Wave watchers 1 ©Kirk Thompson

Curated by Ed Carey (Gallery 291)

Curator’s statement: Few subjects in art history have been portrayed more frequently than water. From primitive cave drawings to the water wall in Bill Viola’s “Ocean Without a Shore” video, water has captured the artistic imagination.

“WaterWorks” represents water in multiple forms (fountains, oceans, rivers, puddles, pools) and many moods (from abstract, elusive, moody, mesmerizing, and transcendent, to literal and quotidian.)

It is not difficult to understand the artist’s attraction. Water is beautiful, awe-inspiring, universal, mesmerizing, mutable, life giving and life sustaining, a source of recreation and pleasure, a luxury and a scarce and sacred resource. Our affinity to water is visual, sensual and tactile. And it is also essential. Our blood is chemically similar to seawater. Our bodies, like the surface of the planet, are both about sixty-five percent water. And our life form originated in water. We wonder how the meanings we find in these water images resonate with our eternal longing to return to our original habitat – the sea.

Exhibiting Artists: Jack Androvich, Henry Bowles, Adrienne Defendi, Anthony Delgado, Malcolm Easton, Linda Fitch, Ingeborg Gerdes, Steve Goldband, Ralf Hillebrand, Irene Imfeld, Ellen Konar, Barbara Kyne, Eric Larson, Thomas Lavin, Erin Malone, John Martin, Charlotte Niel, Heather Polley, Ari Salomon, Kirk Thompson, and Gary Weiner.

A BAPC Exhibition at Arc Studios & Gallery 1246 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

The exhibition ran from July 7 – July 28, 2012 and included an opening reception, closing reception with an artists talk and a marketplace of prints by many of the collective artists.