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Benicia Ganter, Streaming Everything
Artists working from entirely different influences and sources often produce works of art that are quite similar in image, content, and visual construction. Such is the recent work of Benicia Gantner and Lena Wolff now showing at Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley. These two skilled and versatile artists rely upon geometric shapes and natural objects and images to create vibrant and serene compositions that enforce an ordered and formal world.
Gantner has on view some twenty pieces, titled Streaming Everything, all created in 2009, that depict stylized flowers, plants, and geometric shapes and forms both at stasis and in dynamic fluid motion. Some of these works are site specific installations excellently executed on the walls and window spaces of the gallery. The vivid bright colors and sensual reflective surfaces of her works—vinyl collages on acrylic panel, paper, and drywall—promote mental and visual states where, paradoxically, the representations truly exist not in the mind but on and in the rich surfaces.
Those works with organic plant reference, like Rose + Gold Maple + Poplar and Ruby and Gold Water, picture close-up detailed views of leaves, leaf clusters, and stems silhouetted against shimmering backgrounds, silver gray in the former and deep burgundy-ruby in the latter. The reflections of these rich surfaces create visual problematics, whereby the eye struggles to see in, beyond, and around the forefront images and reflections to penetrate the hidden world beyond, yes, but actually right there on the surface. Other purely geometric works, like Halo and Varitone.20, present an ordered and formal world in balance and equilibrium, although Streaming Everything, after which this exhibition is named, is a meticulously constructed vinyl collage that looks like a stop motion photograph of a turbulent flowing jet stream. This piece complements Gantner’s site specific installation at Gallery 555, City Center in Oakland, on view until November 13.
Lena Wolff’s work also draws upon—literally— geometric shapes and natural images, but the source of her images and compositions is not only nature but quilt patterns and quilting, including stitching and pin holes, which she deftly incorporates into her works. Meeting Place, for example, presents stylized decorative birds, one a white dove, poised upon a series of concentric circles, very reminiscent of quilt patterns; and Pinwheel, a paper collage with a central circle with spokes surrounded by other tangential and truncated circles, also incorporates strings of holes made by a hole punch and pinpricks. Wolff has titled her exhibition, also all completed in 2009, Gatherings, after her series of the same name. In Gathering 3 and Spider, Wolff employs concentric and truncated circles to create stylized “spiders” that have the power of primitive cultural icons and mandalas.
Both of these talented and resourceful artists fully understand human visual processes and the universal importance of patterns and patternmaking. Their imaginative works reinforce and substantiate the value of these processes and the abstractions that come from the mechanics of seeing.
For more info:
Traywick Contemporary
Benicia Gantner and Oakland City Center, 555 12th Sreet
Lena Wolff at Traywick Contemporary
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