Synecdoche at Jessica Silverman Gallery

Artists: Julie Beaufils, Vincent Fecteau, Henry Gunderson, Tony Lewis and B. Ingrid Olson

Exhibition title: Synecdoche

Venue: Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, US

Date: July 1 – August 22, 2015

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

Synecdoche / syn·ec·do·che / si’nɛkd”ki / n. 1 a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa (e.g. give us this day our daily bread; all hands on deck; the meeting was full of suits; San Francisco won the World Series. 2 a group exhibition, featuring artists whose works distill grand narratives, complex psychological states and/or linguistic universes into singular forms. ◻ synecdochic adj. [Middle English via Latin from Greek word for simultaneous understanding]

Julie Beaufils, a French artist living in Los Angeles. Her “picture feels whole in incompletion, a body described only by legs, and even those are turned upside down.” *

Vincent Fecteau, lives in San Francisco, currently has a solo show at the Kunsthalle Basel. “How did you figure out that making persuades our senses to recognize more than what is?”

Henry Gunderson, born in the Bay Area, based in Brooklyn. “ A zero is there. Can you see it? It’s real, but it’s just a place holder where presence materializes as a numeral of naught.”

Tony Lewis, based in Chicago, with a solo show at MOCA Cleveland . “Can you consider presence in absence when narrative flows and then opens into blankness, absent vowels, truant bodies.”

B. Ingrid Olson, the New Yorker described her recent show as a “knockout début.” “To distill in limited narrative a fullness that we must fill in fragments of the familiar, a language changing direction.”

* Quotations are from a poem by Rena Rosenwasser, written in honor of the “Synecdoche” exhibition.