Concrete Utopia, two-person exhibition
Johansson Projects, Oakland
August 3 - September 3, 2018
Prisme II, 2018, exposures on gelatin silver paper, 28 x 38 inches
Fragments of urban life and daydreams unite the works of Rachelle Bussières and Courtney Sennish in Concrete Utopia on view at Johansson Projects. The works lure you in through their use of color and material; comparing the softness of a sky palette to the texture of concrete. Both artists, sculpting their mediums, record different processes of perceiving, experiencing and relating to the physical world.
For Bussières, the lumen print process allows her to layer colored light exposures of cut shapes to build a glowing geometric presence. She considers the light of specific geographical locations when creating. In the darkroom, in the studio and outside, her shapes are manipulated, overlapped or aligned, to create records of sculpted moments. The dusty pinks and lavenders regress next to glowing yellow shapes, akin to lunar moments viewed through architecture. The photograms radiate next to Sennish’s concrete sculptures which stand as silent urban monuments. Her sculptures are made of familiar textures and materials that become symbols of our constructed landscape. She stacks, puzzles and combines moments recorded during her city walks. In her work, our relationship to nature within the built environment is recorded as a single tree shadow.
Shadows are Formations, risograph
Published and edited by Night Diver Press.
10” x 13”, 27 pages
Second edition of 200. A copy of Shadows are Formations was acquired by SFMOMA library & archives.
In Rachelle Bussières’s works the capture of place typical of photography is forestalled to that final stage in which light and paper and shape and time push against one another; she creates a delicate rendering of simple forms carries something of the place. The chemistries at play do their part, harnessed to interact in real time with the artist in the dark room without the intermediary of a negative’s recording fixed at another time and place. The light of the site of the works’ making also participates, with the air and sun slipping into the lab and onto the paper’s chemistry charged with peculiarity, personality, simultaneously captured in the work and an accomplice to its making. There is an alien purity to the shapes and colors which surface, subtly but confidently, into the worlds captured and created by Bussières. Heavenly architecture, dawn and dusky skies are drawn sometimes sharply, sometimes in a haze, in pale intermediate colors, in not quite oranges or purples or blush pinks, making a spectral portrait of this particular sun’s travels through this particular atmosphere, these clouds.
- Essay by Aaron Harbour.
BLOOMFIELD | BUSSIERES | WEBB
Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco
November 18 2017 - February 15, 2018
Eclipses I-IX, 2017, exposures on gelatin silver paper, 16 x 20 inches/each