Gearbox Gallery
Contemporary Art
October 16 - November 14, 2020
"it was the signal; the sky quivered like taut tissue... snakes bit themselves with their own teeth, wasps broke their stings on stones, and everything turned against itself; frost lay in puddles, lichen turned to stone and stone to lichen, dry leaves to mould, and trees were filled by thick hard sap. So man moved against himself, both hands armed with swards."
The Moon Is A Mirror is a site-specific installation exploring real and imagined celestial bodies and their mythologies. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s writings, particularly Cosmicomics and The Cloven Viscount this installation explores a chimeric reflection of a studio cosmos. It is a quiet mirrored map documenting accumulation, creation and destruction.
Using only materials I had already collected I began to create a body of drawings built on the erased remains of religious and astronomical imagery. Scraps of past pieces became tightly knit spheres and the work began to orbit around itself, creating its own private and self-generative narrative.
About the Artist:
Penelope Anstruther is a British born, multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Oakland, California. Taking materials and visual cues derived directly from her immediate landscape pieces span the range of site-specific installation, printmaking, book arts, ceramics and experimental video. No matter the medium, strong themes of duality, mental & physical landscape and non-linear material narratives run throughout the work.
Anstruther began her arts education at SACI, in Florence Italy, after which she completed her Foundation Year at City & Guilds of London Art School, achieving Student of The Year in Two Dimensional Media. Subsequently, she gained her BFA in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute, CA, spending a semester in Osaka, Japan, focusing on monoprint & book arts.
Penelope Anstruther has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, most notably at the Tate Modern, London, and has had solo shows in Atlanta, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland. In 2018 she completed a month long residency at Prairie Ronde in Vicksburg, MI where she created a large-scale, permanent, site-specific installation. Anstruther is also deeply informed by her collaborative endeavors. In 2018 she formed Just Enough Collective, a ceramics based studio with fellow artist Betsy Kellas. She has also been continuously collaborating and exhibiting with her partner Drew Grasso of Modest Press and Sun Night Editions since 2017.