Dana DeKalb, Utopia, acrylic on canvas 30” x 30"
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First In ShowSarah Bass for Midbrow, January 21, 2025
Sweet and disarming, the coy smiles and friendly but frequently distant eyes that greet viewers in Marsha Balian’s body of work stare out from their small wooden panels. With their mismatched features and improbable bodies, born of decades of collected ephemera, it is easy—and in fact important— to project a narrative of your own onto the figures. Balian’s “hope is that the viewer can access whatever stories it conjures for them,” and “Autofiction,” on view now at Transmission Gallery, offers a multitude of opportunities for just that sort of storytelling.
Though titled, and featuring a hefty portion of portraiture-focused works, Balian left the exhibit intentionally vague, with no “specific theme,” just the goal of experimentation, to “let the work tell me where it wanted to go.” Off it went. Read More... |
Dana DeKalb, Utopia, acrylic on canvas 30” x 30"
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As ideas settle and paint dries, Dana DeKalb’s
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Livia Stein, Medley (2022). Mixed media on paper
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In order to feel alive: The paintings of Livia Stei
Mary Corbin for 48 Hills, May 11, 2023
The job of an artist, according to Livia Stein, is to translate thoughts and feelings into a visual language that others might appreciate. Her mission is to contribute something to the world that enhances our lives.
“I make art because it is what I do best. Because I have to, in order to feel alive. There is no life without art. Someone said that art is a window to the soul. I believe that. Without art, a culture withers and dies,” Stein told 48hills. Her work is whimsical, and while sometimes irreverent, it’s mostly optimistic. Stein is inspired by many things; history, literature, folk art, and music, among them. Travel, often to India over the past 20 years, has been a muse as well. read more... |
Dave Yoas, Same As It Ever Was, cut tin collage, 30” x 30
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Tin man from El Sobrante:
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Anthony Riggs at Transmission Gallery
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Colored mud and ancient magic:
artist Anthony Riggs’ dualities of paint. Mary Corbin for 48 Hills, April 19, 2023 The job of an artist, according to Livia Stein, is to translate thoughts and feelings into a visual language that others might appreciate. Her mission is to contribute something to the world that enhances our lives.
“I make art because it is what I do best. Because I have to, in order to feel alive. There is no life without art. Someone said that art is a window to the soul. I believe that. Without art, a culture withers and dies,” Stein told 48hills. Her work is whimsical, and while sometimes irreverent, it’s mostly optimistic. Stein is inspired by many things; history, literature, folk art, and music, among them. Travel, often to India over the past 20 years, has been a muse as well. read more... |
Dana DeKalb, Utopia, acrylic on canvas 30” x 30"
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Within wood panels, Marsha Balian weaves
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by Andrew McAleavey, JULY 21, 2022
“Fever Dream” is a deeply ironic descriptor of Karl X. Hauser’s work. The term connotes illness, psychosis; it’s rife with otherness. In lucid moments, we slough off such things, relegating them to the deepest recesses of our subconscious. Calling this work a fever dream, invoking otherness, risks letting the viewer off the hook too easily – Hauser’s work is deeply relatable, taking on our world in skewered perspective with raw honesty and emotional range. Yet it’s that very sense of otherness, that playful, otherworldly audacity in his work, that lets him get away with it all.
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Karl X. Hauser, fever dream no. 5
styrofoam, wire, string, epoxy resin / 12 x 14 x 12 inches |
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Visual Art Source Review:
Daniel McClain, and Claudia Tarantino: “Found Object Facsimile” by DeWitt Cheng Continuing through July 17, 2022 The puritanical taboo against mimesis, or imitation, is thankfully no longer in fashion in the art world. Even at the height of The Age of Theory it made no more sense than the proscriptions against figurative art in the Jewish, Islamic, or Protestant Reformation traditions. As Willem de Kooning said to Philip Guston after leaving a reception of uninteresting art, “We don’t have to think about that anymore.” Actually, the imitation of (and improvement on) observed reality is both an ancient and magical property of art. Three Bay Area artists who employ illusionism to powerful effect are featured in “Found Object Facsimile.” Daniel McClain’s mixed-media drawings on deconstructed books, Claudia Tarantino’s exquisite sculptural still lifes in porcelain, and Bill Abright’s Surrealist ceramic/mixed media birds not only fool the eye with their brilliantly deceptive evocations of found materials, but also delight us with their wit and charm. Trompe-l’oeil, meet trompe-l’esprit. Fool the eye, trick the brain, but benignly so. |
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Robin Bernstein, “The Arc of History”
DeWitt Cheng for Democracy Chain, May 2022 A good candidate for such a revival was Robin Bernstein’s recent “Beauty and Terror” exhibition (at Transmission Gallery in Oakland in 2019). The show was a magnificent commemoration of the Holocaust, exhaustively researched, visually compelling and emotionally cathartic. The eighteen “string paintings” — eighteen will be the final number of pieces in the series, symbolizing ‘life’ in Jewish numerology — are affecting on several levels: as a pure aesthetic experience; as an intellectual and emotional catharsis; and as a demand that such horrors never recur. Bernstein’s deep dive into history informs her resplendent commemorative plaques, replete with putti, banner inscriptions, and simulated Baroque frames. They rescue history from oblivion. read more...
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Robin Bernstein, “Lorenzo's Primo,” 2019, string and wax on wood
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Visual Art Source
Garry Knox Bennett Transmission Gallery, Oakland, California Review by DeWitt Cheng “Illumination: Time, Containment and Bling” includes twenty-three table lamps, boxes and clocks by Garry Knox Bennett, the legendary Bay Area artist and craftsman who is renowned for chairs, tables, sideboards, desks and jewelry. Several pieces installed in a gallery vitrine match exquisite craftsmanship with Dadaist/Funk humor and wit. If the Bauhaus, that German academy of modernist style, was originally intended to marry traditional guild-based craftsmanship with modern technology and a machine esthetic, Bennett can be said to embody its beau idéal.
Read more... https://www.visualartsource.com/index.php?page=editorial&pcID=27&aID=5749
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October 23 - November 27, 2021
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East Bay Express: Pick of the Week
Livia Stein There are minimalists and then there are maximalists, like the East Bay’s Livia Stein, who has created an imaginary world that is partly surrealist, partly expressionist, and always vividly colorful, engaging, weird and inexplicably cheerful. The artist is back at Transmission with more than 50 oil paintings on canvas and mixed-media works on paper, in a show entitled Almost Human, which befits her universe of animal-people hybrids, some suggestive of puppets or kachina dolls, caught in enigmatic encounters. “Two Beasts” depicts the meeting of two parrot-beaked bipeds, with one bowing to the other. “Two Creatures,” by contrast, has its couple standing back to back, as if sulking. In “Caged,” a crowned and gowned woman with a long proboscis stands beside a metal cage from which two bizarre creatures emerge. A tall masked figure holds her leashed airborne pet in “Black Bird Flies,” while a round-bodied doll bobs disconsolately in the water in “Figure in Pink.” — DeWitt Cheng East Bay Express, 2/26/20. Funny Strange |
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East Bay Express: Pick of the Week
Karl X. Hauser at Transmission Gallery Monsters + Friends is a collection of the recent work of sculptor Karl X. Hauser, all made since his solo show two years ago, Failed Repression: I Tried to Make This Pleasant. The funny and strange denizens of his carnivalesque imagination — sculptures in cast aluminum, cast bronze, kiln-formed glass, and drawings in graphite, watercolor and crayon — fill the gallery, making for a total environment of cheerfully absurd grotesquerie. “Drawing lets me have fluid thoughts, internal dialogues, and teaches me fearlessness,” he said. “The drawings inject characters and sets into my sculpture, which also incorporates castings of found materials, cut up and reassembled.” Hauser’s makeshift brainchildren, pieced-together scraps brought to life — e.g., The Wild Ride, The Wrestler, Charming Personages, and The Academy in Peril — may evoke cartoons and the bizarre “personages” of Jean Dubuffet, as well as a certain Karloffian creature assembled from available materials. Artist talk and closing reception, January 25. 2-4 p.m. — DeWitt Cheng January 17, 2020 |
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Photo by DeWitt Cheng: M. Louise Stanley, Bad Girl
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EastBay Express
Jocoseriosity First Thursday-Saturday of every month, 12-6 p.m. Continues through Sept. 21 Voltaire once wrote that tragedy and comedy should never mix; it was one of his few errors, for what is Candide but an ironic look at life’s tribulations? M. Louise Stanley and Diana Krevsky take humorous aim at new follies — same as the old follies. Stanley’s nine paintings on paper in No Laughing Matter feature her art-history-inflected satires on contemporary life: “Bad Girl” depicts a surly, spit-curled temptress nursing and drink and a smoke in a bar, while “Suffer the Little Children” shows a painted sculpture of a priest and two little boys — a plaster saint, apparently. Also included: protest signs painted by Stanley and friends. Krevsky’s ten assemblages and acrylics on sculptured (upholstered?) canvas in Show and Tell parody art history (“SaraList Painting”), art as business (“Pretty As A Picture”), media sensationalism (“Terror and Horror”) and even the amorous dalliances of revolutionaries (the Magrittean masked couple in “Zapatista Romance”). — DeWitt Cheng September 4, 2019 |
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Visual Art Source
pick of the week September 6, 2019 Bay Area artists M. Louise Stanley and Diana Krevsky perform a pro bono publico service with their humorous, trenchant looks at the American scene, Anno domini 2019. Stanley’s nine paintings on paper in “No Laughing Matter” examine contemporary follies and foibles through the lens of art and art history, a product of many trips to European museums and hours spent sketching from the Old Masters. Stanley wreaks gentle feminist vengeance on the abuses of power wrought by the unfair sex. “Bad Girl” depicts a surly, spit-curled temptress nursing a drink and a smoke in a bar, glowering at the disapproving saints set around her in golden rondels. A trio of lawyers, in “Just-Us Served,” take oaths on a stack of legal books, while a statue of Justice lifts her blindfold in alarm. “Suffer the Little Children” depicts the painted sculpture of a priest and two prepubescent boys, as observed by a skeptical tourist. Also included are handmade protest signs (e.g., “Keep Your Laws Off My Body!” with pugnacious fallopian tubes) painted by Stanley & friends. Krevsky’s ten assemblages and acrylics in “Show and Tell” are bas reliefs on upholstered canvas that likewise turn a gimlet eye on art and politics. “SaraList Painting” is a miniature exhibition of several paintings in a variety of styles, including: a faux framed booklet cover on Walter T. Fosterism, as explained in “How to Paint Red Barns”; a magazine clipping quoting the artist Sara List (“I just let the paint do what it wants to do.”); and a reproduction of a Chronic News review written by one Thomas Alldark. Krevsky mocks art sales infected by show business and marketing strategies in “Pretty as A Picture,” with its scantily clad blonde-bimbo model. Media sensationalism is the target of “Terror and Horror,” with its newspaper front page if-it-bleeds-it-leads headlines juxtaposed with back-page women’s underwear ads. Utopian revolution is not spared, as in “Zapatista Romance,” with its masked couple in profile, a Renaissance cameo via Magritte. -DeWitt Cheng, August, 2019 |
Diana Krevsky, Pretty as a Picture, detail
Diana Krevsky, Zapatista Romance
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Mac Mechem, The Russian Connection
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EastBay Express
Mac Mechem and Robin Bernstein at Transmission Gallery Politics is back in art, bigly, these days (despite the bizarre mural censorship flap in San Francisco). Two artists who excel at infusing social commentary with aesthetic vision are Mac Mechem and Robin Bernstein. Mechem’s deiciously satirical oil paintings and photocollages in The Russian Connection take aim at the insanities and inanities of the Trump regime. A blond manchild beams at Daddy Vlad; a drunken swell gropes a statue of blind Justice; a cardinal fondles nubile Teletubbies; moguls achieve their dream of universal dirty energy. Bernstein’s powerful relief paintings of string and wax on wood in Beauty and Terror simulate Baroque commemorative decorations, but what deeds (read the handout) they celebrate! Hamburg’s Police Battalion 101, a death squad composed of superannuated patriots; the 50,000 Jews of Isai, Romania, nearly exterminated in a pogrom; the “Yids of the city of Kiev,” machine-gunned into a mass grave at Babi Yar. History isn’t history. — DeWitt Cheng June, 2019 |
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Visual Art Source
TRUMP CARD: at Transmission Gallery Excerpt: "And so now is assembled “Trump Card,” an exemplary demonstration of First Amendment freedom of expression that brings together Enrique Chagoya, Travis Somerville and emerging artists Patrick Martinez and Mac Mechem." Review by DeWitt Cheng July, 2018 |
Mac Mechem, Who's the Fairest of US All
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Anthony Riggs, Star Planter
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Oakland Magazine
Fall Arts Guide: THE TRIUMPH OF IRREVERSIBLE TIME: ANTHONY RIGGS by DeWitt Cheng September 2016 |
Visual Art Source
Livia Stein: at Transmission Gallery
by Cherie Louise Turner
March 19, 2016
Oakland Art Enthusiast
Photo Feature: Erik Parra "each devil his own" at Transmission Gallery
January 6, 2016
Photo Feature: Erik Parra "each devil his own" at Transmission Gallery
January 6, 2016
Bay Area A-List
2014 Finalist (top 5): Best Art Gallery
2014 Finalist (top 5): Best Art Gallery
The Bold Italic
"Rain Cancels Oakland First Fridays Tonight, Art Murmur is Still On"
By Sarah Han
February 7, 2014
"Rain Cancels Oakland First Fridays Tonight, Art Murmur is Still On"
By Sarah Han
February 7, 2014
Installation of Melissa Pokorny's "Sirens" by ShawTecs Fine Art Installations
Panel Discussion on Cautionary Tales in Art and Literature
Unrestricted: Politics and Art, BP Mandala, Jeremiah Jenkins
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TRANSMISSION GALLERY
OAKLAND 770 West Grand Ave., Suite A, Oakland, CA 94612 Open Thurs-Sat, 12 to 5 pm till 8 pm on the first Friday of the month and by appointment Accessibility: This a 2nd floor art gallery, accessible by stairs. |
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