“Collectively Alone”, an exhibition of recent photo-based oil paintings by East Bay artist Sherry Karver, opens with a reception on July 10 (Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m.) and continues through Sept. 4.
The Peninsula Museum of Art is located in Belmont’s Twin Pines Park. Hours are noon to 4 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.
“I was born and raised in Chicago,” according to Karver, “so my work is informed by city life and the multitude of issues we encounter: loneliness and alienation, personal identity and the loss of it, the individual as part of a crowd, the passage of time, and finding our own voice.“
Karver mounts her black and white images on top of very large, thick wood panels, then hand paints them with many layers of oil glazes to build up the color, combining the old-master technique of glazing with contemporary photo/digital technology.
She personalizes the people in her photos by imagining their “stories” and superimposing the texts over their images. These brief stories about the figures are purely imaginary, based solely on appearance or attitude, and the figures wear their stories almost like clothing.
The “biographies” include a bit of invented history about the person, where they are from, what they do, their hopes, dreams, and often something humorous or embarrassing.
Karver will exhibit a group of her suitcase installations in the “Surveillance Show” curated by Hanna Regev (opening Sept. 11 at the Performing Art Institute in San Francisco). Her solo exhibition in New York at the Kim Foster Gallery opens Oct. 7.
The “Surveillance” series utilizes downloaded photos from public Internet Webcams in different parts of the world plus images from airport x-ray screening machines as sources for the photo-based oil paintings.