WHERE ART INSPIRES CONNECTION
Lay Bare
featuring work by
Elana Bober
Iris Rountree
April 14, 2022 - June 3, 2022
TINT Gallery is pleased to announce “Lay Bare,” featuring works by Elana Bober and Iris Rountree.
The last couple of years have forced many of us to look inward, to figure out what matters, to confront our anxieties. Artists Elana Bober and Iris Rountree have done just that through their new body of work on display at TINT Gallery. What results is art that strips away all pretense, that asks what happens when we lay bare our deepest thoughts, what happens when the materials we use reveal what is at the core of the natural world that surrounds us.
Both Rountree and Bober are inspired by their environs in Northern California. Rountree makes her own paper, incorporating plants she collects along the Russian River, at farms, along roadsides, and in yards. Grasses, flowers, fennel, lavender, various cover crops, and dried leaves create color gradients in Rountree’s handmade paper, ranging from light neutrals of the dryer materials to richer greens or pinks from wildflowers. During the pandemic, the continued drought in California became even more noticeable as the trees on the hills began to look strained. Rountree felt compelled to collect plants that caught her eye, finding a need to capture the colors and textures of the affected landscape, to acknowledge the results of climate change.
Bober similarly infuses her work with the natural world. Deep into the pandemic, Bober began sneaking away alone to spend time along the Northern California coast. There, she would hike and stare into the glory of the tide pools. Deep in the natural world, Bober could regroup and recenter. When the tide is low, a hidden world is revealed, a magical world that sparks Bober’s imagination. The locations she spent time at are depicted in loose watercolor: sky, rocks, seabed. Characters emerge, anthropomorphized with tales of their own making, inspired by the movement of the tides.
Rountree and Bober use repetition and patterns in the artmaking process and in the imagery in their work as a means of working through their anxieties. Through her art, Bober escapes her covid fears, the difficult challenges of young kids at home, and the dark space in her mind that was growing murkier and murkier. Bober use symbols over and over again, configuring them into different narratives. The graphic lines in her work are repetitive, meditative, slow, deliberate, and precise.
For Rountree, the process of making paper and creating repetitive forms helps her stay present in her physical surroundings and eases her anxieties about our changing climate. The ebbs and flows of weather and drought throughout the years have always been constant, but we live in a time where extreme weather patterns are becoming more normal and the future of our biomes is uncertain. Rountree turns her handmade paper into sculptural works, mimicking natural forms such as petals, cells, coral, rain, leaves, bubbles, or snow.
Bober’s and Rountree’s artworks encourage us to take time to be still, to remind us of nature’s wonders, to enjoy the plants, flowers, rivers, trees, tides that are all around us, here, in this moment.