Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring the work of Anne Appleby, Xylor Jane, Dean Smith and Andy Vogt. This selection of abstract painting, works on paper, and wall-sculpture is linked by an investigation of natural phenomena and how that is both perceived and then understood in the mind. 

Anne Appleby’s four-panel painting, Stream Mint, not only depicts the subtle nuances of color, density, and depth of an indigenous plant through an annual life-cycle but the attendant play of ethereal light and tone. It is an investigation into a relationship of perception of the conscious observer and the natural world. Xylor Jane’s grid of minuscule dots illustrates naturally occurring mathematical patterns in a meditation of expansion and retraction. The accumulating mark-making of Dean Smith reflects upon the measure of time and a ceaseless human impulse to render the invisible visible and Andy Vogt’s wall sculpture heightens an awareness of space as both real and imagined. Each work in the exhibition is a subtle meditation on the mind’s attempt to grasp some of the more abstract and intriguing phenomena of the natural world.

Anne Appleby

Anne Appleby was born in 1954 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and moved to Montana at age 17. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1977 from the University of Montana and embarked on a 15-year apprenticeship with an Ojibwe elder, learning to patiently and deeply observe nature. Appleby would watch and then translate into color the cycles of leaves, stems, buds, fruit, and seeds, transforming nature’s fluid evolution into two-dimensional portraits.

Appleby received her Master of Fine Arts in 1989 from the San Francisco Art Institute and has since exhibited her painting internationally to high acclaim. She has had solo exhibitions at the Tacoma Art Museum, 2018, the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University, Kansas, 2011, the Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch, Germany, 2010, and the Boise Art Museum, 2000. In 2007 the artist was featured at the Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese, Italy, which commissioned a permanent major painting installation. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Denver Museum of Art, the Museo d’ARTE Moderna e Contemporea, and numerous other public and private institutions.

Anne Appleby has received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Western Arts Federation, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation; in addition, she is the recipient of the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Art, the David S. McMillan Award from the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Northwest Biennial from the Portland Art Museum. 

XYLOR JANE

Xylor Jane (born 1963) is an American artist whose paintings integrate mathematics, color, and time. Jane's color is rarely brushed, and rather is applied in single, unmodulated dots, sometimes as tiny as a millimeter in diameter. Jane has worked extensively with prime numbers and the Fibonacci sequence.

She is also known to be highly influenced by the weather, working according to weather conditions, revisiting one painting, for instance, only on overcast days, and another when it's sunny out: hence, some works take years to produce.

Jane's painting was featured in the Bay Area Now show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2005. Other Bay Area institutions where she has had solo or two-person shows include the Jack Hanley Gallery, Gallery 16, the LAB, and the Luggage Store Gallery. Jane had a 2010 solo show at Almine Rech in Paris, France, and a 2005 solo show at Four Gallery in Dublin, Ireland.

Xylor Jane is based in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and is represented by CANADA Gallery in New York City where she has had six solo exhibitions (2005, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015, 2016). Jane received a BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993.

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DEAN SMITH

Dean Smith creates drawings, collages, and videos. His work reflects upon the measure of time and a ceaseless human impulse to render the invisible visible by inviting us to join in a slow, rich meditation on an idea as it unfolds to its conclusion.

He discusses his practice in a recent audio conversation with musician, Peter Conheim and artist, Gina Borg; and in an Art Practical interview with artist and perfumer, Bruno Fazzolari.

Smith is a recipient of a California Arts Council Fellowship Award and his work is placed in prominent public collections, including The British Museum; Hammer Museum; LACMA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery; The Art Institute of Chicago; Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Smith lives and works in Oakland, California.

Andy Vogt

Andy Vogt grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC and attended Carnegie Mellon University where he earned a BFA in Intermedia, a program focused on time-based media, performance, and installation. He lived in Pittsburgh PA until 2000.

His current work using reclaimed wood from demolished buildings, started around 2004, a few years after moving to San Francisco. Since then, his work has been exhibited nationally and locally including solo shows at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Eli Ridgway Gallery, Hap Gallery (Portland, OR), Southern Exposure, The Museum of Craft and Design, and Ampersand International Arts. Group exhibitions include Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco State University Art Gallery, Swarm Gallery, and Adobe Books Backroom Gallery. In 2010 he was an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts.

Andy lives and works in San Francisco, California.