Mitsuko Brooks OS2 comes full-circle returning as Oxbow's Alumni Visiting Artist Lecturer.

Lecture: Tuesday, April 11, 2017 7:00 – 8:30pm
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Mitsuko Brooks was born during snowfall in Aomori Prefecture of Japan on Misawa Air Force Base, and grew up in Dover, Delaware; Albany, Oregon; Aviano, Italy; Gaithersburg, Maryland; and New York City. Her grandparents are from Ibaraki Prefecture in Japan and Virginia in the states, and parents born in Manchuria, China and Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. She graduated with a BFA from Cooper Union, is a current MFA candidate in UCLA's Painting & Drawing Department, and attended Oxbow. She resides in Los Angeles and works to manipulate, reorganize, and repurpose online texts, artifacts, and trash through assemblage and installations. Embedded in her family tree, with histories of colonialism; her life and work responds to acts of domination and exploitation. But more importantly, she is inspired to make work about the fragility of life and paradoxical human condition of suffering and happiness.

mitsukobrooks.com

Lecture: Tuesday, March 21, 2017 7:00 – 8:30pm
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Stephen Whisler

My current art practice consists of sculpture, drawings, performances and guerilla art actions. Investigating surveillance and military power has been the main focus of many of my recent projects. In my works on paper, watchtowers, military drones, atom bombs and rockets are drawn as iconic forms in large pastel renderings. My drone series depicts military drones as singular objects and in large groups, always drawn with fingerprints covering the surface.

My most recent preoccupation has been with atomic weapons. Intensely rendered with vermillion pastel fingerprints, these weapons have a sinister feeling. Ultimately the final image is composed of thousands of fingerprints, like thousands of bits of evidence.

Using photographs downloaded from the Internet as source material, I compose the drawings in Illustrator on my computer and print the images in large scale on typing paper with the pages tiled in a grid. The pages are then taped together and given a coat of pastel on the back, which is then used like carbon paper to transfer the image to the drawing paper. The drawings start as digital photographs on the computer and are then fleshed out with the most ancient "digital" technique, the fingerprint.

The sculptural works often have an interactive component, as in Observer, a surveillance tower sculpture based on prison watchtowers. When the viewer climbs into the tower, they become the watcher, making the viewer complicit in the act of surveillance. Walking the Bomb is a performance with a sculpture. Dressed in a dark grey suit with a white shirt, a kind of contemporary version of Buster Keaton's everyman, I walk the streets towing The Bomb. It is essentially an absurdist gesture, but one that points to the daily threat caused by nuclear bombs and bombs of all kinds. We are all towing our own bombs, every day, without realizing it, in our own Theater of the Absurd. We are all complicit in the creation of these objects of destruction: Creation and destruction made manifest in one object.

stephenwhisler.net

Sabine Reckewell

Since 2010 I have built two- and three-dimensional room-sized installations. I am interested in placing artwork in a given architectural context, and I am using linear materials, repetition and geometry to create actual or illusional volumes. I think of them as three-dimensional drawings.

From a distance these installations appear as distinct shapes. Up close they dissolve into linear patterns that shift and change as the viewer's position shifts. Shadows from light sources can create additional visual patterns.

My process is very straightforward and I am only using very simple tools and techniques. These installations look precise, but also have a deliberate hand-made quality to them.

My first consideration is the space I have to work with and how I can take advantage of its dimensions and specific properties, walls, floor, ceiling, lighting, etc.

The second consideration is a concept for the placement of the lines. I have been exploring simple geometric shapes. Angles, triangles, curves, and straight lines are mapped out, and the linear materials are stretched across space from repetitious, evenly spaced corresponding points. Repetition gives the work a meditative quality.

Finally, the materials I choose are crucial. I have been using soft and pliable linear materials of varying widths such as yarns ribbons, ropes and webbing. These are nailed or otherwise affixed to the walls, suspended, or tied to metal channels. It's the materials that give these installations their personality.

My installations usually are not meant to be permanent, movable sculptures. Drawings and notes allow me to recreate some of them in similar spaces. But most of them are site specific. They exist in a particular space for a limited amount of time and then get rolled up and put away.

sabinereckewell.com

Lecture: Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 Third Street, Napa, CA

McNair Evans is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow whose photographs appear in numerous exhibition settings and publications. His first monograph, Confessions for a Son, was pre-released at the 2014 New York Art Book Fair and sold out within months. Work from this series was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His recent SF Arts Commission exhibit In Search of Great Men was on display at San Francisco’s City Hall and EUQINOMprojects.

MONOGRAPH
– Confessions for a Son, Owl & Tiger Books. San Francisco, 2014

SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS
– In Search of Great Men, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, CA, March, 2016

– Confessions for a Son, Sasha Wolf Gallery, New York, NY, February, 2015
– Confessions for a Son, Rayko Gallery, San Francisco, CA, January, 2014
– heritage 780700, The Window Gallery, San Francisco, CA, August, 2014

SELECT CLIENTS
AFAR Magazine, Bloomberg Business Week, CA Sunday Magazine, Esquire Russia, Fast Company, Good Magazine, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, Le Monde, Oxford American, PDN, Random House Inc., Surfer, San Francisco Magazine, Stella Magazine, and VICE.

mcnairevans.com

Lecture: Tuesday, March 7, 2017 7:00 – 8:30pm
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Chris Finley’s idiosyncratic sculptures often solicit viewers to perform prescriptive rituals that unearth hidden layers of narrative content within stacks and groupings of everyday objects.

His disfigured and distorted paintings of world record holders, politicians, and celebrity entrepreneurs paradoxically recall the Futurists’ glorification of speed and technology while ultimately critiquing our current mediated experience.

Finley’s exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Frieze, Teme Celeste, Art Issues, Forbes, Art and Auction, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times.

His work is included in the book “Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting”, by Bob Nikas. PHAIDON publishing.

His work has been included in national and international Museum exhibitions including, 01.01.01: Art in Technological Times, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Game Show, MASS MOCA, North Adams, MA; 2002 Orange County Museum of Art Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Twisted. Urban and Visionary Landscapes in Contemporary Painting, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Just Past: The Contemporary in MOCAʼs Permanent Collection, 1975-1996, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Defining The Nineties, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus Ohio, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison Wisconsin.

He received a Pollock/ Krasner Foundation Grant in 2010 and was awarded a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation in 2003. He received the SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999.

Chris Finley was born in 1971, in Carmel, California
He lives and works in Petaluma, California.
He is a Professor of Art at San Francisco State University.

chimentocontemporary.net/finley

Lecture: Tuesday, February 21, 2017 7:00 – 8:30pm
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa CA

Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, growing up under the Maoist regime. Initially trained in the Socialist Realist style, Liu studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, before immigrating to the US in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she studied under Allan Kaprow, the American originator of Happenings.

Known for paintings based on historical Chinese photographs, Hung Liu’s subjects over the years have been prostitutes, refugees, street performers, soldiers, laborers, and prisoners, among others. As a painter, Liu challenges the documentary authority of historical Chinese photographs by subjecting them to the more reflective process of painting. Much of the meaning of Liu’s painting comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the documentary images, suggesting the passage of memory into history, while working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives fixed – but often concealed – in the photographic instant. Washing her subjects in veils of dripping linseed oil, she both "preserves and destroys the image.” Liu has invented a kind of weeping realism that surrenders to the erosion of memory and the passage of time, while also bringing faded photographic images vividly to life as rich, facile paintings. She summons the ghosts of history to the present. In effect, Liu turns old photographs into new paintings.

A two time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting, Liu also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011. A retrospective of Liu’s work, “Summoning Ghosts: The Art and Life of Hung Liu,” was recently organized by the Oakland Museum of California, and is scheduled to tour nationally through 2015. In a review of that show, the Wall Street Journal called Liu “the greatest Chinese painter in the US.” Liu’s works have been exhibited extensively and collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others. Liu currently lives in Oakland, California. She is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she has taught since 1990.

Jeff Kelley lives in Oakland, California. A practicing art critic since 1977, he has written reviews and essays for such publications as Artforum, Art in America, and the Los Angeles Times. From 1993 – 2005 he taught Art Theory and Criticism at the University of California, Berkeley, and edited/authored two books on Allan Kaprow published by the University of California Press. Kelley was also the Consulting Curator of Contemporary Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco from 1998 – 2008, where he developed the museum’s contemporary exhibitions and publications programs, organizing exhibitions by Chinese artists Sui Jianguo (“The Sleep of Reason,” 2005), Liu Xiaodong (“The Three Gorges Project,” 2006), and Zhan Wang (“On Gold Mountain: Sculpture from the Sierra,” 2008). In addition, Kelley curated the popular and critically acclaimed "Half-Life of a Dream: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Logan Collection" for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008), and currently functions as an advisor on Chinese art to the Logan Collection. He is presently editing a book, for the University of California Press, of the writings of internationally known Chinese artist and architect Ai Weiwei.

hungliu.com

January 2 - 7, 2017
Limited to 12 Participants

Stephen will introduce intaglio printing to beginners and provide advanced printmakers the opportunity to refine their skills. Participants work on copper plates in all the traditional techniques: drypoint, hard and soft ground etching, aquatint, and multi-plate color printing. Class is conducted through demonstrations and one-on-one instruction.

Email info@oxbowschool.org for details on the workshop and registration information.

Join us for the OS35 Fall 2016 Student Final Show and Open House on Saturday, December 17 and Sunday December 18 from 1-3pm.

Casey Gollan OS17 comes full-circle returning as Oxbow's Alumni Visiting Artist Lecturer.

Date: Tuesday, November 8, 2016 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Location: The CIA at Copia Napa Valley Vintners Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA (note this is the same night as the film festival so park in the lot across the street)

Along with collaborator Victoria Sobel, he is currently a 2015–17 Fellow at The New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and a Fall 2016 visiting artist at The Cooper Union School of Art.

In the face of the banality of corporate restructuring, Sobel and Gollan LARP a means of building culture that is activated, distributed, and durational. Addressing the incisive mission-creep of cultural institutions, they entertain both the inevitability of financialization, as well as the interminable possibility of resituating systems. Their recent projects include print and digital publications, a construction-themed Block Party, and a month-long community residency. Their ongoing research investigates the broad entanglement of culture, education, and finance with subjects such as the cloud, artificial intelligences, and poetics.

Gollan’s design practice — considering the intermediation of technology and everyday life — is based out of Orbital. He has written critically about design and technology for Rhizome and Poool, participated in Triple Canopy’s networked publishing intensive, and experimented with open-source administration as part of the School for Poetic Computation. Recent work includes an ongoing collaboration with design researcher Sara Hendren, director of the Adaptation + Ability Group at Olin College. Their project Engineering at Home will be included in an exhibition on the future of design at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2017.

caseygollan.com

Please join us for a lecture with artist Caroline Woolard.

Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2016 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Caroline Woolard makes art and infrastructures for the solidarity economy. Her method enjoins objects to their
contexts of circulation. Woolard builds sculptures for barter only as she also creates international barter networks that continue to grow; she fabricates model Shaker housing and she also convenes organizers of community land trusts.

OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop from 2008-2014, Woolard's organizing work is now focused on BFAMFAPhD.com, a collective she founded that uses both data and installation art to advocate for cultural equity, and the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative that exists to create and support truly affordable commercial space in New York City. While making infrastructure, Woolard furnishes gathering spaces with objects that are as imaginative as the conversations that occur in those spaces.

Caroline Woolard’s work has been supported by residencies and fellowships at MoMA, the Queens Museum, the Judson Church, the Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund, Eyebeam, the MacDowell Colony, and by unemployment benefits, the curiosity of strangers, her partner, and many collaborators. Recent group exhibitions include: Crossing Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Maker Biennial, The Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; and Artist as Social Agent, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH. Woolard’s work will be featured in Art21’s New York Close Up documentary series over the next three years. Woolard is a lecturer at the School of Visual Arts and the New School, a project manager at the worker-owned design firm CoLab.coop, and is a member of the Community Economies Research Network and the board of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.

Caroline Woolard’s artist statement is here. For more information, click on WORK, go to an upcoming EVENT, or read some WRITING. You can also listen to a talk, search flickr and the news, or sign up for the mailing list.

Please join us for a lecture with artist Carter Mull.

Date: Tuesday, October 18, 2016 7:00 PM — 8:30 PM
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Artist Biography

Carter Mull (born 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American artist working in Los Angeles. Mull took his BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2000 and MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2006. He creates pictures through a process of rephotographing and altering existing images.

Mull’s work has been exhibited widely, most recently at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Presentation House, Vancouver, Domaine Departement de Chamarande, Paris, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles and Gagosian Gallery, New York. His project intertwines multiple mediums to question the media that constructs our conception of the world. In turn, the practice recomposes an understanding of our shared, social imagination.

His work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum, The Getty Research Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His practice has been discussed in publications and periodicals, including Artforum, Art on Paper, Art In America, The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker.