WHERE ART INSPIRES CONNECTION
The Poetry of Wood
featuring work by
Alex Garcia
Catherine Mackey
Sept 7 - Oct 27, 2024
TINT is pleased to announce “The Poetry of Wood,” featuring works by Alex Garcia and Catherine Mackey. Both artists explore the inherent beauty in wood in all of its stages -- from shouldering structures to piles of debris. Mackey’s barn paintings highlight the beautiful chaos of the “pile,” but also the variegated patterns and colors created by re-use and weathering on the siding of barns not yet fallen. Garcia salvages wood from similarly decrepit barns and re-uses them to create three-dimensional works that celebrate all facets of the wood, in texture and color. Underlying both artists’ work is an ode to the history of the structures and the lives of the people connected with them.
Mackey’s current body of work focuses on barns in California, where the proximity to San Francisco allows her to revisit favorite structures every year to witness the movement of their collapse as a stop-motion animation. Each year, the architectural framework is diminished, and the fallen siding and structural elements lie scattered on the ground. To Mackey, the pile of fallen wood is as beautiful as the remaining structure.
In Mackey’s hands, these barns come to life. They are exhausted structures, metamorphosing into skeletons surrounded by their scattered memories. These old, weathered pieces of hand-hewn wood, with their slots and peg holes, have worked for years as an architectural team to create shelter and protection for crops and livestock. Now abandoned due to agricultural processes that have rendered them obsolete, these rural wooden structures succumb to the forces of nature and decay. Their physical decline is gradual, and the slow movement of collapse has a graceful beauty as roofs give way, walls detach and tumble, and bent frames are exposed in beautiful transparency.
The palpable sadness of lost livelihoods emerges through Mackey’s signature use of old street posters beneath and amongst the painted surfaces. These printed announcements of entertainments, events, and products, which come from walls of several different countries, remind the viewer that, over the years, people have used these places - not specific individuals but humans, whose needs and desires are essentially the same everywhere.
Similarly, Garcia’s works celebrate the inherent beauty in old wood, and tell the story of the structures and the lives behind them. Several of Garcia’s works in this exhibition are made from salvaged wood from the Straus Family Ranch in West Marin. The Straus Family Ranch was founded in 1941 by the early environmentalists Ellen and Bill Straus. Sadly, by 2013, the state of the ranch had deteriorated. Ellen and Bill had died, and their three children were no longer living there. The beautiful homestead was crumbling apart: the house was severely run down, the barn falling down and the land poorly managed. Faced with the very real possibility of losing the ranch, the children came together to save their family farm.[1] In 2017, Garcia became involved in rebuilding the barn as part of the rehabilitation of these historic buildings. This was a project in which Garcia was able to use both his skills as an architect and artist. The wood that was unable to be incorporated into the new structure did not go to waste. Garcia breathed new life into the decaying wood by turning it into art.
[1] See https://www.straushomeranch.com/about-our-family
