Rena Bransten Gallery

Spanning a variety of media – painting, photography, works on paper, and sculpture – this exhibition highlights how art is used as a tool for evocation. The artists included commune with past and future, often summoning spirits to the present through their powerful work.

A hit parade of hell, Waters’ photographic prints and sculptures use appropriated movie imagery that both mocks and embraces the extremes of the art world and show business all in one whoop of demented joy. Failed masculinity, anal trauma, Catholic rebellion, critical revenge, capital punishment, even children acting out a G-rated video version of the X-rated film “Pink Flamingos”. It’s all here, on the walls, on the floor like leftover storyboards and damaged movie props abandoned by a B-list publicist who fled the industry. Waters considers this a group exhibition with only one artist: himself.

Rena Bransten is pleased to present Folds, a solo exhibition of recent wood sculptures by Oakland-based artist Sam Perry. Inspired by the properties of fabric, the works on view explore how to express softness and suppleness through an inherently hard medium – a theme at the heart of Perry’s practice. These new works are a continued testament to Perry’s craftsmanship and intuition for his chosen medium, and his willingness to collaborate with his material while pushing at its boundaries. The heavier pieces included which embrace the solidity of wood still incorporate bends and folds, adding a touch of softness to an otherwise dense object. Other works are light and airy, lyrical and gestural. The contrast between these two lends a satisfying sense of balance to the exhibition. Sam Perry was born in Kailua, Hawai’i, where he spent weekends as a youth in his father’s canoe shop. Originally a ceramic artist, he received both his BFA (1986) and MFA (1990) from California College of Arts and Crafts. After graduating, he took a position as studio assistant to Viola Frey, which he maintained for nearly 20 years. His sculptures are included in the collections of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA, and the Runnymede Sculpture Farm, Woodside, CA. Follow the Curve, a short film about his work and practice, was released in the fall of 2022.

About the exhibition Taking the essay “Technology & Ethos, Vol. 2 Book of Life” by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) as a framework, Rodney Ewing and Nyame Brown created paintings, drawings, works on paper, and objects reflecting on and conceptualizing new technologies, ranging from mass communication to space travel, as they pertain to the specific needs of a Black diasporic community. This exhibition originated at the Art and Art History Gallery at Santa Clara University and was curated by Pancho Jiménez. 

Rena Bransten Gallery is pleased to present a selection of paintings from the last two decades by San Francisco based artist John Bankston. Deeply committed to expanding access to the Black imaginary, Bankston’s work provokes and entices as he suggests abstracted narratives through queer fantasy characters on their quests through the personified landscape of the Rainbow Forest.

Rena Bransten Gallery is pleased to present "reverberations," an exhibition of new work by San Francisco based artist Diane Andrews Hall. The paintings and works on paper included here are inspired by the artist’s immediate surroundings and are the culmination of countless hours spent lingering in the garden outside her studio. With light, movement, time, and natural phenomena as subjects, Andrews Hall pays homage to the beautiful complexity of the natural world, rendering birds and plant-life in exquisite detail, with an acute sense of wonderment. These new works, like the rest of Andrews Hall’s oeuvre, are defined by a high level of attentiveness which has always been at the core of her practice – a combination of meditative level focus, and dedication to her craft. Andrews Hall is driven by an infatuation with the constant evolution of nature – at once moving in cycles, yet always morphing. Her interest in marking the passage of time in her work is informed by her relationship to playing music; the layering of tempos and notes in musical compositions mirrors the layering of color and forms as they accumulate to form a painting. In this exhibition, the viewer is invited to marvel at the wonder of the natural world with ample time for rest and revery. Diane Andrews Hall received her MFA in 1969 from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore where she studied with Grace Hartigan. She was a founding member, along with husband Doug Hall and Jody Procter, of the San Francisco based multi-media art collective T.R. Uthco, active during the 1970s. In the late 1970s a desire to reconnect with the materiality of art making urged her back to painting and drawing, which she has continued ever since. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally over the last several decades at institutions including the Berkeley Art Museum, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Capp Street Project, San Francisco, CA; Russian Museum, Leningrad, U.S.S.R; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections. She currently lives and works in San Francisco.