Exhibition
2 x 2 Solos is a series of solo exhibitions featuring new work commissioned from four accomplished emerging artists based in the Oakland/Bay Area. The program recognizes artistic excellence and supports the freedom to create challenging and noncommercial work.
Visual Arts Funding provided by:
   
2 x 2 Solos: Michelle Blade
Curated by Jackie Im
March 8 - April 8, 2011
Artists Reception: March 10, 6 - 8 PM
Oakland-based artist Michelle Blade creates paintings that push the medium into the realm of sculpture and social environments. Influenced by anthropology, philosophy and nature, Blade's paintings reflect on the mystical and the spiritual. For her first solo exhibition at Pro Arts, Blade brings together sculptural paintings, photography and projections to create a ghostly environment, using a variety of materials including translucent Dura-lar to highlight her works' other-worldly appearance. Bringing to mind the work of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and Romanticism, the resulting installation is a meditation on the mysteries within dualities, exploring the real and unreal, light and dark, and the natural and man made.
2 x 2 Solos: Michelle Blade
Women's Cancer Resource Center of Oakland
5741 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, CA
May 25 - June 10, 2011
In partnership with the Women's Cancer Resource Center of Oakland.
Michelle Blade works in Oakland where she directs Sight School, an alternative artist run storefront. She received her MFA in studio art from California College of the Arts. Her work has been featured at Triple Base, Jack Hanley, and David Cunningham Projects, San Francisco; the San Jose ICA, Carl Berg Gallery and Broad Art Center, Los Angeles; Space 1026, Philadelphia; Union Gallery, London; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stüttgart. She is a 2007 recipient of the Murphy-Cadogan Fellowship and recent SFMOMA SECA finalist.
Jackie Im is an independent writer and curator based in Oakland. She received her BA in Art History from Mills College and her MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts. She has curated exhibitions at the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art and the Mills College Art Museum. She currently is a curator and co-administrator of MacArthur B Arthur, a gallery and project space in Oakland.
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2 x 2 Solos: Taro Hattori
March 8 - April 8, 2011
Artists Reception: March 10, 6 - 8 PM
Oakland-based artist Taro Hattori's immersive installations deconstruct social systems that impose control. His current project at Pro Arts, commissioned as part of the 2 x 2 Solos program, addresses themes of confinement, labor and immigration through the construction of a series of walled structures and their subsequent dismantling by day laborers. The exhibition features structural remnants and video documentation of the performance.
This project is a continuation of Hattori's ongoing investigation into contradictory ideas that have found an untenable equilibrium in society. By connecting psychological processes and materials, the artist presents a stage on which relationships and affiliations are readdressed.
2 x 2 Solos: Taro Hattori
Window Installation, on view 24-hours a day
1623 Broadway & 1620 Telegraph, Oakland, CA
May 30 - June 10, 2011
In partnership with the Downtown Business Association
Taro Hattori is a Japanese-born installation artist based in Oakland, CA. His work has been exhibited at numerous venues including Black Square Gallery in Miami; Swarm Gallery, Oakland; Contemporary Art Gallery in Opole, Poland; LMAN Gallery, Los Angeles; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and Ssamzie Space, Seoul. He received his M.F.A in Time Arts/Video from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA in Clinical Psychology from Sophia University, Tokyo. He is currently teaching at Stanford University and California College of the Arts.
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2 x 2 Solos: Chris Fraser
Curated by Xiaoyu Weng
January 25 - February 25, 2011
Artists' Reception: February 4, 6 pm
Oakland-based artist Chris Fraser creates large-scale installations that explore visible light's relationship to image making. Informed by optical devices from the early nineteenth century, his work brings attention to the way in which artists not only create images but also impose rules for how their work is to be seen. For his first solo exhibition at Pro Arts, Fraser brings together videos, pinhole photographs, and a darkened room in which changing stripes of color correspond to the ambient light in the surrounding gallery. The common element uniting all three groupings is an investigation of the physical body's role in constructing images from light.
2 x 2 Solos: Chris Fraser
One-night Event Installation
5th Annual Oakland Indie Awards
Kaiser Center, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA
May 13, 2011
In partnership with Oakland Indie Awards and One PacificCoast Bank & Foundation.
Chris Fraser received his BA in history from the University of California, Davis and his MFA in studio art from Mills College. He is a recipient of the Jay DeFeo Prize, is currently a graduate fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and will be featured in Bay Area Now 6 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Xiaoyu Weng is an independent writer and curator based in San Francisco. She received her MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts, is the inaugural 101 Curatorial Fellow at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and currently directs the Asian Contemporary Arts Consortium in San Francisco.
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2 x 2 Solos: Weston Teruya
Curated by Michelle Mansour
January 25 - February 25, 2011
Artists' Reception: February 4, 6 pm
Berkeley-based artist Weston Teruya uses paper to create intricate sculptural installations inspired by built environments. For his first solo exhibition at Pro Arts, Teruya investigates a specific Los Angeles location in which a juvenile hall is surrounded by a public golf course. Working from research documents, photographs, maps, and city plans, the artist has reinterpreted the site, arranging the objects and buildings to draw attention to their coded relationships. The resulting installation is both an acute investigation of relational dynamics and a quiet critique of urban transitional space.
2 x 2 Solos: Weston Teruya
One-night Event Screening and Installation
First Congregational Church of Oakland
2501 Harrison Street, Oakland, CA
May 20, 2011
In partnership with the Radical Resilience Institute.
Weston Teruya was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai'i and received an MFA in Painting and Drawing and MA in Visual & Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. He is a the recipient of a 2009 Artadia grant and has exhibited artwork at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Intersection for the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Southern Exposure, and the de Saissett Museum. His work is featured in the upcoming Bay Area Now 6 exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Michelle Mansour is an artist, educator, curator, and the current Executive Director of the arts non-profit Root Division. She received her MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and co-curated the 2009 exhibition Metaphysical Abstraction: Contemporary Approaches to Spiritual Content at Berkeley Art Center.
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About 2 x 2 Solos
2 x 2 Solos provides a platform for cutting-edge, risk-taking art and situates artists in a critical contemporary art context. The program is in progress and will feature additional exhibition of commissioned works in off-site locations. Supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 2 x 2 Solos engages multiple layers of the region's arts ecology by providing institutional and monetary support for artists, curators, and writers in the Oakland/Bay Area.
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