Artist Reception: Saturday, December 2nd | 5pm–7pm

Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Lisa Bartleson entitled Full Bloom.

Lisa Bartleson's latest project, Full Bloom, sharpens her increasingly narrative abstraction with cool colors that highlight the interconnectedness of the personal to the universal. With an emphasis on the feminine form, Bartleson examines the circle, the symbolic womb and doorway to both cosmological order and empirical wisdom. Within her formal investigation, this shape is used as a symbol for what sustains us: intuition and memory. She bridges the personal with the historic, this time using the ancient signifier of sacred space from where everyone is born.

Inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe and Judy Chicago, Bartleson situates her work in a continuum of feminine thought and practice, without being overtly political. Through her concentration of form, Bartleson sees the circle as an abstract flower that symbolizes the quotidian yet complex cycle of birth, life, and death. She shows her expert skill as a colorist in her use of tones that remind the viewer of the genre's desire to investigate high and low, thereby bridging expressionism with pop art.

A doyen of minimalism, Bartleson unapologetically embraces an analysis of form to shape her own narrative as a woman and an artist. Her emergence as one of the Light and Space Movement's new generation is solidified through her mastery of Finish Fetish materials. In Full Bloom, she uses multiple layers of resin and pigment to convey depth through which she celebrates the round shape as object and metaphor.

Primal bio-resin houses extend the metaphor of how and where we bloom. These new dwellings glow with a rich and radiant light, evidence of the ancient metaphor of house as the space of beginnings and safety. Traditionally, houses offer sanctuary and Bartleson deftly creates objects that remind us that we are always agents of our own becoming.

In early 2016 Lisa Bartleson moved from Los Angeles to Petaluma, drawn to the city's diffused light, vast open space, and small town feel, reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest where she was born and raised. In 2018 the artist will exhibit her body of work Kindred at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California. Her work was also in the exhibition Work Over School: Art From The Margins of the Inside at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, which focused on artists who have developed great conceptual and technical skill through nontraditional means. Her work is in public and private collections throughout the US and Europe.