Judith Roberts (Mexico) Photography and Mannequins
Richard Berger (USA) Kinetic Sculpture
Michael Marnin Jacobs (Finland) Photography

Curated by Jarrett Earnest

The work in this exhibition deals with the complexity of memory and how it structures our experiences of loss and love. Especially how this delicate interplay of presence and absence is made visible by our interactions with mannequins, dolls, puppets and other such figures onto which life is projected. The three included artists, Richard Berger, Michael Marnin Jacobs, and Judith Roberts are from the Bay Area, Finland, and Mexico, respectively.

Richard Berger has been a distinguished member of the San Francisco Art Institute faculty from 1970 to the present where he teaches sculpture history and studio practice. Berger's kinetic sculptures use translucent materials and light to meditate on what is "not" there, and reveal the fundamental urge to project life and wholeness onto these shadow figures. Rotating text and rotary action combine to interrogate notions of purpose, mourning, and desire. Berger's delicately crafted puppet forms create multi-layered experiences formally and metaphorically as they move from object to shadow.

Judith Roberts, photographer, and well-known collector of and authority on Mexican folk art, has been taking portraits of mannequins she finds throughout Mexico, her home for the past 30 years. Her subjects, decades old, have been painted over generations by shopkeepers; as fashions change their surfaces thicken and are distorted, becoming a skin of their individual and cultural histories. Roberts writes: "This is not an act of nihilism on the part of a shop girl being asked to re-do the make-up on these old mannequins but an acceptable female custom in Mexico to use very colorful facial make-up everyday, shaping a culture she is also shaped by."

In the work of each of these artists, whether literal mannequin, shadow, or billowing fabric, focus is shifted onto the surface. In doing this they foreground the experience of the individual viewers who animates the work with their own memories, histories, and emotions. In this way these art works reveal key aspects of our interactions with each other, ourselves, and our environment.