Eleanor Harwood Gallery is pleased to present “Sometimes Things Come Together”, a group show with Kelly Carámbula, Tiffanie Turner and Paul Wackers.
The idea that “Sometimes Things Come Together” is about science as much as it is about art. Carámbula, Turner and Wackers share a love of combinations and invention in their very different mediums. Playfulness and a shrewd process of editing is integral to these artists' work.
Carámbula creates individually made “tiles”, texturing and glazing them various colors, and then intuitively assembles them into ceramic collages. Turner works with paper petals, colored paints, and various scales and angles creating dynamic paper sculptures of flowers. Wackers draws from a variety of remembered and invented forms to create paintings of curiosity cabinets. HIs arrangement and juxtaposition of color, various tempos and rhythms make the paintings almost read as text.
Scientific research and art-making share a pursuit of the new, of singular ideas, unique elaborations on the shoulders of other thinkers and makers. The new mRNA vaccines will be the the first to be widely used to teach our bodies how to fight Covid-19 by prompting our cells to produce a piece of the ‘spike protein’ that is unique to SARS-CoV-2, rather than by using weakened or inactived viruses, to induce an effective immune response.
Artists, like scientific researchers, spend many years finding their voices, learning and taking from others, and molding previous observations and experiences into their unique voices. Not all scientists succeed and not all artists do either. It is when we interpret the data presented with a new lens that breakthroughs happen. Progress is necessarily a creative endeavor. This show is a celebration of when seeing anew does work, when the efforts pay off and something profound happens, be it a scientific breakthrough or a culmination of many hours in the studio.
Onwards and upwards. Sometimes things come together.
About the Artists
Kelly Carámbula
Kelly Carámbula is a San Francisco-based artist and sculptor. Her work explores elements of acceptance and control, often incorporating surprises that encourage the viewer to look closer, longer, or from a different perspective. She is continually interested and inspired by the tactile relationships between color and form— using clay, wood, and metal as her primary mediums.
She has exhibited at Rare Device and Legion Projects in San Francisco.
Tiffanie Turner was born in 1970 in Colonie, NY and raised in the woods of New Hampshire. She lives and works in the Bay Area.
Tiffanie Turner
Turner received her Bachelor of Architecture from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1995 and worked as an architect for over 15 years before beginning her career as a botanical sculptor. She received a Zellerbach Family Grant award in 2016 to support her work as the May 2016 artist-in residence at the de Young Museum located in San Francisco.
Turner has had solo exhibitions at the Kimball Gallery at the de Young Museum, Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston, MA, and Rare Device in San Francisco. Recent group exhibitions include “Pleasure Garden” at Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, “Flower Power” at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, “Preternatural” at Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, “Detritus” at San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and “Botanica” at Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA. She has been featured in Vogue, American Craft, O Magazine, LAB magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and been noted online by Colossal, Squarespace presents HI-FRUCTOSE, My Modern Met, Design*Sponge, Elie Saab, and The Jealous Curator, among others.
Turner is an instructor in the art of paper flower making in the United States and beyond, and authored her first book, The Fine Art of Paper Flowers, which was released on Ten Speed Press on August 22, 2017.
Paul Wackers
Paul Wackers works from personal experience, pulling from objects and places he sees, feels and keeps close. He makes objects and paintings to try to understand what they are, what they mean, and how he should understand them. Many of the subjects are things that seem very familiar but through the process of painting or sculpture become confused or unreal because of the associations created within the picture.
Paul Wackers was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1978. He received his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute, and BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. Some of Paul’s solo exhibitions include Narwhal Projects (Toronto, ON), Alice Gallery (Brussels, Belgium), Eleanor Harwood Gallery (San Francisco, CA) and Morgan Lehman Gallery (New York, NY). Paul has also been in several group and two-person shows, including exhibitions at New Image Art (Los Angeles, CA), Halsey McKay (East Hampton, NY), Frosch and Portmann (New York, NY), and Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA). His work is in the MIMA Museum (Brussels, BE) and many prominent private and public collections, including Chevron Corporation, Fidelity Investments and the Ellie Mae Corporate Collection. He also installed a large public mural on the James Hotel in New York City.
He received the Tournesol Painting Prize in 2008 with an awarded residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts (Marin County, CA), the NKDale Residency (Sunfjord, Norway), Encore (Brussels, BE), and an artist residency at the Byrdcliffe Colony (Woodstock, NY), and the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, (Portland, ME).
Paul Wackers has been exhibiting with Eleanor Harwood Gallery since 2006. He lives and works in New York City.
