2010 CAA Exhibition

Exhibition Dates and Times

September 10th – 12th, 2010

Friday September 10 & Saturday September 11, 10:00 am – 8:00 pm

Sunday September 12, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm

Opening Reception, Preview Party

Thursday, September 9th, 5:30pm – 9:00 pm

I will be showing three works, come and see me and enjoy all of the beautiful works by other ceramic artists in Northern California!

Crystal Morey

Log Voyage/2010

Ceramic and Underglaze

15″ x 10″ x 6″

$550

Crystal Morey

Ground Voyage/2010

Ceramic and Underglaze

12″ x 10″x 6″

$550

Crystal Morey

Untitled/2010

Ceramic and Underglaze

12″ x 10″x 6

$550

http://povevolving.com/gallery/

“Irregular Cycles”

15″ x 15″

Paper Collage and Ink

$450

We recently caught up with Crystal in order to find out what themes are behind her new body of work and what techniques are used when shes capturing emotion in her sculptures.

A lot of your work deals with human emotion and in a recent interview you stated that your work has become more and more introspective over the years. What mental processes do you go through in order to come up with the emotions you want to portray in a piece?

My work has actually been very introspective and personal in the past and has taken a different route lately. I have been working on a body of work that is dealing with emotion in relation to environment. I have been building sculptures with figures in full backgrounds and themes of natural cycles and man-made changes in nature.

I don’t know if I have a mental process I go through in order to portray emotion. I try not to think about how the figures in my work feel, I try to feel the emotions I want them to exude and show them in the body, face and hands.

When you have an emotion you want to portray in a piece, how do you then avoid letting your current mood and feeling effect the end result as you work on the piece over time?

I try to work really fast! If I have a new idea for a piece I try to start and finish sculpting within a week. I find that I lose ideas or an idea can be diluted even if I make detailed sketches. I like to work with vigor and potency and they both escape me if I wait to long.

In your landscape pieces you said that you have taken inspiration from, amongst other things, nature and memory. Is there any place in particular that has inspired your work recently? is this reflected in the piece?

I use imagery from nature to make statements about the environment and to give my figures a context. I spent my childhood living in the forest surrounded by tall trees, mountains, rocks, and streams. Nature is a reflective, quiet place for me, a space where my mind can wander and be contemplative. Nature is also a precious place, it is finite and ephemeral, I like to work with this idea as an over-arching theme.

You seem to get a lot of support from other artists, including John Casey who has photographed a number of your works. If you could collaborate with anyone either living or dead who would it be?

The Oakland art scene is really strong right now and filled with lots of new galleries and artists. There is a momentum and everyone is really involved. I have a lot of support from other artists in the area. We are all working towards the same goals and it is really motivating to work as a group or a movement.

I would love to collaborate with so many different artists for so many different reasons. I have found that in the past, when collaborating with other artists, that I learn so much about working with people and my own ideas. But if I had to come up with a short list of dream collaborators, I would have to include Kevin Taylor, Tiffany Bozic, Egon Schiele, Akio Takamori, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Jay Shafer from Tumbleweed Tiny Homes.

What’s the name of the exhibition you have coming up?

I am in several group shows that are coming up, although I am most excited about a solo exhibition at Rowan Morrison Gallery in Oakland this December.  The name of the show is ‘March Into The Sea’ and deals with ideas about the death of nature.

December 2010 – www.rowanmorrison.com

I have a drawing at POVevolving opening August 7th www.povevolving.com

What’s the idea or theme behind your new body of work that you have prepared for the exhibition?

My intention is to explore the human experience of emotion, and its relationship with the environment. I want to study the tenuous, symbiotic balance between human necessities and the health of our natural habitat of forests, oceans, mountains, and deserts. Everyday we strengthen the disconnect between what we use in our lives, and the destructive effects it has on where we live, the air we breathe and the water we drink. We have made a departure from nature and the balance that should exist has been broken. In my work I want to reveal the ephemeral quality of human life and show our dependence on an increasingly delicate ecosystem.

Which of your new pieces are you most proud of in terms of how honestly it has reflected the emotion you have wanted to portray?

“The Long Wait” is a piece I am pretty happy with right now. The idea behind the work shows that in order for new life there must be death. This piece shows a cycle of disintegration and growth at the same time.

When working on that piece what were your working conditions? What environment do you have to be in, in order to capture the raw emotion in your sculptures?

I need quiet time in order to think and read about current events. I listen to National Public Radio for inspiration. I have ongoing ideas and stories that build and need regular working time in the studio to stay constant.

To see more of Crystal’s work and to keep up to date with her exhibition schedule please vist her website: http://www.crystalmorey.com/

Thank you for your support,

Crystal Morey

See My Work!

‘INNOVATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY CRAFT’ A Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Crafts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Innovations in Contemporary Crafts is a juried exhibition of San Francisco Bay Area artists. The show explores innovations in the traditional craft mediums of ceramics, wood, glass, metal, fiber, enamel, paper and jewelry. The jurors are Garry Knox Bennett and Nancy Selvin.

June 29th through August 21st

Artists’ reception Saturday, July 24, 3-5 pm

Richmond Art Center

2540 Barrett Ave.

Richmond, CA 94804

‘COMPOUNDING: ANNUAL GROUP EXHIBITION’

July 10th through August 8th

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 10th 6-9pm

The Compound Gallery

1167 65th st. Oakland,

CA 94608 510.817.4042

Purchase my work and support a good cause!

Meighan O’Toole, who writes the blog, ‘My love for you is a stampede of Horses‘ has organized a Gulf oil spill Fundraiser. 83 confirmed artists and print shops are donating one hundred percent of the proceeds of their work to benefit The Gulf Restoration Network.

Works range from $15 to $600, take a look! I have a ‘Hope Log’ available for $55. I have enclosed a picture!

Take My Class!

I am teaching at the ASUC Berkeley Art Studio. the Studio is a wonderful place to learn and get studio access! The

Figure in Clay: Self Portrait : This is a beginning clay class where we will use hand-building techniques to create busts and self portraits. We will use simple step-by-step processes to create more elaborate forms and achieve a human feel. We will look at the history of the figure in art as well as contemporary figurative sculpture for inspiration. Come, have fun, learn, and see the figure in a new way.

Wednesdays 6-8 pm, 6 weeks starting July 21
$140 / $125 ucb students

Innovations in Contemporary Crafts
A Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Crafts in the San Francisco Bay Area

Innovations in Contemporary Crafts is a juried exhibition of San Francisco Bay Area artists. The show explores innovations in the traditional craft mediums of ceramics, wood, glass, metal, fiber, enamel, paper and jewelry. With the new decade, we survey artists who are forward thinking in their approach to materials and application. This exhibition is open to San Francisco Bay Area artists who work in all craft mediums. The show will be featured in the Richmond Art Center’s spacious 6,000 square foot Main Gallery, showcasing each artist’s unique approach to their respective craft.

The Richmond Art Center was founded in 1936 and was originally named the Richmond Art Craft Center. It wasn’t until the early fifties when it moved into it’s current home, that it was re-named Richmond Art Center in order to encompass all of the artistic media that it served. This exhibition brings back the beloved Richmond Art Center’s juried Annual Designer Craftsman Exhibition which started in 1951 and ran for at least 25 years.

Jurors: Garry Knox Bennett & Nancy Selvin
Garry Knox Bennett is an internationally known furniture maker, woodworker, metalworker and artist known for his whimsical, inventive and unconventional uses of materials and designs. Born in Alameda, California, his long-established workshop and studio in Oakland.

Nancy Selvin is an independent studio artist living and working in Berkeley, California. She has taught for more than 30 years at colleges and workshops internationally, including a stint at her alma mater, UC Berkeley. Nancy studied with Ron Nagle and the late Peter Voulkos while earning her master’s degree at UC Berkeley. Among her impressive list of honors are two National Endowment Artist Fellowships, and in 2003 she was awarded a California Arts Council Fellowship.

June 29th through August 21st.
Reception for the artists: Saturday, July 24th from 3 to 5pm.

With Crystal Morey

This is a beginning clay class where we will use hand-building techniques to create figures that show gesture and emotion. We will use simple step-by-step processes to create more elaborate forms and achieve a human feel. We will look at the history of the figure in art as well as contemporary figurative sculpture for inspiration. Come, have fun, learn, and see the figure in a new way.

ASUC Berkeley Art Studio

Wednesdays 6-8 pm, 6 weeks starting June 2
$140 / $125 UCB students

Come Join us this Saturday evening for the re-grand opening of the Compound GAllery and the Swee(t)art Drawing Gallery. The entire space has been in a state of transformation for the last month and now has finally come together for this event!

I will be showing new ink drawings in the Swee(t) art Gallery along with other sculptors who draw! Lucien Shapiro, Bruk Dunbar, and Carrissa Bowman will also be showing new works.

Obi Kaufmann had some very thoughtful questions for me about how I work, and where my imagery comes from.

From Obi’s site:

Crystal Morey, the Record of the Maker

Crystal Morey’s strong yet delicate sculpture has only gotten more strong and more delicate as the years of gone on. As a fan of her work, I am thrilled to include her in the show this month at the Swee(t)Art Drawing Gallery. The show is calledProtoform and from her startlingly consitant and strong portfolio, the gallery will showcase her drawing, a mode of her work that she doesn’t regularly show. If you are a fan ofCrystal Morey’s Website than you do know her drawn work and if not, please visit us on the night of the reception, April 17th, 2010. I visited her new studio in the Compound’s new space on 65th in North Oakland and I asked her a couple of questions.

Her statement for the drawing show:

“In making the drawings for ‘Protoform’ I worked in an additive way. I collaged the drawings together by cutting out pieces and adding them for surface and texture.”

Obi: How did you come about to sculpture? Is it something you have always done, or were you a draw-er at first?

Crystal: I have been drawing for as long as I can remember. I grew up in the rural mountains of Northern California where I spent lots of time roaming the forests and building forts. In the evenings I would draw with my father, making elaborate stories about the animals and indigenous people that lived in the woods. This love for adventure and imagination fueled my desire to draw and has led to many other artistic passions.

I didn’t start sculpting until much later in life. Drawing is something that doesn’t require special equipment, only a surface and a tool to make marks. The way I work is no different, I have a surface and a tool to build with, the separation is in the process and the outcome. I think learning to draw first has only made my sculpture more informed, immediate, and inventive. Drawing and sculpting are both equally important to me. I have found that sculpting is more rewarding for me in its hands on visceral quality, it leaves a record of the maker that I haven’t been able to achieve through drawing.

Obi: I have noticed that your relationship to landscape, as a theme in your work is changing over the years. Am I right about this? Your figures exist in an environment now. Can you describe how that process came about and how you chose the imagery for the environment?

Crystal: I think my work has become less introspective in the past few years. For a long time I was very interested in emotion and focusing on the gesture, over exaggeration and animation in the body. I am still working with these ideas although in recent works I am looking at natural environments in relation to human emotion. I have always seen my figures in landscapes, although before, I only drew them. I am now making full environments, full narratives and landscapes.
The imagery for my landscapes are taken from objects, pictures, films, books, nature, and memory. I then reconstruct these images to make an environment that conveys the ideas and mood I want to show.

Obi: Sometimes I think your figures look like you. Is that right? Where do these people come from?

Crystal: Many people see the work as self-portrait, other people see the work first, and then on meeting me, can’t see the connection. For me, the figures don’t represent specific people, they represent feelings, situations, and states of being, and they are simply a vehicle to show an idea. I relate to humans and I am interested in both the relationships we have with each other and in nature.

03.22.10

Press Release: group-art exhibit

Protoform

Drawings by Sculptors

Artists in show

Carrissa Bowman

Brük Dunbar

Crystal Morey

Lucien Shapiro

Curator, Obi Kaufmann

The SWEE(t)ART Drawing Gallery

1167 65^th Street

Oakland, California

Show Runs April 17^th -May 23^rd, 2010

Opening Reception Saturday, April 17^th, 6-9pm

First Friday Reception Friday May 7^nd 7-10pm

Tea (Last Sunday of Show) Sunday April 16^th 3-6pm

www.oaklandsweetart.info

Swee(t)Art Drawing Gallery has moved and this is the opening show of 2010!

This show is based around sculptors and ceramicists’ drawn work as art in and of itself. The gathered roster includes emerging and established artists from a regional and national level who have built their careers on exploring their voice in three dimensions. This show explores their never before seen works at their creative genesis, as drawings. How does the sculptor relate to only two dimensions? Is their a tactile element that is maintained? How much of form is simply illusion.

Oakland curator Obi Kaufmann and artists/gallery owners Matt and Lena Reynoso continue their partnership with the side-project of the Compound Gallery, The Swee(t)Art Drawing Gallery. Now in its new location around the corner from its old spot, the Compound Gallery opens once again in April and is proud to host this unique Bay Area gallery.

Mission

The Drawing Gallery operates philosophically from a place near the origin of visual art. As a force in the world, Drawing separates humanity from all other terrestrial life-forms with its mysterious ability to transmit rudimentary information about beauty, mortality and emotive trans-generational divinations. Modern Art has subdivided itself into a million nodes of fashion and commodity and still there remains this mark-making impulse that ties us to the beginning of all art which begat then language: writing, theater, the visual arts, et al. The Drawing…the first beautiful word of the hand, the first dance, where the mind meets the eye and the creative spark is kindled and kept.

Swee(t)Art? Yes. It used to be a magazine,and then a website…now a gallery. Mixing both the Sweet and the Tart, Swee(t)Art has always been about the many flavors of contemporary Oakland. Although the gallery is committed to showcase regional and national art and the focus is on the local community, the scope of the work is not provincial and the themes, craftsmanship and presentation of all the high-concept shows at Swee(t)Art are of the highest aspiration in both presentation (of the individual) and cohesiveness (of the group).

CONTACT

OBI KAUFMANN

Phone 925-951-7501

Email: obikaufmann@msn.com

In my mind the perfect studio would be half way between a cabin and an elaborate fort or tree-house. It would be small in size and made with all kinds of precious, found materials like windows, doors, and woods of all shapes and sizes. This is what I would like to make, a magical, whimsical, shanty-cabin where I can make my work. I would also like to use the structure as a project space to show friends work or maybe have a small art or craft sales!

We shall see what I come up with! While I have been thinking, I have also been looking at Tumbleweeds Tiny Homes, you must take a look!

50 artists from around the world have created hundreds of works of art for this highly anticipated annual exhibition and sale. These artists were invited based on their unique artistic vision and contribution to urban/contemporary arts and culture. Each artist has submitted up to 10 works of original art, all affordably priced at $250 or less.

Exhibition & Sale Opens: First Friday, December 4, 2009
8pm til late, free and open to the public
On view through January 16, 2010

Here are some works I will have available!

1. “Morning, Keep The Streets Empty For Me”

Ceramic and Underglaze

$125

2009

2. “Forest Families III”

(Hand wing figure)

Ceramic and Underglaze

$125

2009

3. “Forest Families V”

(Grass chest)

Ceramic and Underglaze

$125

2009

4. ”Forest Families VIII”

(Hand body)

Ceramic and Underglaze

$175

2009

5. “Forest Families VIIII”

(Hand body)

Ceramic and Underglaze

$175

2009

6. “Our Spring Is Sweet Not Fleeting I”

Ceramic and Underglaze

$175

2009

7. “Our Spring Is Sweet Not Fleeting II”

Ceramic and Underglaze

$175

2009

8. “The Big Flight”

Ceramic and Underglaze

$195

2009

9. “Take Me Home Before The Storm”

Ceramic and Underglaze

$195

2009