Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Patti Oleon titled Tomorrow Looks Like Yesterday. The exhibition features eight oil paintings created over the course of the last year that depict windows and doorways in interior spaces, particularly entryways and hallways in elegant older homes and buildings. In these works, chiaroscuro techniques are employed to create dreamlike images that shift reflections of light and our perception of time and place. This will be Patti Oleon’s first exhibition with the gallery. Oleon’s process, rooted in photography, produces works that question our concept of reality. While each painting is created from an image of an actual location, the artist relies on the cinematic effect of the camera to create scenes that reveal the light cast through doorways, curtains, and glass, often reflected in geometric patterns rendered in subdued shades of golden yellow, pale green and light blue set against dark shadowed walls. The camera’s function in capturing light abstracts and darkens most of the signifiers in each room. The particular location of each piece recedes in significance, and the works begin to function as if the artist is building a memory or forming a dream. Each room that Oleon depicts is a place that she has been, but the works also act as a space that she could be going. The mind is left to fill in the blanks—the color of the walls, the sound of footsteps on the hard floors, the feel of cool air from a drafty window… The images in this series were originally shot on Kodachrome film. Oleon’s choice of film, with its mass popularity in the 1960s and 70s capturing every holiday, wedding, graduation, and family event, provides both an exquisite image from which to paint, but also an indicator of her works as a repository of memories, where past and present merge in a dreamscape of half-remembered visions captured by a now discontinued medium. Patti Oleon's paintings exude a palpable nostalgia for bygone days, yet with her evocative use of light she reveals an ephemeral quality, contemplating the transient nature of perception and the elusive essence of truth. Patti Oleon (b. 1954, St. Louis, MO) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Oleon received both a BA in Fine Arts and an MFA in Painting from the University of California, Los Angeles. Patti Oleon’s paintings are an amalgamation of contradictions, blurring the line between the real and the artificial, the dark and the light, and the banal and the transcendent. She uses traditional Old Master oil painting techniques to create works that reference the past yet are firmly rooted in the present. Her works have been exhibited at galleries and institutions including Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas, TX; Modernism, Inc. Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Los Angeles, CA; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco and Los Angeles, CA; the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose; CA and the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA. Oleon has received many awards and grants including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Grant, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (twice), the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, and a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Munich, Germany. - Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Some Future Refuge, a solo exhibition by Yucca Valley-based artist Amy Kim Keeler. This is Keeler’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and features nine of her intricately hand-stitched works on corrugated cardboard. Meditating on her time settling into her new home in the Mojave Desert, Keeler's weavings speak a language of abstract forms and shifts in color that create a contemplative space where the natural world is both method and muse. Each work exudes a quiet yet palpable energy, revealing a profound connection to the organic rhythms of life. “The desert and its landscape have afforded me a refuge in recent years in which to deal with and examine the direct fallout of human nature on my life and life in general. While searching for healing, peace, and answers within the rhythms of the natural world, the land and all it contains continue to hint at some future refuge where all will come together and make sense one day. In the meantime, the inner workings of the desert world have taken me under its wing and continue to guide me. I am told to remain close to the earth and the necessary answers will be revealed in time. Until then, the assignment is to be still and observe all that is around, utilizing all senses at full capacity. The colors it has chosen, the hierarchy within, the change that occurs both slow and fast, the ever-shifting light all lead the way. My move to the desert saw me unload my darkness into this great open space, serving up a sort of offering or release, like clasping a bird in one's hands and setting it free into the wind. Embracing the slowness forces a certain patience, revealing a beauty that comes with allowing things to take their time while relinquishing a tight control. And with that naturally comes a certain kind of trust. What has emerged are lessons in growth, healing, patience, and freedom. Life here is a never-ending loop of cycles, rhythms, seasons, patterns. It is teaching me to step into the current and become fluid and part of it, to move and function as part of a unit rather than as a solitary individual. The landscape whispers the hope of some future refuge where everything will be okay. And maybe the refuge does lie somewhere in the future. Or perhaps I'm already there.” – Amy Kim Keeler Keeler was born in Los Angeles, CA, and has lived and worked in the Mojave Desert in Yucca Valley, CA for the last three years. She creates abstractions out of cardboard and fiber-based materials. Through a series of handmade stitches, patterns and shapes arise reminiscent of formations derived from nature—striations in rock formations, cloud variations, light and sound waves. Informed by concepts in Anthroposophist philosophy and the explorations of Goethe, Keeler's works acknowledge that only through a connection to natural rhythms and imperfections are we able to imagine, grow, learn, and progress. Amy Kim Keeler's works have been exhibited at galleries and institutions, including Fortnight Institute, New York, NY; Lowell Ryan Projects, Los Angeles, CA; The Pit, Palm Springs, CA; Good Naked Gallery, New York, NY; my pet ram, Santa Barbara, CA; Compound Yucca Valley Gallery, Yucca Vallery, CA; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, San Jose, CA; and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA. Keeler has been a resident artist at Pocoapoco, Oaxaca, Mexico, the Icelandic Textile Center, Blönduós, Iceland, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine.