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Barbara Cooper, Gwynn Murrill, Kazuma Oshita
June 1 - July 7, 2007
Opening reception: Friday, June 1, 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe
1011 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM 87501
TEL 505.954.5700 FAX 505.954.5754
Hours: Monday-Saturday 10am - 5pm
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The Gerald Peters Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Barbara Cooper, Gwynn Murrill and Kazuma Oshita, featuring recent sculptural works.
Barbara Cooper
The Chicago-based artist makes use of scraps of wood veneer discarded by furniture factories and milling plants, and by gluing layer by layer, returns the wood to an organic form. Out of flexible and fragile veneer, the sculptures seem to grow into sturdy structures that call to mind a representation of tree trunks, tree stumps, bodily forms, and other natural structures. “I want to mirror the efficiency I find in nature by recycling waste product into a new generation of form," says Cooper. “My focus is on how a form records its growth process of evolving from one condition to another as it responds to its environment. This process of transformation is an essential aspect of life.”
Gwynn Murrill
Gwynn Murrill’s work bridges figurative and abstract sculpture. Her animal figures serve as points of departure for the exploration of form, becoming vessels, which reduced to their most basic lines and shapes, elegantly echo the essence of the subject.
Murrill is drawn to animal forms due to their complex beauty. She says, “My interest lies in the fact that I use the subject as a means to create a form that is abstract and figurative at the same time. It is a challenge to try and take the form that nature makes so well and to derive my own interpretation of it. I spend many hours perfecting a piece with the goal to utilize all of the negative space surrounding the form as a vehicle for the abstract part of the sculpture. The negative space is as important to my sculpture as the positive space, evoking somewhat of a Yin and Yang relationship. Most of the animals I work with are also a part of our life here in the U.S., and I truly enjoy expressing my appreciation of their existence.”
Kazuma Oshita
In an outline devoted to metal hammering techniques, Kazuma Oshita writes, “Ever since that time, pre-dating history, when men first discovered metal, they have directed great energy towards it from both technical and aesthetic standpoints. The extensive contribution of metal to every culture of the world needs hardly to be argued. The most primitive metal hammering techniques called for placing a sheet of metal over a wood, metal or stone object, and beating it to the shape of the base form. Now, however, the sheet is placed on a metal stake and beaten by hand with a hammer until it shrinks and expands in the right places to take on the desired shape. The object is made of one sheet of metal and appears without points of juncture or joints. With the development of modern welding techniques, joining metal has become much less difficult, and with the new combined techniques the purpose to which the end product may be put has taken on much greater variety. Whereas, such objects used to be limited to decorative objects and weapons, they now extend into the realms of sculpture and accessories for architecture. Advancing technology has lent a great hand to metal hammering techniques and new ones will doubtless continue to be found, yet it is regrettable that the apparent complexity of these techniques today has discouraged artists from entering the field. One would hope that more and more people might come to appreciate and expand the genre.”
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