Our annual Valley Focus exhibition is an opportunity to highlight the very best work being created in and about our region. For the past 10 years we have honored artists through solo retrospectives and through small group exhibitions, and many of them have celebrated artists who are educators shaping the future of the arts in the Central Valley. 

This year’s exhibition, 4 Perspectives, features four painters who are making an impact in the region through their work as artists and their positions as faculty at our local colleges.  Role models for young and aspiring artists, they offer valley students the opportunity to explore a variety of viewpoints – literally in their paintings and intellectually through discussion of ideas in their classes and critiques.

Louisa Benhissen (Merced College), Chelsea Gilmore (Modesto Junior College), Susan Stephenson (CSU Stanislaus), and Mirabel Wigon (CSU Stanislaus) offer us new perspectives. In very individual ways, they each take representation – notably in the depiction of space and spatial relationships – in a unique or challenging direction. Our connections to people and places are presented from new, distinctive angles. These four perspectives will inspire us to look closely and have creative conversations.

The exhibition is on view from February 14 – May 13, 2023. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Artist Gallery Talks on March 3 and April 7 at 6:30 p.m.

 Louisa Benhissen approaches representation from the most photo-realistic perspective of the four artists. Her eye for detail and her specificity in rendering color, light, and shadow, lead us quickly to a sense of comfort in the spaces she depicts. As viewers, we instinctually want to recognize and understand where we “are” within any work of art. Benhissen moves to undermine our sense of comfort in subtle ways, at times pushing us too close or pulling us back too far. Sometimes we are stepping into an intimate setting, where perhaps we shouldn’t be intruding. Or we find ourselves uncomfortably situated in someone else’s personal narrative. (image above left: Nail Appointment, Allington House, 2008, oil on canvas, 40 x 30″, © the artist)

Chelsea Gilmore invites the viewer into spaces that were once occupied and recognizable, but are now vacant, dilapidated, and uninhabitable. Working from photographs, Gilmore reinvents these ruined sites by applying layers of oil paint on panel or paper. She exerts control over the space as she crafts her compositions with intention. Using a monochrome color palette allows Gilmore to abstract the images, removing the connection to reality that color often provides. Solids and voids become areas of darkness and light, challenging our reading of the architectural structure that was the original “subject” of the work. The viewer alternates between fear and curiosity as the artist draws us in toward areas of light that hold promise.  (image above right: Jamestown IV, 2022, oil on panel, 27 x 20″, © the artist)   

Susan Stephenson also sees the world through a lens that straddles the line between the beautiful and the unsightly. While acknowledging a landscape painter’s freedom to edit, adjust, and compose their scenery, Stephenson seeks out vistas that pose challenges to the concept of “scenic.” Shabby buildings and empty streets form the foundations of many of her compositions. Street signs, utility boxes, light poles, and electrical lines interrupt our view. There are often subtle shifts in the perspective she employs – transforming a linear pathway into a curving visual adventure. Stephenson selects corners of our world that other artists might avoid, but she applies colors of such intensity that we cannot disregard the passion she shows for these uncomfortable spaces. (image above left: Ephemeral, 2022, oil on panel, 24 x 24″, © the artist)

Mirabel Wigon takes the most radically abstract approach to representation in her paintings. She layers multiple views and perspectives over one another, creating dynamic visual puzzles for the viewer. Wigon uses imagery from the built environment and from natural forms; she superimposes transparent and semi-transparent elements in a way that creates depth but belies the reality of logical space. The elements come together in a tenuous balance. Color and line guide us through the maze of layers as we seek points to anchor our place in relation to the painted “view.” The complexity of the images reflects the accumulation of information – visual, technological, emotional – that we experience in our contemporary environment. What begins as representations of recognizable, stable structures becomes a metaphor for instability and uncertainty. (image above right: Rupture, 2020, oil on canvas, 72 x 60″, © the artist)