Green Chalk Contemporary is calling its first show of the year the Annual Brilliant Art Show, which sounds a little presumptuous. But thanks to a super-team of contemporary artists from the Bay Area, Washington D.C., Japan and Monterey County, it rings right.
It also features two artists who haven’t shown locally. One of them is Mai Ryuno. She created an installation that consisted of friends of hers eating a catered dinner at the SFMOMA’s Artists Gallery at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center, complete with waiter service, wine and pasta.
For her Green Chalk debut, Ryuno, a recent Monterey transplant, brings Dancing with Shadows, “abstract images of airplanes as photograms, woodblock prints and hundreds of tiny origami paper airplanes,” per the gallery statement.
The other featured artist is Enid Baxter Ryce (note – she’s my wife), who’s best known locally as the chair of CSUMB’s Cinematic Arts film department and the founder of the Monterey Bay Film Society. But her work has shown at the Smithsonian, the Getty, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and elsewhere.
But this will be her first local show. The gallery’s statement says her works are inspired by “rural, roadside signs [that] fluctuate between whimsy, longing and impossible architectures.”
Other artists include Lorenz Sonnerman, represented by prints that conjure the trippy organic curves of Yellow Submarine and the inventiveness of Rube Goldberg. Sharron Anholt’s primordially simple paintings suggest profound images, like “Tanjuvar,” a monolithic silhouette of black paint on a dusky background that looks like the old Indian temple of Thanjavur.
The entirety of the roster includes Seema Christie, Jerry Takigawa, Lisa Solomon, Tamiko Kawata, Rebecca Clark, Farley Gwazda, Francie Hester, Anne Marchand, Indira Morre, Noriyuki Sekiguchi and Richard Whittaker.
There are not a lot of venues showing serious contemporary artists in Monterey County, so all these voices and visions jammed into the stark rectangular space of Green Chalk should act like an amplifier blasting sounds in an otherwise sleepy neighborhood. Or like a high-wattage lantern illuminating the landscape – which makes “brilliant” an appropriate adjective.
ANNUAL BRILLIANT ART SHOW opens 6-8pm Saturday, Jan. 4, at Green Chalk Contemporary, 616 Lighthouse Ave., New Monterey. Free to attend. Greenchalkcontemporary.blogspot.com