Elizabeth Bernstein: Nothing Is Sacred and Everything Is Sacred
Wednesday, June 3rd - Sunday, July 5th

Nothing is Sacred and Everything is Sacred presents seven photographs by Bernstein that are drawn from her investigations into daily life, specifically the private spaces where we establish our routines and spend our time. Utilizing a minimalist sensibility, Bernstein subtly reveals the complex psychology of such spaces and the meaning they can contain. The compositions, both found and constructed, are visually bare and straightforward yet convey nuanced emotions. Whether recording a lone sponge in a shower stall, a spot of light on a floor, or bodies alone or entwined, the works reveal a sacred presence in the most mundane subjects and encounters.

C. Ursula Cipa Paintings,  Until the sun can do no more, April 2015

Powercall: A mobile, micro energy commons | marksearch March 2015
Wednesday, March 4th - Sunday, March 29th

Make Things (Happen): Organized by Christine Wong Yap, March 2015

Make Things (Happen) is a participatory project organized by Christine Wong Yap that features over 40 artist-created activity sheets designed to guide participants in either making things or making things happen.

Yap selected artists to highlight practices that are participatory, engaged with the world, and unconcerned with the demands of the art market. The artists work across social practice, drawing, sculpture, video, and performance, and hail from the Bay Area, New York, other parts of the US, and the UK, Canada, Poland, and India.

List of Participating Artists:
Lauren F. Adams, Maurice Carlin, Kevin B. Chen, Torreya Cummings, Helen de Main, double zero, Bean Gilsdorf, Galeria Rusz, Sarrita Hunn, Maria Hupfield, Ariana Jacob, Hannah Jickling & Helen Reed, Nick Lally, Justin Langlois, Justin Limoges, Jessica Longmore, Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., Kari Marboe & Erik Scollon, Betty Marín, Mark Anthony Martinez, Meta Local Collaborative, Melissa Miller, Roy Meuwissen, Laura Napier, Susan O’Malley, Dionis Ortiz, Kristina Paabus, Piero Passacantando, Julie Perini, Ryan Pierce, Pavel Romaniko, Risa Puno, Genevieve Quick, Mary Rothlisberger, Pallavi Sen, Elisabeth Smolarz, Tattfoo Tan, Lauren Marie Taylor, Sharita Towne, Emilio Vavarella, David Gregory Wallace, Lexa Walsh, Alex Wilde & Emily Chappell, Brian Zegeer, Lu Zhang.

Bonanza VI, Eighteencharacters, October 2014

“The first rule of naming a horse is that a name may consist of no more than 18 letters, and spaces and punctuation marks count as letters. Eighteencharacters is acceptable (and is, in fact, a registered horse name) but Eighteen Characters is not.” (From The Jockey Club Registry, established 1894)

Interface Gallery is pleased to present Eighteencharacters, featuring Bonanza, the collective practice of Conrad Guevara, Lindsay Tully and Lana Williams. Taking inspiration from the horse races at nearby Golden Gate Fields in Berkeley and the gallery’s history as turn of the century horse stable for the local horse-drawn trolley, the exhibition is titled after a naming convention used for race horses.

Examining the performativity of identity through stage names like those given to race horses – Midnight Lady, Mark of a Gem, Lil Swiss Echo - Bonanza finds a metaphor for their own collective practice, which is similarly playful and strategic.

Just as the act of naming attributes, masks, and alters meaning, implicitly revealing the imitative structure and contingency of naming itself, Bonanza’s shifting interplay of sculpture, film making, and painting, and of individual and collaborative works, examines contingency through a collapsing and continuity of their work as a spirited partnership. As the distinctions between individual practices blur and the collaborative exercise becomes more concrete, the artists challenge the value of authorship and the fixity of identity by taking on their own stage name – Bonanza.

Back in the Saddle Again.

No person is without a shadow | Laurie Reid and Manuel Angeja, August - Septeber 2014

Laurie Reid and Manuel Angeja both embrace practices that emphasize materiality, allowing for fluidity and ambiguity. In each, loose mark making and subtle washes, suggest and deny meaning, allowing for shifting relationships and interpretations to emerge.

In this exhibition, their works echo and mirror one another, like shadows - shadowing one another as artists - objects, paintings, and marks within the works, shadowing each other and the space in which they are installed, and vice versa.

Angeja will be showing a series of small paintings on repurposed graph paper and Reid will present a small watercolor, a larger oil painting and a series of small glazed ceramics.
What is real, the original or its shadow, and which work is by what artist is not important. Rather, the fluidity of relationships, a kind of slippage or interchange is highlighted.

Tamra Seal, Irresistible Forces, June/July 2014

Interface Gallery is excited to present, Irresistible Forces, a solo installation of new work by Tamra Seal. Drawing inspiration from such disparate sources as industrial design, film and Tantric tradition, Seal creates abstract sculptures that are both strange and oddly alluring. They operate simultaneously as prop, set, and transformational vehicle, drawing us in and eliciting surprising emotional responses.

Inspired by the films Forbidden Planet and All About Eve, works in this exhibit suggest the otherworldly, vanity and desire. Materials range from polished, fabricated, fluorescent, acrylic rods to an 800-pound rock, tool dipped with fluorescent paint, and appearing as though from another planet. Fur Muff Zoetrope - a veritable one person stage for reveling in status and glamor, symbolized by the white fur muff at its center - evokes a desire to reach out and touch the soft, tactile muff. Smooth, pink, fluorescent tubes surrounding the muff suggest stage lights and the whole piece reads as some kind of weird teleportation device.

Seal is drawn to fluorescent colors for the "inherent light" they emanate, which is at once inviting and self-contained, like the works themselves. While the objects seems to exert an irresistible pull, activating the senses and making us want to touch, explore and even enter, we cannot actually physically engage with them. Instead, they initiate a heightened state of awareness, awakening some dimly remembered place within our psyche and provoking our reflections on the experience.

Tamra Seal received her MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute in 2013. She was recently selected by Berkeley Art Museum curator, Dena Beard, for the 2014 Bay Area Currents exhibition at Pro Arts Gallery. Later this year, she will have shows at Studio 110 Projects and Ever Gold Gallery.

Producing Space, Aaron Finnis, Amy M. Ho, Cybele Lyle, Emma Spertus, April/May 2014

Producing Space features new site responsive works by Aaron Finnis, Cybele Lyle, Amy M. Ho, and Emma Spertus.

While pursuing distinct practices, these four artists similarly work with re-purposed images, materials and existing spaces in ways that reference normative modes of representation, while also subverting them, instigating psychological responses and suggesting new possibilities. To varying degrees their architectural and material manipulations call attention to and critique the cultural production of space, exploring relationships between illusion and reality, constructed space, constructed subjectivity and power.

For this exhibition, the artists literally produce a new space, or set of spatial possibilities, within Interface Gallery with site responsive works that are surreal, playful and subversive.
Spertus advertises a fictional sculpture exhibit in a work that simultaneously functions as blinds, covering the gallery window and door and creating darkness for Lyle and Ho's projected works within. Lyle contributes a video projection of a scene from nature onto the existing gallery architecture, while Ho projects video of a small scale model of an imagined space into the gallery skylights - blurring lines between outside and in, imagined and existing architecture, respectively. Finally, Finnis' work combines everyday, mass produced objects with the digital, referencing physical and virtual spaces of production that reflect and construct our social and cultural identity.

Three out of four of these artists share studio space in an Oakland studio, aptly named "Real, Time and Space," which was founded by Spertus. The artists first exhibited their work together in 2011 in a show at The Lab entitled, "A Floorless Room without Walls." Interface Gallery is pleased to bring their work together again for this exhibition.

Kelly Inouye,  The Company You Keep, November/December 2013

In this exhibition, Kelly Inouye expands upon her ongoing series, The Company you Keep, by creating a large-scale installation for Interface Gallery.

The Company You Keep references Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the archetypal nature show in which Marlin Perkins sent Jim Fowler to study animal behavior in particularly dramatic made-for-TV ways. A riveting nature show in its time, Wild Kingdom might also be seen as a strange mechanism for advertising insurance.

Equal parts anthropological study and comedic send-up, Inouye’s installation examines the show as a time capsule reflecting the mentality of the era in which it was created. Themes explored include: the application of science to investigate mysteries of the natural world, the use of language to elevate the importance of a project, having the best intentions but being unable to foresee unintended consequences, and above all, Man’s classic literary struggle with Nature. Inouye's work highlights the incongruity of the show's slogans considering the current state of our healthcare system and reveals almost sinister undertones of the show's patriarchal tropes.

Heightened Subjectivity: Teresa Baker, Claire Colette and Lana Williams, September 2013

Interface Gallery is pleased to present Heightened Subjectivity, featuring recent work by Lana Williams, Claire Colette and Teresa Baker. Each of these artists is working with a compelling abstract visual language that is highly subjective. Their work conveys an immediacy of feeling that is both concrete and open to infinite interpretation.

Colette's delicate graphite renderings capture subtle psychic states, while Williams' bold gestures, vibrant colors, and diverse mark making convey a sense of spontaneity and playfulness. Meanwhile, Baker's highly reduced mixed media works, combining painted fabric, wood, and shaped foam, evoke an oddly visceral response with just a few elements.

All three artists explore the tension between surface and depth, chance and conscious construction. These formal tensions support the artists' shared desire to present a space or state that is unfamiliar, uncertain, or in between. Williams speaks of "addressing the space between temporality and permanence," Colette of evoking "that which lies between the phenomelogical and the empirical," and Baker describes her process as creating "another space."

Tuning into these "other spaces" or spaces between, the viewer experiences a heightened subjectivity that points to the subjectivity of experience itself.

Chandra Baerg, Perceptual Shifts, August 2013

Interface Gallery is pleased to present, Perceptual Shifts, a solo exhibition of recent work by Chandra Baerg. Baerg's quiet, minimalistic works stem from a dynamic practice in which she fuses painting and drawing with everyday building materials, specifically drywall. Interested in exploring geometry, dimensionality and light, Baerg alters this mundane material through techniques like cutting, scoring, stacking and the application of subtle reflected color.

Baerg is influenced by her background in architecture and an interest in how people perceive and interact with constructed environments. Her work often reveals how subtle shifts made to commonplace objects like a basic wall surface can lead to transformative and even uncanny experiences.

Perceptual Shifts will include recent drawings, paintings and objects by Baerg as well as a site specific installation.
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Chandra Baerg is a 2013 graduate of San Francisco Art Institute's MFA program and was recently selected for Navigating the New, Pro Arts Gallery's Bay Area Currents Exhibition, a critically acclaimed juried exhibition showcasing the region's top emerging artists.