February – April, 2021
Curated by Dina Zarif
Hold me in the Palm of your Hand began during the first two months of sheltering in place in 2020. Missing friends and family, Andrea started asking them to send an image of their palm. Staring at the lines of their palm, she began to sew them into the canvas: building the lines of my loved ones little by little, piece by piece, brought her closer to them in my mind. The paintings created alongside them speak of the water, land, and bridges that lie between the people represented as palm lines as well as the tangible absence and distance that exists between us.
Window Exhibition at Red Poppy:
Sunday, February 7
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Using the everyday materials of mending, my work explores the layers of social and emotional experience related to ancestry, immigration, and domestic life. Thread and cord are sewn, tied and knotted: they speak of the tight ropes we all walk, each step composed of mundane and extraordinary moments, containing influences both known and unknown. The work is designed to move beyond the boundaries of the art object, mapping paths that become routes of connection and experience.
Hold me in the Palm of your Hand, the current exhibition on view in the windows of The Red Poppy Art House, began during the first two months of sheltering in place in 2020. Missing friends and family, I started asking them to send an image of their palm. Staring at the lines of their palm, I began to sew them into the canvas: building the lines of my loved ones little by little, piece by piece, brought me closer to them in my mind. The paintings created alongside them speak of the water, land, and bridges that lie between the people represented as palm lines as well as the tangible absence and distance that exists between us. For more info please visit www.andreaguskin.com
ARTIST BIO:
Andrea Guskin is a San Francisco Bay Area artist who was raised amongst the woods and college campuses of Wisconsin and Ohio. She began drawing by pillaging her father’s office supplies for fine-tip pens and yellow pads, filling them with costumed figures while lounging on a 1970s shag carpet.
After studying painting at Antioch College, Andrea moved to NYC and became a part of the art and songwriter community on the Lower East Side, joining a group of artists working without heat in an 1897 former school building (now known as The Clemente). It was here that the figures in her paintings began to deconstruct into minimal skeletal portraits in black and white, which formed the bridge to her architectural tape drawings and her abstract explorations related to the home.
Since moving to the Bay Area in 2003, Andrea has expanded the materials and themes she works with–incorporating small ordinary objects and domestic mending materials such as thread, burnt matches, cotton rounds, tape, and rubber bands. She uses these objects to explore ideas related to domesticity, refuge, and ancestry.
Andrea has recently added a participatory community aspect to her work, merging her years in museum education (The Oakland Museum/The Contemporary Jewish Museum) and her art practice. One example is the ongoing From Where to Here Project, a series of events in which participants are invited to reflect on their own and their families’ journeys to the Bay Area.
In 2020, Andrea founded Virtual Cultural Connections, a Bay Area program designed to promote cultural awareness in schools and support local artists. She currently lives and works in San Leandro with her husband and two sons.
Dina Zarif is an Iranian immigrant, performer, designer, and vocalist who combines Western classical singing with Middle Eastern styles inspired from her Persian roots. Some of her credits include SF International Arts Festival, Palace of Fine Art, San Jose Stage, Golden Thread Productions at Brava Theater, Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, and the staged reading of Layla & Majnun at BAMPFA as part of the symposium with Mark Morris Dance Group and the Silk Road Ensemble. She tours both nationally and internationally as a costume designer and actress in the shadow light production Feathers of Fire. Dina is also a part-time architect and received her MA in Landscape Architecture from the University of Tehran, College of Fine Arts.
