Sacred Geometry

Peninsula is pleased to present Sacred Geometry, a three-person show featuring the works of Tamara Gonzales, Elisabeth Key, and Robert Storr. Each artist employs geometric forms, patterns and designs in deliberate repetition to explore and communicate different facets of culture, spirituality, and creative intent. Rudimentary figures are implemented to elicit an instantaneous response, and through them, the featured works are able to engage the viewer with immediacy and, at the same time, permit them to delve further into transcendent concepts. The artists use familiar, geometric contours as a visual gateway, layering them with more complexities. Their works invite viewers to move beyond the underlying shapes, allowing them to consider the more intricate, nuanced environment around them. In these artists' hands, these simple and universal forms become a revelatory way to explore and contemplate our surroundings and gain a deeper understanding of how we perceive the world.

Tamara Gonzales’s paintings are heavily influenced by textiles found on her travels to Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and other various Central and South American countries. Collected lace, both factory produced and handmade, are utilized as a central component within her artworks. Gonzales administers spray paint to the lattices and meshes of the gathered fabric, using them as stencils. The uncontrolled mist is channeled through the gaps of the delicate lacework repeatedly, leaving behind an ethereally hazy layered pattern on the canvas. Her sustained, continual implementation of the collected patterns becomes ritualistic, an automatic drive that delves into something similar to a spiritual devotion. The undulating geometric figures are encircled by painted-on frames, enhancing the shrine-like elements within each work.  Intense, brightly colored sponged-on paint and pastels highlight the Mesoamerican design sensibilities. Prismatic colors clash and combine, further channeling psychedelic, ascendant cosmic visions and experiences onto the canvas. 

The designs and visual motifs found on the ceramic sculptures of Elisabeth Kley are ancient yet distinctly contemporary. Her fountains, vessels, and urns present an ornamental aesthetic that is pan-national and timeless. Unfussy yet exuding a sense of quiet grandeur, the ceramics simultaneously appear as if they could exist within a temple of antiquity or a current day residence. Rendered in austere black and white with subtle blue undertones, the geometric patterns found on the sculptures harken back to hieroglyphics found within Egyptian tombs, ancient Grecian amphoras, and Islamic ornamentation while also presenting sleeker, Modernist features found in early 20th century movements such as Wiener Werkstätte and Art Deco. Disparate components from far-flung cultures are melded into a harmonious, unified visual language. Through her abstract, geometric forms, Kley invents a universal symbology, connective and primal. 

Robert Storr’s artworks often consist of a series of squares, rectangles, and lines. Uncompromising borders and angles, rendered in broad bands of solid colors, bump up against each other and intersect. These simplistic geometric figures are presented as monoliths, shapes so straightforward and comprehensible they are foundational to the act of artmaking. However, through these supposedly straightforward forms, Storr is able to impart turbulence and multifaceted interactions within the paint. Partitions and edges which initially appeared immutable waver and bleed past their bounds. Swathes of monochromatic paint thin out and split, revealing hidden colors underneath. Brushstrokes vary from gentle and deliberate to jagged and impulsive, intermingling both translucency and opaqueness. Inside these seemingly solid forms, there is great turmoil, constant flux. The hundreds of “irregularities” within presents endless possibilities and perspectives.