Painting on Cardboard is a new series of mixed media paintings on discarded and unfolded cardboard by GRO member artist Will Thoms. In these paintings, corrugated cardboard, a ubiquitous everyday material, is transformed by the artist into rich, textured and luminous surfaces.
Will Thoms is an east coast transplant now living in the beautiful San Geronimo Valley. He has been making art off and on for 60 years and has been a member at Gallery Route One since 2007. Thoms has always enjoyed working with his hands, so the transition from his day job as a building contractor to his work as a visual artist comes naturally. His influences include Rauschenberg, Tapies, Klee, Eva Hesse, associates at Gallery Route One and many others, well known and unknown, who continue to inspire and support.
Speaking Out: 9 Myanmar Artists
Curated By Pamela Blotner and Mie Preckler, Artists Beyond Boundaries
Artists Featured: Cynthia Thient Soe, Htein Lin, Ko Z, Kyi Wynn, Nge Lay, Phyu Mon, Soe Yu Nwe, Zoncy and ZZDD.
Gallery Route One and Artists Beyond Boundaries are pleased to host Speaking Out: 9 Myanmar Artists, an exhibition of contemporary artists who explore urgent issues challenging their country today.
The exhibition at Gallery Route One comes at a time when Myanmar’s military is engaging in ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people and mounting campaigns to repress other ethnic minorities. For the current exhibition, the curators have chosen nine individuals whose work addresses the current human rights situation in Myanmar, and are thrilled that Gallery Route One will be giving these outspoken Myanmar artists a venue and a voice in the San Francisco Bay Area.
When curator Pamela Blotner first encountered the Myanmar art community ten years ago, artists there faced repression, including imprisonment, for speaking out against their military government. In response, Blotner curated The Burmese-American Art Exchange, an exhibition at the American Center Gallery at the American Embassy in Myanmar, assuring exhibitors a safe place to display their work.
Mie Preckler joined Blotner in 2017 to co-found the Artists Beyond Boundaries Project. Their first project was an exhibition in Yangon that examined how local artists were responding to the cultural and political changes that had taken place during Myanmar’s transition to democracy over the past decade. The curators chose artists who had lived and worked under the dictatorship, and contemporary artists who had come to artistic maturity since 2007. The current exhibition at Gallery Route One is a sequel to this project.
Exhibition-related events will include artist and curator talks and a gallery workshop relating to exhibited works. One of these special events will focus on “Sitwee,” a 2015 documentary film about a young Muslim girl and a Hindu boy describing their lives and the tensions in Rahkine State, where they live. The screening will feature an introduction by the filmmaker Jeanne Hallacy and filmmaker/activist Gregg Butensky, followed by a discussion of the film and current events in Myanmar.
Among the Artists exhibiting at Gallery Route One:
Htein Lin spent nearly seven years in prison for his anti-dictatorship art and activism and remains one of the most active political artists working today.
Z Hkawng Gyung, also known as Ko Z, uses multi-media to depict the displacement, social injustice, and exploitation experienced by his own people, the Kachin, and other ethnic minority groups.
Phyu Mon, a pioneering feminist photographer and video artist, is the founder of Blue-Wind, an independent non-profit association dedicated to women artists and writers.
Annex
The Atlas of Decivilization
Curated by isis Hockenos
Gallery Route One will participate in a multi-site exhibition being held at various locations throughout Point Reyes Station during the month of March, 2018. The project, titled Atlas of Decivilization, explores the themes of this year’s Geography of Hope conference, The Nature of Resilience: Finding Strength in the Land in Challenging Times.
The imagery of an atlas, such a richly human construct, paired with the concept of decivilization, is a playful acknowledgment of the paradox between the formality of the curatorial and exhibition process and the objective of the participating artists to make work that accesses a more primal relationship to nature.
Each of the artists participating in the exhibition turns to their environment as a source of resiliency and force. Humanity is in a state of detachment from the rest of the natural world, and these artists are chipping away at our human condition to rediscover the reciprocal ways by which humans find resilience through nature. An artist selected by curator Isis Hockenos will exhibit work in Gallery Route One’s Annex.
Atlas of Decivilization is curated by Marshall-born painter and curator Isis Hockenos. Hockenos lives and works between Oakland, San Francisco and West Marin. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, NY and studied printmaking at Fondazione Il Bisonte in Florence, Italy. Isis is an Artist Member at Gallery Route One and a Resident Artist at The Midway Gallery in San Francisco. She has exhibited both locally and internationally. In early 2017 Isis curated Rhizosphere: Celebrating West Marin’s artists & creative legacy from 1960- today at The Midway Gallery, bringing several generations of West Marin artists together in an urban gallery setting.