Nature Bound

Date: Jun 07 - Jul 28,2007

Reception date: Jun 07 - Jul 28,2007

Featuring work by:
Rolando Castellón, works in mud and paper
Susan Jarmain, silk works
Nick Johnson, drawings
Daniel McCormick, ecological sculpture

The inaugural exhibition, Nature Bound, at Meridian's new site expresses the gallery's persistent focus on artists and ideas from the contemporary Americas. This show emphasizes the world of nature-its processes, its mutable expressions, its ecological fragility.

Four artists whose birthplaces and arena of artistic activity span from Canada and the San Francisco Bay Area through Central America include Rolando Castellón (now of San Jose, Costa Rica and formerly a curator at SF MOMA), Nick Johnson (from Southern Ontario, a drawer who earned his PhD in Latin American studies at Tulane University), Susan Jarmain (a weaver in hand dyed silk from Ontario, Canada whose work has been deeply informed by the indigenous myth and culture of the Americas) and Daniel McCormick from the SF Bay Area (whose sculptural work speaks of its ecological, restorative function).

The show's title, Nature Bound, reflects conceptually the approaches of all four artists. Castellón is recognized for his untraditional uses of mud and paper, wood and vegetation in room-sized installations. His work will fill Meridian's new Performance Gallery, an 11' x 50' space on the third floor. Nick Johnson's series of Cornfield drawings were done in brilliant sunlight as the artist sat high above the north shore of Lake Erie or sometimes in Mexican cornfields. These drawings will occupy the gallery's second floor Drawing Gallery. Johnson's work is essentially characterized by what he calls "the language of lines." A proposed scholarly lecture by Johnson at the gallery in June will deal with line and symbolic form in the Mesoamerican manuscripts known as Codices.

 

Susan Jarmain's wall-hung pieces are woven silk configurations representing stones or sticks, the latter gathered and contemplated for their traceries of dots and tiny gestures sometimes resembling native peoples' mapping devices. Daniel McCormick's sculptures of woven and bound supple willow are intended first as structures to contain, hold, remediate the banks of streams in the Marin County watershed where he works. He writes, "In a gallery, my sculptures suggest nature, not only through the materials used, but also in form, construction and gesture...Once placed in the watershed, they take on a remedial quality as they become integrated with the landscape."

Photo Album 

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In-Kind support generously donated by the Hotel Rex

 

Other events

Nick Johnson Lecture

"Picture-writing manuscripts from ancient southern Mexico: An introduction to the stories and how they are told""