When it came time to downsize from a multiple room house to a small apartment, I found the perfect place. Then it was time to wrap for storage the precious things I wouldn’t have room for in my new home. Eric Clausen’s ironwork door knocker would fit in, but most of my own work was too large. Night Garden and Interferrence pieces have been represented in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento, the Woman in Mid Life series is currently represented by AfterImage Gallery in Dallas.
Each piece in my art collection has a story, a history, a relationship with an artist, and many fond memories of living together—collector and artwork. I wanted to see it all together one last time and Oakopolis Gallery’s new format, which we are calling Art Soup, seemed the perfect venue for the installation.
Art collections are held together by the eye of the collector—matching up his or her inner life with external visuals, sometimes with guidance from a trusted art dealer or gallerist. Even if the pieces collected are primarily for financial investment, there is a personal aesthetic that draws the collector to one piece over another within each particular artist’s body of work. For instance, at the end of the northwest cubby in the gallery, we placed a painting by Denise Carabetta. The image of a girl suspended, as she hangs onto the frond of a palm tree, was not the artist’s favorite. But I was irrevocably drawn to it. I knew I wanted the piece when I tried to move on to something else but my gaze repeatedly returned to this particular painting. I wanted to be able to look at it on any given day, at any given time of my choosing. And I had to take it home.
Marcy Voyevod’s painting is another example. I was thrilled to see her show at Oakopolis (October/November 2014) but hadn’t planned on purchasing a piece. However over the course of two viewings, I couldn’t let go of the one I thought of as locating home. So I bought it to stay on the gallery wall for the start of our Art Soup. In February, artists’ books by Marcy and her cohorts Joell Jones and Jeanne Jabbour will also be added as the focus of the next iteration of the show.