770 West Grand Ave. | Oakland, CA | 94612 |
Phone: 510-271-0822 | [email protected]
Hours: Thursday to Saturday 12-5pm | First Fridays 5-8pm
770 West Grand Ave. | Oakland, CA | 94612 |
Phone: 510-271-0822 | [email protected]
Hours: Thursday to Saturday 12-5pm | First Fridays 5-8pm
Gearbox Gallery is proud to present Refusion, an exhibition of new work by GearBox Gallery artist Harry Clewans and guest artist Courtney Brown, winner of the 2024 GearBox Gallery Juried Show Award. Clewans’ large scale composite wood block images on panels and Brown’s intricate, somewhat unsettling bronze sculptures both combine disparate elements. As the title implies, these two artists use an amalgamation of images, and materials, re-fusing them to create new compelling, and sometimes disturbing hybrid forms.
Harry Clewans has been making woodcuts of found objects for the last thirty years, building up an extensive library of images he cuts up and arranges to create larger and more complex compositions. Like mosaics or jigsaw puzzles, these larger works are typically comprised of hundreds of individual pieces that he fits together to form a new image mounted to a wood substrate.
Just as everything in our physical environment is composed of the same matter, Harry’s large pieces are composed of the same collection of woodcut images. This approach communicates the idea that all things, by virtue of their makeup, are connected, and that all things participate in a cycle of composition and decomposition in which the old, the broken down, and the disposed of become material for the new.
Courtney Brown creates bronze sculpture using organic forms to ask questions about existence in a rapidly changing mechanistic world. Through surreal self-portraits, the artist examines consciousness, time and decay. Currently, the artist is making work using combinations of natural forms that are unsettling, often combining life with inanimate objects, to reflect our unsettled times.
Brown discovered a love for design and metalsmithing at Wayne State University in her hometown of Detroit. She spent most of her career creating jewelry, sculpture and custom furniture for other artists and designers in the Bay Area and beyond.
All are welcome to join us for this Opening Reception celebrating a decade of presenting contemporary art in Oakland. Stop in anytime Saturday, May 24th, 1-4pm to greet the artists and enjoy the light refreshments. Plenty of free street parking on Grand and in the nearby neighborhood.
I’ve always been drawn to things that are in a state of disrepair or decay, things one might find in a gutter or washed up on a beach––a broken light bulb, a battered plastic toy, a dried piece of kelp. For me, such objects reveal the effects of time and use, and offer insight into how they work and how they were formed or put together.
I’ve been making woodcuts of found objects like these for thirty years and have built up an extensive library of images from which I makes prints that I cut up and arrange to form larger and more complex compositions. Like mosaics or jigsaw puzzles these larger works are typically comprised of hundreds of individuals pieces that I fit together to form a picture and then adhere to a wood support.
For every woodcut I’ve made I have a print pinned to a wall in my studio; I think of this wall as a kind of periodic table, and each woodcut as an element that I can use to create a picture. I may use a woodcut of a seedpod to describe the skin of an octopus or the surface of a tree trunk, a woodcut of a dried-up pear to articulate ground around an old well or the wings of a butterfly.
Just as everything in our physical environment is composed of the same elements, my large pieces are composed of the same collection of woodcut images. This approach allows me explore the ideas that all things, by virtue of their makeup are connected, and that all things participate in a cycle of composition and decomposition, in which the old, the broken down, and the disposed up, become material for the new.
Courtney Brown is an artist originally from Detroit, who specializes in bronze sculpture. She discovered a love for design and metalsmithing at Wayne State University in Detroit. Courtney spent most of her career creating jewelry, sculpture and custom furniture for other artists and designers in the Bay Area and beyond.
She is privileged to spend her time creating wholesome pagan works of her own sculpture, as well as a line of clay pots for dry garden plants.
In her sculptural work, Courtney Brown uses organic forms to ask questions about existence in a rapidly changing mechanistic world. Through surreal self-portraits, the artist examines consciousness, time and decay. Currently, the artist is making work using combinations of natural forms typically combining life with inanimate objects, often in discomforting ways.
770 West Grand Ave.
Oakland, CA 94612