Terrain: Navigating Landscapes

Terrain is a group show featuring artists: Mark Garrett | Tracey Kessler | James Tucker | Karina Bania | Elisa Gomez | Performances by Alexa Eisner | Curated by Kelsey Marie Issel Terrain is meditation on art that explores natural and mindful landscapes. Each artist represents physical space, geography and our natural surroundings in a different ways but each gives us a sense of place and the journey it took to get there. Mark M Garrett is an artist living and working in San Francisco. The scope of his work has morphed over a period of some 30 years from drawing to painting, from collage to assemblage and back again. He draws inspiration from a variety of sources that seem to find memoire than I seek them out. "I came across the paper cuttings of Hans Christian Anderson at a time when major life changes left me feeling bare and dislocated." At some point he began to fold paper and 'draw' with scissors... particularly re-purposing maps or anatomy texts culled from flea markets or estate sales. He often incorporates opaque and transparent watercolor as an extension of the color palette printed on the charts. The technique of hand-cutting maps and painting in the gaps emerged for him as a metaphor of holding the world even as its outlines shift radically and unpredictably. James Tucker is the owner and operator of The Aesthetic Union, a small design studio and print shop based San Francisco. It’s main focus is creating limited edition letterpress prints with contemporary artists as well as designing and consulting on paper specific projects. Tracey Kessler's work reflects the calm she finds in the daily interactions and conversations with random acquaintances, friends, and family. Though inspired throughout the turbulent times of our modern era, her work (influenced by such artists as Tapies, Twombley, and Stein) possesses a soothing, calm and organic feel clearly paralleled by her California lifestyle. Karina Bania is a mixed media painter living in California. Largely self-taught, her degree is in Business, but she picked up a paintbrush and a backpack the day after graduating. She spent many years living around the world developing her art. While studying in India, she began incorporating local pigments and dyes into her work, eventually developing her unique style of stained washes and shapes on raw canvas. In addition to solo and group exhibitions, Bania has been licensing and selling her artwork across the US and abroad. Her work has been featured in marketplaces and publications such as Restoration Hardware, Land of Nod, Riviera Magazine, San Diego Magazine, and LUXE. Elisa Gomez creates aggressively gestural paintings inspired by the natural world. Working primarily with mixed-media on canvas, her compositions are dynamically colored and textured. Gomez received her BFA with an emphasis in painting from the University of Utah in 2010. She has been involved in multiple shows, including the Springville Museum of Fine Arts Spring Salon in 2010, and has been published in Luxe Interior+Design Magazine. Alexa Eisner passion is communicating concept through design. With a background in prop & fashion styling, interior design, modern dance, communication theory, and mixed media art, she incorporates a multidisciplinary process with an emphasis on identity to create unique brand experiences.