skip to main |
skip to sidebar
It was a wonderful surprise this past week to get an email query from a Mills College student about this piece pictured here called Nocturne. She is is helping to put together an exhibit from the collection of Lenore Pereira & Rich Niles which will open on April 14 in San Francisco. It is really delightful to hear out of the blue that my work is going to be shown publicly. Once a piece sells and leaves my domain, it finds a new home and depending on the circumstances, I may not even know where that is. This mixed media collage now dwells in some great company in a private collection focused on contemporary women artists. This exhibit, called Femmescapes, "explores the relationship of a woman’s place in the environment, woman as environment, and the environment as woman." It features artists including Ann Hamilton, Louise Bourgeois, Lisa Kokin, Ana Mendieta, and Kiki Smith - wow!
Nocturne was created in 1999 as part of my series Mapping the Body, in which I explored the emotions & experiences housed within the body. Here I layered kodalith transparency over sheet music (a Chopin Nocturne), torn paper and skeletonized magnolia leaves. Nocturne depicts that chrysalis state right before flight - the egg hatching and wings ready. While making this piece, I was thinking a lot about the experiences in life that crack us open - both the joyful ones and the very painful ones. That cracking can be quite uncomfortable, but ultimately yields access to a new territory within oneself...a new sense of self...a new internal rhythm or hum.
If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and would like to see this exhibition, here is some more information:
FEMMESCAPES
An exhibition featuring work from the collection of
Lenore Pereira & Rich Niles curated by students in the
Mills College Museum Studies Workshop
Opening Reception:
Saturday, April 14, 2012, 6–8 pm
Exhibition Dates:
Saturdays & Sundays, April 15 - May 6, 2012,11am–5pm
Location: 70 South Park, San Francisco, CA, 94107
Learn more by clicking here
Image Info: Nocturne, ©1999, kodalith and mixed media collage, 13 x 11" framed, edition of 10 (sold out)
I am delighted to share that I have new solo show at Cavallo Point in Sausalito, CA - both in their art gallery (pictured here) and in their healing center. This lodge at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge has a unique art program. In addition to the gallery, each guest room features original fine art work on extended loans by wonderful local artists including Linda Connor, Judith & Richard Lang, Candace Gaudiani and many more.
I was thrilled when curator Anne Veh contacted me last fall about showing my work there. I have to say I hesitated though when she told me the dates because the show was to open January 5 - just two days before the due date of my second child. Fortunately Anne was open to creative solutions, so in mid-December when I was very round with pregnancy, we met in my studio and selected all the work, wrapped it up, and she took it with her and stored it at her home until she installed the show a few weeks later. I had to really let go in a way that I don't usually with an exhibit and let Anne truly "curate" - a word whose etymology means "to take care of." She has attended to all the myriad details of the show beautifully.
One of my favorite parts of this exhibit is the spirit of generosity that is present. 10% of all sales proceeds go to the non-profit of my choice. I selected Lily Yeh's outstanding organization Barefoot Artists which "works with poor communities around the globe using art to bring healing, self-empowerment and social change." And then at Anne's suggestion, we created a give-away for every visitor. In the center of the gallery is a wooden bowl filled with rolled scrolls tied with ribbon, and inside each is one of my favorite quotes about the creative process. There are 11 different quotes, so each visitor can intuitively pick the best one for him or her. As you can see from the photo above, the bowl was empty the day I visited as these have been so popular that it has been hard to keep up with the demand, but I have been assured that the bowl is replenished often. If you are unable to attend the show, but would still like the creative inspiration, please email me and I will send you a pdf of the quotes.
One of the quotes is George Braque: "Art is a wound turned into light." Anne as a curator really understood right away the healing inherent in my creative process, and chose to emphasize this aspect in the show. She selected a very nice group of over 40 pieces from 5 different series including Mapping the Body, Milagros, Evocations, and Sanctuary (pictured in the photo above). I do hope if you are in the Bay Area that you will get a chance to see the show and/or hear my artist talk on March 22.
Mary Daniel Hobson, Creativity: A Journey of Transformation
Cavallo Point Art Gallery & Healing Center, Sausalito, CA
January 5-April 3, 2011
Special Program & Artist Talk on Tuesday evening, March 22, 2011
For directions & more information, please see www.cavallopoint.com or call 415-339-4740.
Last week, I had a nice visit to Modern Book Gallery at their new location at 49 Geary Street in San Francisco. Previously on University Ave in Palo Alto, they are now on the fourth floor of this building known for housing top-notch galleries like Fraenkel, Koch, and Stephen Wirtz. The space looks terrific - bright and elegant. I particularly love this corner dedicated to books published by Modern Book, including titles by Maggie Taylor, Fan Ho, Fred Lyon, Brigitte Carnochan, and an about-to-be-released retrospective publication on Jerry Uelsmann. They will be doing a book signing and closing party for Fred Lyon's series of vintage San Francisco photos on Saturday, September 11, 2-5pm. I am crossing my fingers I can get there. My work has been represented by Modern Book since 2003, and you could find a large selection of my work there in the back room. I just delivered 10 more pieces from Mapping the Body for them to take to several upcoming art fairs including - Art Toronto, Art Miami, and Art Chicago. I have so valued working with Mark and Bryan and having my work included in their stable of artists as they have grown and evolved over time.
A good friend and collector sent me this photo from her iPhone last week. I was touched to see how she has arranged on her mantle postcards of my art with the three collages she owns. Pictured here left to right are two small-scale collages from the Milagros series, a postcard of Creative Fire Within, the collage In Memory from Mapping the Body, and postcards of Flight, Evocation #001, and Sanctuary #1.
This photo was such a great reminder that my work exists and lives beyond me. It is easy to forget when I am working away alone in the studio that my art is out there enriching the experiences of others. I am so grateful to Nell for the gift of seeing how my work is installed in such a graceful and beautiful way in her home.
I just got a delightful surprise in the mail - a preview copy of The Map As Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography by Katharine Harmon. I am a big fan of her earlier book, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (which informed my thinking about maps in my series Milagros), so I was quite honored when she asked me to submit work for her latest book. My piece, Territory, from the series Mapping the Body is reproduced on page 144 as an example of "Personal Terrain: Maps of Intimate Spaces." I am in some very good company - the pages of this book include works by 350 artists including Maya Lin, Olafur Eliasson, William Kentridge, and more. Katharine Harmon writes in the introduction:
"Spend time immersed in the world of artists' maps in this book, letting it steer you through familiar landscapes revealed in new ways and over strange topography resonating with hidden meaning. Contemplate each artist's use of cartography and consider maps of your own journey. Discover how mysterious, jarring, thought provoking, and gorgeous artists' maps can be. Wayfinding documents as artworks have never been as diverse, or as stimulating. Mapmaking as a whole is enhanced as each artist makes a mark on a bigger map, calling out I AM HERE."
My foray into maps began with my series Mapping the Body, in which I often layered maps under kodalith images of the body to convey a sense of a pschychological inner world. I am most often drawn to older maps for both their beauty and their errors. Just as early navigators set sail on uncharted seas, so does the explorer of the self. Some contours of one's world are known, but many others shift and change and surprise.
The Map as Art will be released this fall by Princeton Architectural Press. You could pre-order copies at Amazon by clicking here.
Recently I received a wonderful box in the mail from Healing Environments full of postcards featuring a detail of my collage, Flight (pictured here). This card was part of a postcard gift packet distributed to their audience. In addition, work from my series Mapping the Body is going to be in their next publication. I am truly honored to have my work included. Healing Environments is an extraordinary organization whose tag line is “together we will comfort the suffering,” and you could learn more about them by clicking here to read an interview with co-directors Traci and Kate on artheals.org. They create both healing spaces with interior design and elegant books and publications, which they give away free of charge to their audience as tools for healing and inspiration. It is such a beautiful model of generosity. In response, I want to offer something back as well. I invite you to leave a comment here on this blog post before March 26. Then I will randomly select three people to receive a set of 5 of these postcards.
PS - I have gotten some feedback that people are unsure how to leave a comment. Be sure you are reading the post on my blog page and then click on the text below (1st line, right side) that says Comments. Then you can fill out the form and submit your comment online. Thanks!
Poet and painter Kirsten Rian has a wonderful practice of emailing a poem to her friends every Monday. This is one she recently sent me - it took my breath away.
Blink
by Morton Marcus
You’ve got to love life so much that you don’t want to
miss a moment of it, and pay such close attention to
whatever you’re doing that each time you blink you can
hear your eyelashes applauding what you’ve just seen.
In each eye there are more than 80 eyelashes, forty
above and forty below, like forty pairs of arms working,
80 pairs in both eyes, a whole audience clapping so loud
you can hardly bear to listen.
160 hands batter each other every time you blink.
“Bravo!” they call. “Encore! Encore!”
Paralyzed in a hospital bed, or watching the cold rain
from under a bridge—remember this.
(Image: Vision II, ©1999 from the series Mapping the Body)
A quick post to share the news that work from Mapping the Body will be on display at Art Santa Fe this weekend at the booth for Modern Book gallery. One of the nice things about working with Modern Book is that they take my work to several art fairs every year. In January, they traveled to Photo Los Angeles; in June, they were in New York City for the Affordable Art Fair (their NY booth is pictured here); and now this July they are in New Mexico for Art Santa Fe. For me, as an artist, fairs are a great way to get more national exposure. For art lovers, it is like visiting a warehouse-sized candy store. Galleries from around the world sign up for booth space and display a selection of their represented artists, so there is lots of great art on view all in one venue. Art Santa Fe will take place at El Museo Cultural at 1615 Paseo de Peralta. For more information, please click here.
I took a family excursion to SFMOMA on Friday evening with my father, daughter, and husband to attend a Foto Forum walk-through of the new Lee Miller show. It was such a treat to see so many vintage prints by her. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Lee Miller and relied heavily on books for my view of her photographic oeuvre. Now at SFMOMA I could view the wonderful subtleties in her prints. I drank them in, filling my creative well.
The walk-through was led by curator Marc Haworth Booth and Lee Miller’s son, Antony Penrose. They each animated the images on the wall with background stories and information. For example, the photograph below is a wonderful surrealist image of the magic electricity found in the everyday occurrence of opening a door. Marc Haworth Booth explained that this was a door to an exclusive shop and that the explosive illusion came from light hitting the marks left by the diamond rings of wealthy women scratching against the glass as they turned the handle. I have always viewed this image as articulating the power of the hand to ignite the creative spark that generates new art.
It is hard to consider Lee Miller’s work without connecting it to stories from her multi-faceted life. Born in Poughkeepsie in 1907, she modeled for Vogue magazine, was Man Ray’s mate/muse/assistant, ran a portrait studio in New York City, married an Egyptian and lived in Egypt for several years, then became one of the first female war correspondents during WWII, and after the war married Roland Penrose and settled down in the countryside raising her son and entertaining artistic friends like Picasso and Max Ernst. The rich variety of her life caused her son, when writing Lee’s first biography, to call it the Lives of Lee Miller. I have recently been enjoying Lee Miller: A Life and the catalogue for the exhibition.
It was a treat to see this show with my father, Charles Hobson. When he created his book, Parisian Encounters, about eight famous couples who met in Paris, he included Lee Miller and Man Ray, recounting the story of their first meeting. Lee Miller was traveling in Europe and decided to stay in Paris and study with “the best photographer in the city,” which at the time was Man Ray. So she went to his studio and rang the buzzer, but the concierge informed her he had already left for his summer holiday. Crestfallen, she went around the corner to a café, and finding him seated there, she marched right up to him and introduced herself, saying “Hi, I am Lee Miller, your new assistant.” He countered, “I don’t take assistants, and anyway I am leaving now for my vacation.” She said, “Fine, I am coming with you.” And she did and so began a rich collaboration.
It was stories like these that inspired me, as a student at Vassar, writing my thesis on Lee Miller in Poughkeepsie (the city where she was born), to really go after what I wanted in life. If, at a time when women most often defined themselves as mothers and wives, Lee could burst through limitations and live such a full, animated life, then so perhaps, could I. She helped me dream bigger and commit myself to the path of photography. When I began my series Mapping the Body, it was her and Man Ray’s vision of the cropped female figure that informed the way I photographed my own body – mining inspiration from their vision to create my own. In the end, I think there are people who touch you through time, despite death and never having met. Lee Miller is one of those intangible mentors for me. It’s why seeing her show on Friday filled me with that magic electricity of exploding hands.
Sitting here with morning coffee and a fresh stack of invitations to my upcoming exhibit at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA. My husband (good guy that he is) delivered 59 pieces from Mapping the Body and Milagros to them yesterday and picked up 200 invites for me. Labeling and stamping them will keep my hands busy while watching tomorrow night’s Academy Awards.
One of the nice things about this exhibit is that because it is at a non-profit (rather than a commercial) gallery, I am able to include some artist proofs from editions that have sold out and a few pieces borrowed from collectors. So pieces like Release, Crescendo, Territory, Union, and Nocturne will be able to be in the public eye again.
I will be driving down for the show, which opens on Friday, March 14. At 5pm that night, I will give a gallery walk-through, followed by a reception from 6-8pm. If you are in the area, it would be great to see you there.
Last night I participated in Sausalito Art Walk – a monthly event celebrating the arts with live music in the streets, and galleries and businesses staying open late. Prints from Evocations and Sanctuary were on display at Sausalito Picture Framing at 310 Caledonia Street, and they will be up all month until July 9. Bob Woodrum just opened Sausalito Picture Framing a few months ago, and he did a great job on all my framing for the Bolinas Museum show. It is a pleasure to have my work displayed in his very professional shop with crisp white walls and great lighting. I also love that my work is in the company of all of his molding samples since I am such a frame junkee (as witnessed in my series Mapping the Body).
I took this photo above through the front window. It seemed fitting somehow to photograph a piece from Evocations through the distortion of the glass storefront window as it mimics the distortion already happening in the photograph, which was shot through a glass bottle. In the background you can see additional pieces from the series that are more clearly displayed in the photo below.
I am pleased to have been curated into an online exhibition and quarterly publication called Contemporary Quarterly – which is dedicated to putting contemporary art in context. This issue's theme is "art and text," and it includes some of my work from Mapping the Body as well as art by Donald Farnsworth (whose work is on the cover above), Arthur Huang, Rachel Wieking, and Catherine Courtenaye. Each artist’s work is quite distinct offering a nice affirmation of the myriad ways text can be incorporated into art. As the curator Robert Tomlinson explains in his essay, “The five artists represented here are as diverse in their imagery as they are in their choices of mediums. They are, however, unified in their use of text as a means to marry content with form to transform the common and ordinary into the personal and profound.”
You can view the online exhibition which features a clever room by room 3D format by clicking here. Or download a free pdf version of the catalogue by clicking here. Or purchase a hard copy catalogue for $20 by emailing info@contemporaryquarterly.com.
I spent two grey and rainy days this week holed up in my office, doing accounting for my taxes. I had been dreading this task, and put it off until this Monday. Surprisingly, when I sat down at my desk, pushed all the other papers away, and turned off my email, an almost zen-like space opened up. It was just me and the numbers from the year before – inputting them methodically into Quicken. I was struck by how each receipt brought back memories of things I forgot I had even done. A receipt from a framer reminded me that I had editioned more pieces than I thought I had from Mapping the Body. A postage receipt reminded me that I did a mailing to my collectors last summer. Travel receipts from a trip to New Mexico reminded me that my trip to Review Santa Fe last May was less than a year ago. I learned from this that in my work as an artist, I am most often in the present or the future – my head full of all I want to do. One good thing that came from tax accounting this week was a recognition of all the small stuff - the little details, the errands run, the mail sent, the connections made - that altogether reveal how much hard work I have already done.
This then feels like a great point to be taking a vacation. In two days, my husband and I are headed to Mexico to a small beach town near Zihuatanejo where we will relax and bring the tempo of our bodies back to a resting pace.
Earlier this week, I spent an afternoon at the home/studio of Michael Creedon. Tucked within the redwood trees of Marin County, his studio boasts an Epson 9800 printer and an affectionate cat named Checkers. Together he and I proofed an edition of archival pigment prints based on a unique collage from my series Mapping the Body. The resulting print (pictured here) is part of the PhotoAlliance collector print program – an endeavor in which artists donate images, which are printed in special editions and sold to raise money for the organization.
I am fond of PhotoAlliance, and so this act of generosity came naturally. A former board member, I value all they do to build community around contemporary photography. Their workshops and lectures feature top-notch artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, William Christenberry, and, coming soon, Terri Weifenbach in April and Bruce Davidson in May. I value these talks as a means to gain a new perspective on the photographic medium, and for the chance to gather with others devoted to image making.I was delighted that PhotoAlliance selected Cadence to be one of their collector prints. With this work, I pay homage to Man Ray, whose Surrealist photographs of the closely cropped female figure inform so many of my photographs in Mapping the Body. Cadence is a direct reference to his famous photograph, Le Violin d’Ingres, which itself references another artist, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. And so Cadence speaks to the ongoing cycle of one artist impacting another. I like to think that in making Cadence into a PhotoAlliance collector print that I am supporting this kind of transmission of influence. The money earned from the sale of this print will fund public events where artists speak to other artists. May the cycle of inspiration continue…
Over thirty of my pieces are now installed at the Etherton Gallery in Tucson, Arizona as part of a three-person show called Figuratively Speaking. I shipped the work there a few weeks ago, and now thanks to the magic of the internet, can see the show online. At the end of the month, I will fly down for a reception and see the show in person, but for now, from a distance of 1000 miles or so, I am enjoying seeing the work arranged anew and spotlit on brown walls.
