Past Exhibitions

Linda Pedersen (1947 – 2018) was a long time and beloved member of San Francisco’s Street Artist Community, who passed away in August 2018. Linda Pedersen was born in Salem, Oregon and at an early age relocated to Novato, CA. Pedersen was an active artist and worked across a variety of disciplines including painting, jewelry, poetry, and linocut printing.

Pedersen was adept at creating limited edition linoleum reduction cut block prints, a multi-colored print made with the use of a single block. The process involves a series of progressive carvings, inkings, and printings that allow an image to slowly emerge, while the use also destroys the actual block. Pedersen’s prints employ painstaking detail articulating the hairs of a rambutan fruit or the papery skin of an onion in her still life work. This exhibition is in honor of Linda Pedersen’s impact on her community and her generosity.

Bay Area photographer Youngsuk Suh spent eight years working on his photo-based series, Wildfires. Far from documentary shots, Suh’s lush and languid images take the viewer from the comfortable position of being just out of the fire’s path, to standing within feet of the source. The artist exploits these positions of perspective to play on natural human feelings of both compulsion to and fear of nature. This “anxious desire” is the primary focus of his photographs.

Although they are the output of a destructive force, smoke and haze are irresistibly beautiful. Suh takes full advantage of this romantic attraction by emphasizing ash-filled rosy skies and billowing white plumes. The dramatic nature of Suh’s photographs lies in a tense and eerie stillness captured on the fringes of Northern California’s most devastating fires, after the flames have subsided or in anticipation of its potential arrival. Suh elegantly communicates the balance between the tranquility of the moment and what is on the horizon.  

Nasim Moghadam’s work explores the limitations and restrictions placed on women and their bodies. In her series Black, time images capture the artist’s hair as she gently sways back and forth. For Moghadam, hair is a constant physical reminder of femininity and the limits of the agency of the female body within culture, specifically Middle Eastern culture. In Black, the act of Moghadam using her own body and hair is an expression against the restrictive traditions she has grown up in and her hair serves as a source of power and a demonstration of defiance. For Moghadam, this form of self-portraiture is a means of building solidarity with other women, and showing others both inside and outside her culture what it means to be a woman. In Moghadam’s work this act of reclamation finds inspiration in the efforts of women worldwide who are defending their basic, undeniable rights.