October 26 – November 25, 2017
Oakland Art Murmur Art Walk Reception, November 3rd, 6-9 pm
Frances Lerner courtesy Jack Fischer Gallery
“Other Conversations” will juxtapose the AbEx influenced paintings of Irene Nelson with the eccentric assemblages of Frances Lerner. Both artists share a conviction in the values of their intuitive processes.
Nelson says of her acrylic paintings, “(They) celebrate the dynamic interaction of line, shape, color, and composition. Paint and original photography collage are the material of my explorations. The paintings are acts of discovery, asking the continual ‘what if?’ I’m fascinated by the way that one move or gesture limits the field, or suggest a new direction. The process is a dance between thinking and not thinking, balancing patience with spontaneity. It is an act of faith.
As I become absorbed in the creative process—working to discover imagery that has always already been there, or waiting for it to emerge—the creative process itself becomes the answer to the question.”
Frances Lerner, whose work combines unlikely materials, explains, “The individual shapes unite and reunite forming a sort of hybrid form that felt both familiar and mysterious, balanced and imbalanced.
Instead of technical constraints serving as a guide and only using oil paint on panel, multiple techniques and materials accrued to these hybrid sculptures: Odd bedfellows – cast concrete and homespun fabric, wood and wool, bound physically to each other and reacted together unexpectedly. They formed a kind of old world symbiosis where the materials hold memory.”