HARMONIC CONVERGENCE

Six Takeaways from a Sextet

Gray Loft Gallery stands out usually due to the artistry of its top-tier show layouts One navigates a Gray Loft show multiple times because of the many conversations owner Jan Watten creates among the works on display.

But for those who move quickly this week (Saturday 11/8), the gallery features an important departure: a show both chosen and hung by the six participating artists themselves.

This is a group of women who have been working together for quite some time, bringing the full meaning of “studio” to their practice and ambiance. We see, in their current show “Aligned”, that Gray Loft’s offer to us presents both the authority of the women as a group and the openness of the show’s highly varied ways of being appealing.

My takeaway, which settled in on my third viewing, risks being more of a proposal than a finding. The dynamic of group interaction among artists is something already studied deeply enough as to leave little room for new insight. But what I wanted to dwell on is what, within the diverse works, indicated something unifying that evolved from the togetherness of the women

Here I’m fast-forwarding to what I decided to keep looking for.

My best phrasing of it, but perhaps still in testing, is ”iconic feeling”. In the show we find six different strategies for having an image take us to something visceral, recurring, and definite that we don’t even need to label. We just see it and recognize it, not mostly as language, not mostly as emotion, but in some third way holding meaning.

That said, we’re here to talk, so… here we go.

There is no linear gradation in the collected works from one strategy to the next.

We have the gestural energy in Kim Cardoso’s deceptively calm pieces; an aching profundity of Dobee Snowber’s emblematic (perhaps existential) crafted snapshots of Womanhood and Home; and Lisa Levine’s comic affection for free-forms and traditional motifs using each other. And there is Anne Rabe’s meditative hunt for simplicity in nature’s creation of complexity; Dee Tivenan’s abstraction of pattern from space; and Valerie Corvin’s invention of space from primitive, abstract signs.

At the show, there is no reason for someone else to confine themselves to those points of view. But in seeing features like that myself, I find it easy to imagine these artists all recognizing some balancing act in each other’s works --  and appreciating the nuance of their respective personal awarenesses -- beyond the kinds of attraction that they can whip up as the skin of their images.

Gallery Hours: Saturdays 1:00 - 5:00 pm and by appointment

2889 Ford Street #32, third floor, Oakland CA 94601

Third Floor - not wheelchair accessible.