Geoff Tuck Painting is blue, red, yellow, and green. It is round and grey, small, and off centered. It is intelligent, and charmingly stupid. It is orange and still, and collects dust. Painting seems easy until you try. Paintings are gold, shimmering and sultry, and made of the ground we walk on. They are technology and moon landings delivered in crates bigger than doorways. They are your friend, your dog, and your dog’s bone. Painting is for kids and old folks and trash cans and fields filled with flowers; they are trampled on and nurtured, rescued and discarded and started over–and signed. Painting is a gift, a follow through, foreign and curious. Painting is a catastrophe–missing for years, dug up, tearful and relevant again. Painting–determined, mediocre and mysteriously flawed, perfect even. Painting is useful and unapologetic; it pretends. Painting tells you what to do, so you’ll get angry and say, Hey Painting! Stop telling me what to do! "No problem," painting says "stop looking at me." Painting is black and fabulous and far, it is the light on your lips, calm and exhausted, and calling you late night, I’m trying to sleep painting! Leave me alone! But painting is petty, and has already hung up. Geoff Tuck was born in Anaheim CA, in January 1960. He went to high school in Pomona, and spent a couple of years at Mount San Antonio College and Pasadena City College. He also worked at the Federal Reserve, made jewelry, worked as a baker, and as a construction administrator. Although Geoff never received any formal training in the arts he was active from an early age as a self taught devotee of literature, music, and the visual arts. His enthusiasm led him to become an influential collector, thinker, writer, social practitioner and painter. In 2004 he joined the Fellows of Contemporary Art (FOCA) and served as their Board chairman in 2007 and 2008. In 2008 he started the blog Notes on Looking, publishing, his thoughts on contemporary art and music in Los Angeles. While running the blog from 2008-15 he wrote daily, reviewing exhibitions, documenting studio visits and conversations. Inspired by his activity with FOCA and the ever growing circle of artist friends and contacts he had developed, Geoff together with his husband David Richards started the Parkfield Retreat, an artist retreat on the V6 Ranch in the remote southeastern corner of Monterey County. About 200 artists joined the weekend long get togethers in the years from 2010-15 and five artists' books were published containing writing and artworks developed there. Having been together for 17 years, Geoff and David married in 2014, shortly after they had permanently moved to Parkfield. Until his untimely death in 2019, Geoff focused on his work as a painter in his outdoor studio. Geoff‘s work has been exhibited at JB Jurve, Dave Gallery and Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University. He also showed his work at an installation series in Berlin in 2013. He made many videos, and he collaborated on projects with other artists in both the U.S. and Europe. He is loved and sorely missed. --- iris yirei hu It begins with the dead. There is a Hmong understanding that when one dies, the soul of the dead will return to their birthplace to find her placenta buried beneath the earth, where her mother had kept it. The soul will wear the placenta, like a jacket, and dwell. Dwelling is both a movement and affective principle in hu’s work. Often situated in personal, historic, and environmental loss, hu’s work is a living document of grief. Mourning and reflection illuminate the entangled interdependencies and collaborations that allow her to make life in a precarious world. Without memory, stories become harder to tell. hands are full blue is a rhizomatic assemblage that tells stories of an entangled world, while considering the site-specific history and community of Visitor Welcome Center. The crux of hu’s practice involves collaborating with those around her, including plants, people, and landscapes. In her second project with the gallery, hu builds with the works in the exhibitions prior to hers–the clay floor piece by Armando Cortes and Hande Sever’s soybeans–and uses weaving as a conceptual framework and practice to unearth loss and expose the intimacy between seemingly unconnected things. ---- ivan forde ivan forde is an active reader. He renders Blackness as multitudinous and expansive, using photomontage to insert his body into landscapes culled from epic poetry and imaginary worlds. Inspired by literature and the gaps between what is spoken, written, and what can be visualized, forde’s newest project, entitled local edge margin, explores the poetics of homeland, migration and identity. One foundational text for forde is British-Guyanese writer Sir Wilson Harris’ 1954 collection of poems, “Eternity to Season,” in which characters from The Odysseyare transplanted to villages on the Guyana coastland. forde considers the legacy of Caribbean writers’ deconstruction of the classics, and this particular tradition of mapping ancient stories onto current and ongoing anti-colonial struggles. The room-sized installation contains new works on paper that mix watercolor, frottage and cyanotype (forde has been experimenting with the light-sensitive photographic process used to make blueprints over the last five years). Portraits of bee-eaters, small brightly-colored migratory birds that travel from South America to Africa and Southern Europe, and who the artist encountered during a recent residency in Umbria, appear throughout the space in indigo frames hand dyed by iris yirei hu. On opening night, forde’s sound performance will sample improvised organ the artist recorded in a 15th century chapel dedicated to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers.