used for post about what is showing at Axis
Phil Amrhein I joined 750 Gallery about 20 years ago when it was located in downtown Sacramento between 7th & 8th on J Street. The space was about 500 square feet upstairs on the 2nd floor. Jim Adan, David White, … Continued
Mark Emerson After living and teaching in Los Angeles for 3 years I returned to Sacramento in the spring of 1990. In 1991, I curated an exhibition for the Kondos Gallery at Sacramento City College, “SACRAMENTO ABSTRATION”. While gathering the … Continued
Portraiture is a foundational photographic genre. It is a means of defining ourselves visually. But, how do we define ourselves beyond our physical presence? Can the definition of portrait expand to include what lies beyond our physicality to include passions, … Continued
Axis gallery is pleased to present Murray Bowles’ Sixteen Frames, a selection of his photographic works that depict the energy filled spaces of this region’s underground music subculture. Renowned throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, Bowles is held in especially high regard by punk cognoscenti for his devoted photography actions and his generous distribution of prints. Bowles participated in thousands of gatherings, from the center of the floor, with his camera and flash held high, recording the people and interiors from the early 1980’s until his death in 2019. As his anarchic subjects move with abandon inside derelict buildings, their bodies and limbs flail beyond the confines of the camera viewfinder. The resulting images subvert common notions of pictorial order. Bowles’ compositions are immediate and dynamic, their formal qualities produced primarily by the photographer’s proximity to the chaos and his use of dedicated flash lighting.
Silence is defined as a complete absence of sound, and there are few places or situations that allow us to understand what that truly is. We see places as silent and serene, often missing the tone that makes up the world. The subtleties that are overlooked, the everyday that is often ignored, but when we sit and listen to the silence, what do we hear? A Perceived Sense of Silence asks you to travel with the artist to various places and listen. It is a challenge to your perception of the intensity of sound and the true power of silence.
A departure from her previous work, Kenna Doeringer is incorporating her past experiences as a sound recordist and editor in an audio installation at Axis Gallery. A Perceived Sense of Silence is a passion project that has allowed her to explore and share with you what a silent world sounds like and how loud our lives really are.
Portrait: a pictorial representation of a person usually showing the face.
Wayne Shorter’s seminal work titled Portrait is the impetus and inspiration behind both the exhibition title and the bodies of work that unite the practice of artists Beth Consetta Rubel and Nafis M. White. Just as Shorter conflates simple and compound meter in jazz by bridging African, swing and cross rhythms to create new pathways of intellectual discourse, Rubel and White take a similar approach uniting themes of accumulation, belonging, abstraction and portraiture towards the synthesis of ideas around identity and power. Using color theory as a through line while moving beyond simple definitions prescribing guidelines for use of color, White and Rubel instead utilize chroma as a way to increase power, resonance, and urgency through abstract narratives. Like Shorter, the melodies shift frequently within the work lending itself to lead new lives often in simultaneity.
Merriam-Webster defines Resist as the ability “to withstand the force or effect of.” In today’s society of American Culture it can be argued that there are many opportunities to rebuff an undesirable force. And though there is no firm consensus on this issue, though across the globe there is a state of survey and activity, where previous ways of thinking are being processed and re-imagined, here at home there is fewer consensus on basic and fundamental issues.
The artists in this exhibition have powerful, nuanced and emergent voices. In a market where there are many – though complicated – moments to resist an exerting force they are here, cultivating a space of identity, solidarity and grace. Recently, in noting forces in the Art World and methods on how to “withstand,” activists and artists have protested the role of Warren B. Kanders as the Whitney Museum of Art’s (NY), Board Vice Chairman. They cited his defense manufacturing company, Safariland, and its production of tear-gas canisters used against asylum seekers about the U.S./Mexico border. This may have influenced his resignation.
And with this work, Resistant Gesture is full of intention, discovery and affirmation, similar to currents vibrating nationally and globally in the effort to withstand a force or effect. The artists articulate keen ideas with material fluency, visual resonance and cultural reflection. This is a most profound expression of what is both sensitive and assertive, and how shifts in thinking present the critical vision in the position of authorship.
The Resistant Gesture encompasses many forms, media and methods of demarcation. It is by a subtle stroke, a tender indication or by placing roles of authority in humorous indignation, that new voices precede new ways of thinking. And, how the act of making itself becomes oppositional to an ordinary experience.
Axis is proud to present “Containment,” a solo exhibition by Summer Ventis. In the city, we often feel distant from the landscape. The natural world, however, asserts itself in spite of—and sometimes through—the ways in which we try to contain … Continued
Axis Gallery is pleased to present “A Mechanized Pencil,” an exhibition of photographs in a site-specific installation by Nick Shepard on view from October 4 through October 27, with a Second Saturday reception with the artist on Saturday, October 12, from 6:00–8:00 pm. Shepard will present an artist talk Friday, October 4. This is Shepard’s second solo exhibition at Axis Gallery. Shepard’s work is grounded in a deep understanding of art history and the relationship between photography and other media. He makes frequent use of digital and analog processes to create images that are easily mistaken for paintings, but remain undeniably photographic.
Our conception of reality is really just a story that we tell ourselves to provide a coherent narrative that we can place ourselves within. Recent studies and emergent theories regarding the nature of consciousness, the illusion of free will, and theory of mind shed light on how precarious our personality traits and our “nature” are. With seemingly minor trauma to the brain, shift in gut-biome, or the ingestion of a psychoactive substance, a person can be permanently and radically changed. It is this volatile aspect of our “selves” that has become a recurring theme in my studio practice, both in regard to content, but also in approaches to the work, which at times produce results that seem both unfamiliar and alien.