July 2015: Carolyn Garcia & Tom Soule

Carolyn Garcia's drawings for this show are small in size and created with graphite and acrylic medium. Carolyn explains "One of my favorite things to do is to get very close to the ground and look at tiny plant life and insects. Weeds become vast forests and lush patterns emerge from plants that you would barely notice if you were standing up. There is so much drama in this infinitesimal world, and it mirrors our larger world and even larger things in our solar system. The work I did for this show is inspired by my observations of nature and my love of animals. As I worked on the pieces a story began to emerge, and I realized that all of the pieces were taking place in the same forest. The show is a story, with a cast of mysterious characters." On most of the work she used both reading glasses and a magnifying glass to get the detail she wanted.

Tom Soule creates wood sculpture using different woods. "I have been making art for quite a long time. I think of myself as heir to the (mostly American, hence painterly) modernist tradition. Unfortunately, one of the traits of that tradition is/was to be largely puritanically programmatic, full of "shalt-nots';that is, variously, no opticality, formalist only, cerebral only, no planning, no reference, no beauty, not fussy, no complexity (simplify, simplify), no illusions or allusions, grids only, no grids, big and bigger rather than small, etc. etc. Those programs spilled over into related prescriptive demands on the viewer as well." He is now making work irrespective of those programmatic dicta, complex sculptural objects open to viewer response of any and all kinds. These objects are fashioned of wood (mostly), are of a size to be carried by one person and are "meant to occupy the human living space ".