of my home and the people in it. We are literally bouncing off the walls, and the behavioral loop of tension and concession between family members confined to a tight radius has made its way into my studio. This latest body of work reflects the daily grind of, and ultimate comfort in, intimate relationships. We sit between boredom and unease. I aspire to maintain a similar anxiety or slipperiness in my work. While there is always something trustworthy, like a clear central axis or underlying pattern, the paintings barely hold together the more chaotic and unpredictable information that edges towards the periphery of each piece. I want there to be an uneasy union between visual elements. I think of these paintings as arial views of the domestic “rectangles” we put to use every day: a loud but loving family dinner table, or the phenomenon of going to bed alone but waking to a tangle of four family members jockeying for purchase. My paintings are an equally a rowdy bunch, and the pleasure in working lies in the balancing act of wrestling with colors, patterns, and techniques while also allowing an image to unfold organically.

These paintings are made with casein, a milk-based paint originally used for painting wooden furniture, on wood panels primed with a traditional marble dust and hide glue ground. This provides a surface for painting that is as absorbent and delicate as paper but durable enough to heavily tape, sand, and layer upon, giving it the physicality of a ceramic tile or frescoed wall. This particular combination of materials is the result of years of experimentation with different media and techniques, and ultimately alludes to my interest in architecture, building materials, and by extension a continuing exploration of public versus private space and the development and collapse of the built environment.

GC 2022

Kelly Falzone Inouye (b. 1975 Woodland, CA) works in watercolor exploring contemporary culture and nostalgia. For this exhibition she was the recipient of a San Francisco Artists Award from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Inouye has presented solo exhibitions at venues including Marrow Gallery in San Francisco and Interface Gallery in Oakland. Notable group exhibitions include “The de Young Open” at The de Young Museum and “Contemporary Watercolor” at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York City. She has been awarded public art projects by the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and was a finalist for the Creative Capital award in 2015.

Inouye also founded and ran Irving Street Projects, an influential San Francisco-based residency program that provided project development and exhibition opportunities to fellow Bay Area artists from 2015-2020.

She is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA 2008) and UC San Diego (BA 1998). She lives and works in San Francisco with her family and tiny dog.

Marrow Gallery presents Mother Tongue, an exhibition of new works from New York and Nashville based-artist, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery and presents a selection of brand new work made during the global Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 and 2021. Mother Tongue marks a significant formal shift in Kline’s oeuvre from oil painting on traditional rectilineal planes to a mixed media approach centralizing papyrus surfaces and incorporating thread, pearls, beads, glitter and ink. Parallel to this emergence of new materials, Kline distills her subject matter into body-based lexicons as a tool to decipher the expansive mysteries of human relationships. Cut out from the distractions of place, situation, context and even gravity, these emotionally-charged figures take center stage as they grapple with the complexity of self and each other.

Shaped as silhouettes but refracting fiery light from luminous surfaces of ink, paint, beads and glitter, the figures in Kimia Ferdowsi Kline’s Mother Tongue are bright tangles of ids and egos. The employment of papyrus-as-canvas in these works is a stand-in for fragile, yet resilient skin. The use of this ancient material suggests age-old human problems and themes, while shiny lakes of glitter and boldly saturated colors situate the work in a shared contemporary moment. Shedding contextual detail and highlighting the body’s architectural form, these new works come at a transformative personal moment: Kline recently gave birth to a daughter in 2018. It is well worth noting that a new direction in creative output was mirrored by the creative process unfolding inside the artist’s body.

The show title, Mother Tongue is a ubiquitous idiom used to describe the language we first learn: the sounds that connect us as children to our caregivers, the words that shape the contours of our early inner worlds through tone and meaning. But while a mother’s words can be the source of complete comfort, they can also carry the potential for harm--a weapon that, when discharged, might inflict lifelong wounds and scars.

The scarred and interwoven bodies in Mother Tongue are often arranged in four-pointed configurations that evoke the charts of modern day trauma theory or the psychological mapping systems of interpersonal dynamics. Also map-like are the topographical surfaces of these works. Lines of beads and dots of pearls build up surface texture forcing the bodies closer to us, into our spatial dimension. While the faces are elemental, archetypal, a visitation from prehistory, the specificity and individuality of these figures' stories come from their stitched up wounds and even their adornments. Much as we adorn ourselves, the artist brightens up her bodies with a dash of staccato glitter or a swoop of pulsing silver beads.

The pearl’s presence in Mother Tongue offers a metaphor for how we deal with the trauma we inherit from and inflict upon each other. The pearl’s life starts off as a humble grain of sand; but for the oyster, its presence is unacceptable. Unable to rid itself of the painful irritant, the mollusk coats the sand with a protein rendering the foreign objects' jagged surfaces smooth, a little more manageable, a way to survive more comfortably. The imagery in Mother Tongue illustrates the invisible yet never-ending affairs unfolding in the small spaces of intimacy--the unresolved traumas turned to pearls, the excruciating messiness, the big and small glories of being together.

Mercy Hawkins received her MFA in Art Studio at University of California, Davis in 2021. She received her BA in Art Studio from California State University Sacramento in 2018 with a minor in History. Presently she works at the Before Columbus Foundation in Oakland, CA, a non-profit promoting multicultural literature for fifty years. She works in painting, sculpture and fiber, exploring craft-based manipulation of materials. Her work seeks to bridge and reconsider the relationship between the human world and the natural world. Recent drawings and sculptural work investigate patterning, rhythmic repetition, drawing on characteristics of script to explore vibrational pulses of the natural world. She is currently a graduate fellow in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito and her work will be featured in New American Paintings, MFA Annual.

Jordan Holms is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, textiles, and sculpture. With a keen sense for architecture and design, her practice considers how aesthetic ‘tastes’ are materialized, organized, and made to mean. Mining source materials from the built environment (both physical and online) Holms’s work references commodity culture, folk art, flea markets, reality television, boutique concept stores, and so-called aspirational design accounts on social media. Filtered through the lens of abstraction, her work interprets the things we find in our homes and in the built environment that signal something about how taste produces meaning. Through her work, Holms constructs irreverent and errant spaces that index their own meanings in an attempt to make sense of what ‘having taste’ might look like in a moment wherein cultural trends are dictated by algorithms as well as elites.

Holms has exhibited in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and her work is held in multiple private collections. She has participated in solo exhibitions at Marrow Gallery (2020; 2018), and group exhibitions at the de Young Museum (2020), and SFMOMA Artists Gallery (2019). She has attended residencies at the Icelandic Textile Center (2022) and Vermont Studio Center (2020). Holms earned a Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute (2019). She currently lives and works in South London, UK.

The Old Boys’ Club (OBC) moniker connotes a fraternity of the wealthy, white male ruling class. It also represents who is excluded; people of color, women, gay, poor and disenfranchised people. In her work, the artist seeks to analyze what is happening in the 21st century world through the lens of entrenched power dynamics and systemic oppression. Syncretism is a collection of works from the artist’s ongoing series titled Prophets.

The Prophets series started as a reaction to the 2015 terrorist attacks in France—Charlie Hebdo, The Bataclan and the Stade de France. Originally shown in a renovated church in 2017, the Chapelle St Jaques Contemporary Art Center, the artist wanted to approach belief and religion with a sense of curiosity and tenderness in an effort to make sense of tragedy.

The imagery in Prophets is based on 16 prophets, both real and imagined. Continuing in her signature mixed-media and maximalist approach, The OBC draws on a diverse repository of visual language from all over the world from traditional Japanese woodblock prints to African masks, underscoring the inherent postcolonial critique in her artist moniker. Conjuring elaborate iconography by borrowing from traditions from all over the world, Syncretism creates a visual world of language that proposes a unity and familiarity in the human experience and a reminder that only by coming together do we outnumber the real enemy—The Old Boys’ Club.

About the Artist

The Old Boy’s Club has shown extensively worldwide, including at the Chapelle St Jaques, Contemporary Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), The San Jose Museum of Art and at galleries in Ireland, USA, Germany, France, London and Brussels. She has won awards for her web design, including for Sketch London and Le Palais de Tokyo. She studied at The School of Beaux Arts and the Sorbonne. Currently based in the French Pyrenees, Marrow Gallery has represented the OBC since 2015.

About Shawn Powell:

Shawn Powell has presented solo exhibitions at 106 Green, Brooklyn, NY; Chapter, New York, NY; Tennis Elbow at The Journal Gallery, New York, NY; and at Webster University, St. Louis, MO. His work has been included in a two-person exhibition at Abattoir Gallery in Cleveland, OH and Nada Miami along with numerous group exhibitions at venues such as The Fabric Workshop and Museum and NADA New York. He has been featured online in Vanity Fair, Brooklyn Magazine, Bedford and Bowery, Art F City, Hyperallergic, the White Columns #39; Artist Registry, and Juxtapoz Magazine as well as in print in Artmaze Mag, Secret of the Friendly Woods with the Wassaic Project, and the CAN Journal. He co-curates the project space Gazebo Gallery with his partner, curator Annie Wischmeyer, in Kent Ohio, which was featured in New Art Examiner, and he recently curated the exhibition The Dead Don’t Die at Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, OH. Powell received his BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA in Painting from Hunter College where he was presented a Tony Smith Award Grant. He was awarded a 2021 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award Grant.

Sculpture for me is about tangibility and transformation. Being able to manipulate materials with my hands, transforming it into something else, is an intimate and magical process. My latest series of work consists of wall pieces that combine traditional stone carving (mostly marble) and the process of needle felting wool. The combination of the physicality of the process and the labor-intensive demands of these materials allows for a focused, slowing down and becomes a mediation on what is happening around and within me. I’m responding to the materials and finding the forms through action and reaction; the challenge is keeping the work fresh and not overworked. Each piece is a meditation on form, texture, and color. The exhibition title Close Contact refers to this intimate relationship with materials and at the same time gives a nod to the time we find ourselves in, where close contact with another human holds a heightened level of preciousness and danger.

I have always been attracted to forms that are in direct opposition to each other or challenge their final aesthetic/functional appearance: I intentionally make a carved stone appear soft and sewn fabrics or needle felted wool to appear rigid and architectural. Many of these pieces are marble which is a material that I absolutely love. I find that I can play and experiment with marble in ways that I cannot in other materials. Wool is a fairly new material for me. The process of needle felting wool is amazingly versatile; it can be worked both additive and reductively. I feel stone and wool have much to teach me; skill and material knowledge are an investment in exploration and discovery as well as hard work and practice. I generally use a graphic and bright palette, with highly saturated colors. Although I used color in older works, there has been a change in my thinking about both color and its role. Now with the incorporation of the wool, I am able to blend color on the surface of the forms in a more painterly way by working with gradations of tones or hues so that color becomes an integral part of the visual structure. I use color to emphasize the forms and create a strong edge contrast with the surrounding space thus reconfiguring the spatial relationships between forms. By merging incongruous materials such as wool and marble I am able to synthesize: organic and geometric, natural and architectural, handmade and the uniform industrial, the new and the traditional. And by infusing the work with humor and awkwardness, I can begin to relate my experience of what it is to be human.

Stephanie Robison

2021

About Stephanie Robison:

Originally from Oregon, Robison currently resides in Oakland, California teaching sculpture and serving as Art Department Chair at the City College of San Francisco. Robison holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Marylhurst University and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Oregon.

Robison’s work has been exhibited at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Joseph A Cain Memorial Art Gallery and Greater Denton Arts Council in Texas, Whatcom Museum and Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, Marrow Gallery in San Francisco, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in California, Peter Robertson Gallery in Alberta Canada, Yeiser Art Center in Kentucky, and Site:Brooklyn Gallery in New York.

In his process, Sato marries the duality of his life with his formal training. His greatest influences; Diebenkorn, Park, Avery, coalesce with his knowledge of traditional Japanese methods, theories and compositional philosophies. Sato has no preference for either ideology of picture making, therefore they become a tool to further fictionalize the already dubious accuracy of what is being depicted.

About the Artist

Hiroshi Sato was born in Japan in 1987. He spent his childhood in Tanzania but returned to Japan for secondary school. His work has been featured in Visual Art Source and Juxtapoz Magazine. He was most recently Artist in Residence at the Cheekwood in Nashville, TN. His work is in public collections including Cheekwood and Ionis Pharmaceuticals. He has shown extensively across the US and UK.