Whether Meyo is working with digital art, regalia, or weaving, each creation begins with inspiration drawn from the world around me—the patterns in the land, the rhythm of our dances, the wisdom in our songs.

This show offers a glimpse into her creative process. The digital drawings, which she calls fingerdoodles, incorporate basket patterns, traditional dances, and scenes of Pomo life. Each basket pattern carries meaning, reflecting the land, the animals, and the stories of our ancestors.

We will be hosting the Opening Reception with Meyo Marrufo on Friday, October 16, 6-8pm

All are welcome, we look forward to seeing you!

Gail Wight

Holdfast - Swept Away

At the Marine Biodiversity Lab at UC Irvine, Matt Bracken is studying the effects of global warming on the seaweeds of California’s coastline. At Matt’s invitation, artist Gail Wight has followed the lab’s research for the past five years. Holdfast and Swept Away are Wight’s interpretations of that research, influenced by the decades she’s spent exploring Northern California’s tide pools.

Holdfast is a book structured around the life-sized scan of a thirty meter piece of kelp found free floating off shore. Running the length of the book, the kelp forms a baseline to the story of Matt’s research. It’s accompanied by ghostly pochoir portraits of twenty-four lesser known seaweeds that are the subjects of Matt’s studies. In addition, twenty-four woodblock prints portray creatures that live amongst these seaweeds.

Swept Away is a small video installation. Unlike Holdfast, which offers a narrative of both hope and duress, Swept Away is a more visceral response to our coastal crisis. It’s an ode to the stunning beauty and hidden movement of Pacific Coast algae. It’s also a glimpse of our shoreline bereft of seaweed, and a reminder of the ebb and flow of evolutionary change.

Sandy Smith

Scanography: Mendocino Coast Seaweed

On the desert of Arizona, where I lived for fifty years, people flocked to see the Spring bloom of wildflowers, while I waited until the petals fell and revealed wonderful forms of plants and pods. Now in my new landscape on the Mendocino Coast, I walk the beaches and find surprises of seaweed in beautiful shapes and colors hiding among the mostly overlooked clumps of detritus washed ashore and abandoned. I collect specimens of seaweed small enough to fit on my flat-bed scanner. I wash and towel-dry the seaweed at home and arrange it on my scanner. Because arranging the seaweed is done upside down, it requires several previews before I have an image I want to share. Leaving the scanner lid open, I scan at a high resolution so I will have the option to make large prints. I use Photoshop to clean smudges and grains of sand that appear on the scan and to make other adjustments to the image. Perhaps you will be inspired to take a closer look at those clumps along the shoreline. If so … enjoy the surprises and keep one eye on the waves. 

 Sandy has experimented in various categories of Photography including traditional black and white photography, Polaroid transfers, pinhole, composites using Photoshop, and more recently, scanography. Her work has been shown at The Field Museum in Chicago, Walker's Point Art Center in Milwaukee, Canton Museum of Art in Canton, Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, Tohono Chul Park in Tucson, and El Museo Nacional de las Culturas in Mexico City. Her work is in collections at Arizona Historical Society in Tucson, Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, Columbia University Libraries in New York City, Maryknoll Mission Archives in Maryknoll, and El Museo Nacional de las Culturas in Mexico City. Her book, Portraits of Clay, was published by the University of Arizona Press.