PENINSULA ART MUSEUM

(Special report from DeWitt Cheng)

10.11.09

Peninsula Art Museum: Claudia Chapline, Tyler James Hoare, Jone Small Manoogian - Ebb & Flow.

Review and images by DeWitt Cheng: This group exhibition brings together three Bay Area artists who have dealt with the Bay ecosystem over the years. Claudia Chapline (of the Claudia Chapline Gallery in Stinson Beach) depicts the effects of light and water on Bolinas Lagoon, an endangered salt-water estuary, in her paintings, which range from impressionistic to abstract to conceptual in approach. Tyler James Hoare of Berkeley assembles flotsam for his humorous figurative/mechanical driftwood sculptures, well-known for landmarks (Red Baron, anyone?) in the Emeryville mudflats to generations of Bay Bridge commuters. Jone Small Manoogian's acrylic paintings of the Palo Alto Baylands depict that salt marsh in all weathers and times of day; her 1994 Four Seasons series of abstract, symmetrical collages of sedges, seedpods, twigs and flowers collaged atop mirrored digital photographs represents not only the seasonal variety of natural life, but conjures up imaginary figures, earth spirits, that seem to warn us from our bad eco-habits. It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature.