Slate ‘minimal’ – 3/4/16 (Reception & Exhibition)

While Oakland’s SLATE contemporary gallery may be best known for colorful abstract expressionism, digital exploration, and energetic cityscapes, there comes a time now and again when one must take a deep inhale and an even longer exhale. SLATE’s minimal exhibition, on view from March 4th through April 16th, is an expression of an expansive sense of time and space, where time slows down and space opens up. It is seductively peaceful and calming and, yet, incredibly challenging. It is challenging precisely because we are so used to the constant onslaught of stimulating images that we are ill-equipped to simply stand in front of a white picture and wait to see what emerges. Part of the problem is our society’s increasing emphasis on digital and graphic displays: if an artwork does not grab one’s attention in five seconds while scrolling by as a 1-inch 72 dpi thumbnail, it has no power to navigate the media-powered currents of contemporary art. Hence, today’s art is increasingly reduced to the equivalent of sound bytes: short, snappy, and quickly understood.

minimal goes against this trend, featuring work that is mainly colorless and that does not translate to reproductive media. These pieces present shifts in tone that are so subtle that they can only be seen, much less appreciated, in person by standing in front of the art object. It is only from this vantage point that a viewer can appreciate the layering of white and off-white papers collaged onto Silvia Poloto’s mixed-media panels, or notice the shadows cast by Jane Grimm’s porcelain forms. It is only with time and attention that viewers will be rewarded with the etherial and yet structured floating forms in Edythe Bresnahan’s oil paintings, discover the message buried under the surface in Lucky Rapp’s white acrylic and resin wall work, or attempt to follow the figures in Tressa Pack’s photographic series Wanderers in a Sea of Fog.

EXHIBITION DATES
March 3 – April 16, 2016

PRIVATE PREVIEW
Friday, March 4th, 2016 (5pm – 5pm)

LOCATION
473 25th Street Suite A
Oakland, CA 94612