Artist Talks with Katherine Westerhout and lauren woods September 30, 2006

Swarm Gallery hosts its first Artist Talks with Katherine Westerhout (photographs) and lauren woods (ethno-fictive video).
Artists will discuss their work, process and upcoming projects.

Saturday, September 30, 3PM
Swarm Studios + Gallery
560 Second Street, Oakland CA 94607

Exhibition info:

Katherine Westerhout

WINTER LIGHT

September 9 — October 8, 2006

In the PROJECT SPACE: lauren woods | ethno-fictive video installation

“…elegant symmetries and oceans of light…mediate on transciene…In their unfashionable formalism, they make for a memorable show.” – Kenneth Baker, Art Critic, San Francisco Chronicle

OAKLAND, Calif. — September 25, 2006 — Large-format pigment prints on exhibit at Swarm Gallery are a selection from multiple ongoing series' that focus on the interior spaces of abandoned buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area and the southern United States. Within these empty spaces, Westerhout meets a vision of the psyche, a dark and quiet place that reflects the deepest parts of the self. An echo punctuates human absence; carried on the light is a message not wholly decipherable. In her introduction to Westerhout's newly produced box set sharing the name of the exhibition, Stephanie JT Russell writes about these mysterious places that are full of history and possibilities: "A battalion of girders in a factory, a luminous arcade through a madhouse. A ceiling festooned with urgent memos and ashen pinups, a warren of doors left open to nothingness...[These rooms are] sanctuaries of magisterial light."
Katherine Westerhout has exhibited locally and internationally, including such venues as: The Oakland Museum of California; the Arts Commission Gallery, Limn Gallery, and Gallery 16, San Francisco; the San Jose Museum of Contemporary Art; the Berkeley Art Center and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley; the Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle; the Brewery Gallery, Los Angeles; and Sepia International and A.I.R. galleries in New York City; The Biblioteca Nacional in Havana, Cuba, and Focus Gallery, London. Katherine’s photographs are printed exclusively in the pigmented inkjet process at Trillium Press, Brisbane.
PROJECT SPACE – lauren woods’ hybrid media projects use video and 16-mm film as well as appropriated material to contemplate and question cultural and collective memory in history as well as contemporary times. Her work, inspired by sociopolitical theories, psychology, and contemporary and historical film and art discourses, takes shape in the form of single channel projections and large-scale multi-channel installations. woods creates “ethno-fictive” (a term borrowed from Jean Rouch) documents of her navigation through the world as an American woman artist of the African Diaspora, approaching the documentary as subjective, rather than objective.

Official Website: http://www.swarmstudios.net