Kathrin Van Dyke: New Paintings
Nancy Rexroth: Iowa. Photographs (1970-1976)
Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco
September 6 - 30, 2000
The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents exhibitions of photographs by NANCY REXROTH and new paintings by KATHRYN VAN DYKE.
In the main gallery, are exhibited the intimate, vintage black & white photographs from Nancy Rexroth's series, IOWA. Rexroth used a "Diana" camera (a plastic toy camera) for this six-year long project. These selenium and gold toned prints are vignettes that unlock the Midwestern atmospheres of her childhood. Nancy Rexroth discovered the Iowa of the past in the Ohio of the present where she currently resides. Her photographs are subjective and autobiographical, finding children in the act of flying, old white houses that wave and shutter, and her mother.
NANCY REXROTH (b.1946, Washington, D.C.) has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among others. Rexroth was represented by Light Gallery in New York during the 70's and 80's.
In the small gallery, new, richly textured paintings by KATHRYN VAN DYKE are exhibited. Van Dyke was the recent recipient of the SECA Art Award (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, an auxiliary of SFMOMA) and will have an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in February 2001.
Kathryn Van Dyke's interests lie in structure, texture, form, and color. She seeks contradictory spaces and multiple perspectives. For instance, she has painted a number of works using metallic paint resulting in the surface shifting and changing according to the viewer's perspective. Her juxtapositions create situations and forms that are unstable, ephemeral. In her painting she looks for a kind of disorientation, followed by a reorientation into a place that we have never seen but that is familiar to us.
KATHRYN VAN DYKE (b.1957, Wisconsin) received her M.F.A. from Yale School of Art in 1993. Her work has been in numerous shows including the "1997 Bay Area Now show" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and more recently at The Lab and Four Walls.
STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY
49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
www.wirtzgallery.com
