Visual Aid Opening: iconography and trans-formation

Visual Aid presents iconography & transformation, an exhibit at Space 743 Harrison Gallery from July 5th through August 13th, 2005. Please join us at the opening reception on July 8th from 5:30-7:30. The gallery is located at 743 Harrison Street between 1st and Fremont in San Francisco.

This show features important work by five Visual Aid artists who are either directly influenced by religious iconography that evolved into a formal yet very personal language, or have stumbled upon a stylized visual language which reads as personal iconography. The work displays a process of progression and transformation. The exhibit was curated by Termeh Yeghiazarian and Mape Andrews.

About the Artists:
Heavily inspired by Christian iconography, Gregg Cassin uses traditional religious icons with a contemporary twist. His imagery of the winged angel cake, topped with lit birthday candles, fills us with promise of hope and possibility as it hovers above a child prophet. As each icon repeats itself in the same painting or the next, we recognize it as a fixed character in a different scenario.

Although far from Christian iconography, the same repetitive reference appears in Richard Bolingbroke’s paintings. As shells, rocks, thorns and flowers are arranged and re-arranged, they begin to read as a coded language, which clearly represent more than a still life. Spirituality and physicality merge in Bolingbroke’s imagery like carefully composed music.

We negotiate between macrocosm and microcosm in David King’s work. There is a nostalgic focus as his iconography traverses between figurative and the abstract as if zooming in and out of the same frame. Time and Space overlap as we move back and forth between layers of vintage imagery that turn into contemporary science.

Marcia Weisbrot’s transfixed preoccupation on the empty dress directly addresses the missing female figure. The play on words in each of her work’s title, and the writings which appear in the seams of her delicately crafted paper dresses, read like a book of mystery.

Visual Aid helps produce, present, and preserve the work of professional artists whose careers are challenged because of a life-threatening illness. We serve professional artists from the nine-county Bay Area, providing artists with direct services from art supplies to exhibitions and career development. For more information, email visaid@visualaid.org, visit http://www.visualaid.org or call 415-777-8242.