TRACING PASSAGES
Gray Loft Gallery
Until November 11th, Oakland’s Gray Loft Gallery boasts a genre-bending trio of artists whose works also erase the presumed difference between the abstract and the concrete.
In very differing ways, Ruth Boerefyn, Tom White, and Cuong Ta take strongly visceral materials and work them into forms of imagery that also readily float back and forth from echoing nature to insisting on the artifice of their own invention.
One of the hallmarks of shows at Gray Loft is the studied relationships that different works can have with each other, displayed in a way that makes this difficult curatorial insightfulness all seem like that was easy to do. But the effect is that individual pieces wind up being more distinctive, as the show guides us to heightened levels of attention.
In this show, that nuanced touch is nearly suspended, and quite dramatically, by the first piece we reach at the doorway, a room-sized Boerefyn installation that dazzles as a sculpture, a living drawing, and an environment all rolled into one.
Opposite that installation, Tom White’s pieces continually vibrate between feeling 2D and 3D. Meanwhile, meditating on the work allows it to increasingly seem like an organic evolution of its parts into a whole. It is cultivated, and while its final coherence need not refer to anything more than that it found its “rest” state, it is still highly evocative of things other than itself.
As if to make that very thing a point, the design of the exhibit allows the placement of Cuong Ta’s several works, the third artist’s, to both share space and comment on other works of Borefyn and White.
But on their own, Cuong Ta’s pieces survey ways that artists intervene in natural forms. Artists often elevate Nature’s abstract qualities to make its presence even more pronounced. Here, the pieces are vessels but also highly graphical. The artist finds various ways to deliberately and sharply emphasize forms that already had natural meaning of their own but now also carry the imprint of our human hand.
Additional introduction to the unifying currents of this exhibit and its immersive experience is found presently at www.grayloftgallery.com through November 11th while the show remains on view.
Malcolm Ryder, Oct 2023
Gray Loft Gallery is located at 2889 Ford Street #32 in Oakland
Gallery Hours: Saturdays 1:00 - 5:00 pm and by appointment
Closing Reception: Saturday, November 11, 5:00 – 7:30 pm
grayloftgallery@gmail.com