Stories Nine
John Baca | Sharon DeMeyer | Josh Olivera | Lauren Ruth + Jason Clower
Sheri Simons + Judith Leinen | Marilyn Walsh
Now on view & extended to April 18, 2021
Stories Nine is the ninth annual 1078 Gallery Stories group exhibition held in December. It brings together five to eight artists with strong links to Chico. This year, we have Sierra College instructor/mixed media artist John Baca; CSU Chico ASC (English) photographer/baker Sharon DeMeyer; Feather River College instructor/mixed media artist Josh Olivera; collaborating partners and CSU Chico professors Lauren Ruth (Art) and Jason Clower (Religious Studies); collaborating sculptors Sheri Simons and Judith Leinen; and watercolor painter/Sal Casa student Marilyn Walsh.
To accompany the Stories exhibits, the Gallery publishes a hard-copy booklet that is small enough to hold in your hand or put in a large pocket. It is a document of the artists as they have been and are now. Please download this PDF to enjoy the Stories Nine booklet online.
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John BacaJohn Baca writes: I am a Northern California interdisciplinary artist whose body of work often lacks a specific unifying focus. Individual projects take deep dives into disparate and generally simple questions while assuming no absolute answers. (If you are interested in commissioning individual pieces from Squeako System#1, contact the artist directly.)
johnbacaart.com IG: @jbacaster Sharon DeMeyerSharon DeMeyer writes: I am a lifelong Chico resident, born at Enloe Hospital in 1963, when you could stand outside and see the babies in the nursery through the window. As a pandemic project, I am cooking my way through Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison, documenting each dish with a photograph and a brief description on Instagram @aunt_sharon_the_vegetarian. The six digital photographs in Stories Nine are excerpts from the project, all taken in 2020 and priced at $10.78 each. They are Watermelon, Cream Cheese Mousse with Blackberries, Tea, Banana-Pineapple Frappe, Mixed Olives, and Super Worm.
Josh OliveraJosh Olivera writes: By employing reconfigured and disparate materials, I create indelible versions of a compromised and fleeting landscape and perhaps expressions of Western expansion. For Stories Nine, there are two pieces: Archer’s Point (mixed media, 38x11x3 inches, 2020, NFS) and Back and Fill (mixed media, 32x17x2 inches, 2020, $1200).
joshuaolivera.com
Lauren Ruth + Jason Clower
Title: Conversations with the Yijing: After Denial comes Bargaining
Year: 2020 Medium: Wall vinyl installation Dimensions: 18' x 8'10" Price: POR Lauren Ruth + Jason Clower write: The Yijing (formerly “I Ching”) or Book of Change is a classical Chinese oracular system, roughly comparable to Western tarot and Kabbalah. In this work, it gives wise answers to our questions about showing art during the pandemic and resists our efforts to cajole it into telling us what we want to hear. Ruth is a sculptor and performance artist whose solo work anthropomorphizes insentient objects to reestablish meanings. Clower is a researcher and writer on Chinese Buddhist philosophy. Sheri Simons + Judith Leinen
Title: Porous Minded
Medium: Many Year: 2020 Price: For each piece determined by following an "algo-rhythm" (a sort of pricing game), copies of which are available in the gallery. Sheri Simons + Judith Leinen write: We have taken your directions completely to heart with Sheri/Judith operating as one [source: email from 1078 invitation]. This sent us in the direction of making our every single move a collaborative one in the most absolute sense. The ongoing collaboration across state borders started us moving into territory with a paradox. We want to act as one voice with a language that is strictly physical: body, material, encounters arranged and composed in space. The text to be revealed in the upcoming Stories Nine booklet was written by a 41-email exchange where we batted a phrase, a word, an unfinished sentence back and forth and had the other one move it further down some road that we had neither planned nor would individually own. We are spiraling around the solution in a process of words, images, material samples, and thoughts that are always completely co-produced. We are making or giving ourselves unregulated permission to use the collaborative design as a spring. We are indulging in the removal of direction for the sake of finding out vs. proving. We will be continuing this in our work together—via any means to transfer thought: sculpture, sound, writing, material shreds, image, movement. judithleinen.com sherisimons.com Marilyn WalshMarilyn Walsh writes: As a retired teacher I have not had a formal art education, but I have been able to attend various workshops and classes. Since I do my painting at the dining room table, watercolor—because of its ease of cleanup and lack of odor—became my medium of choice. I have come to appreciate its challenges and the effects it can produce, and I enjoy the way that the paint flows onto the paper. (Walsh's series for Stories Nine comes from a visit to Brooklyn in 2017. Please refer to the gallery guide posted as a PDF near the top of this page for a description of each of the six pieces in the series, two of which are for sale as marked.)
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