Reception: July 19th | 4pm-7pm

Anglim Gilbert Gallery is pleased to present Summer Sessions, a two-part series of exhibitions that will feature the work of six emerging Bay Area artists, each of whom will be showing at the gallery for the first time. The series is conceived as an homage to the gallery’s historic Introductions program, which provided many now established Bay Area artists with their first formal exhibition opportunities.

The Lands Beyond, part one of Summer Sessions, features textiles, paintings, and ceramics by Ricki Dwyer, Eli Thorne, and Maryam Yousif. Often verging on the fantastical and anthropomorphic, the artists’ works address the mythical and social forces that shape self-presentation and personal narratives.

Ricki Dwyer’s textile-based installations and works on paper present cloth and the body as analogues. Dwyer’s practice is grounded in an understanding of cloth as a social signifier with nearly universal cultural resonance. The act of weaving is entwined with the progression of human history and plays a role in countless myths and origin stories. How we utilize and contextualize woven material — as a tool, decorative object, or garment — is a metaphor for how we choose to present ourselves to others. Personal adornments, then, become a means to communicate and perform our individual identities.

Eli Thorne’s lovingly unruly oil paintings function as a portal into fantastical internal landscapes. Part allegory, part autobiography, he creates emotive narratives that draw upon his lived experience as a trans man. Superimposing a host of otherworldly figures and emblems against a backdrop of conflated scenes from the Santa Cruz mountains and the California desert, Thorne crafts a self-contained visual language. Cherubs, tigers, snakes, and a looming, bearded oracle act as powerful guides through his sprawling environments — negotiating and reconciling with masculinity along the way.

Maryam Yousif’s ceramic vessels, pots, and figures pay homage to the women of Iraqi folklore and their contemporaries. Utilizing anthropomorphized forms that hearken back to the artistic traditions of Assyria and Mesopotamia, Yousif’s work melds the florid, stylistic quirks of her ancestors with imagery culled from American and Iraqi pop culture. Underpinning her practice is a sense of genuine resourcefulness — Yousif attributes much of her artistic approach to her mother’s pursuit of creative fulfillment in the face of cultural and socioeconomic limitations she faced as a woman in 1970s Iraq. By embodying both mythical and historical figures, such as Shamiram and Puabi, Yousif creates a contemporary narrative that celebrates both the romance and resilience of the global Iraqi community.