OPENING RECEPTION: 1st THURSDAY, AUGUST 3rd | FROM 5-8pm
Sullivan Goss is excited to announce its second solo exhibition for Holli Harmon, a Santa Barbara based artist known for her embrace of history and mythology as well as her love of novel processes and media.
This exhibition is a feast for the senses. An impressive group of 89 paintings of clouds rendered onto vintage silver tableware will take over the walls of one of the gallery’s spaces. The accumulation of clouds from sunny to stormy and everything in between creates a conversation about water, where it comes from and how it works in relation to the food we grow that eventually ends up on our tables.
Along with the clouds is a series of paintings done on the pages of a farmer’s almanac from the 1800s - one for each month of the year charting the individual seasons and cycles of farming. Almanacs were used by farms for centuries before the development of corporate farming and technologies to maximize agricultural yields. In the words of the artist, “This series is shaped by my time as resident artist on the White Buffalo Land Trust's Jalama Canyon Ranch. The organization practices and fosters regenerative farming methods, many of which can be traced to practices before the advent of corporate farming.”
Rounding out the exhibition is a quartet of oil paintings depicting clouds again, but with the artist imagining what the opposite of a cloud might be. All soft swirls and curves in nature, she has re-imagined clouds as cubes by abstracting a shape shifting form to lines and angles, each representing one of Goethe's cloud poems: Nimbus, Cirrus, Stratus, and Cumulus.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Holli Harmon is a California printmaker and painter. She is the first artist in residence for the White Buffalo Land Trust. She was part of The River’s Journey project to document the Santa Ynez River that traveled to museums and galleries. Her work resides in many public and private collections throughout the country.
TWELVE GOUACHE PAINTINGS ON FABRIANO WATERCOLOR PAPER may be Holli Harmon’s crown jewel. Each one features a month of the year reproduced from an 1866 Farmer’s Almanac, when hand labor began to be replaced with machine farming. Each piece, inspired by her sketchbook, represents a month of the year at the Jalama Canyon Ranch, floating over deep blue cyanotype prints made using autochthonous vegetation.
Two shows open July 28 at Sullivan Goss: 1) Holli Harmon’s To Feast on Clouds: “An impressive group of 89 paintings of clouds rendered onto vintage tableware will take over the walls of one of the gallery’s spaces. The accumulation of clouds from sunny to stormy and everything in between creates a conversation about water, where it comes from and how it works in relation to the food we grow that eventually ends up on our tables.”
Nicole Strasburg’s Surfacing: “Long associated with 12 x 12 inch paintings on birch panels that seem to float away from the white walls of the gallery, the artist has, in the last two years, adopted a slightly larger square format of 14 x 14 inch panels with beautifully-finished wood sides. Impressive suites of paintings in both formats can be seen and purchased in this special exhibition. They will be joined by a focused presentation of larger paintings that revel in the endless forms and colors offered by those places where ocean, sky, and land meet.”
