Peter Honig’s photographic images of ragged and intimate assemblages resonate with a nervous laughter. His highly technical, playful, and somewhat morbid artistic activity is funny and horrifying. 

In Honig’s universe, the reclining nude is reinvented as a skeletal bird in bed dreaming of flight and a lone wildcat with a head fashioned from a fishing weight rusts in a field of wilted leaves. Inherent in his work is a conflict between the monumental scale of the imagery and the fragmented scenarios of psychological intimacy depicted in his “model worlds”. This reflexive, self-conscious blurring of the distinction between internal dialogues and external realities is a central and recurrent theme in both his sculptural and photographic work.

A native of Boston, Peter Honig has a BA in art history and fine art photography from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.  He has exhibited his fine art widely in the Bay Area, has worked for numerous publications as a photographer, and taught photography at UC Berkeley’s ASUC Art Studio.

Kathleen King is fifty-three years old. She’s losing her balance. Her bones are dissolving. Her ongoing experience with her own vulnerability, as well as with the precarious global future has brought her to the awareness that reality can be measured by objects in the process of change: disappearing and becoming something new. Past work has explored complexity but currently King has begun to make reductive paintings and painted objects, finding the possibilities in an eccentric minimalism. The artist corresponds in earnest empathy with newfound materials—PVC pipe, painter’s tape, scrap wood, spray paint—normally relegated to urban walls, building sites and dumpsters. She seeks to create a material display that makes a poetic connection to the adjustments we all make between present and future.

Kathleen King was born in Oakland, CA and has a BA in Art from UC Berkeley. Her work has been exhibited locally at Pro Arts, Hang Gallery, and 66 Balmy and is represented in numerous private collections.

Mercury 20 is an artist-established and operated gallery located in Oakland, CA. A collective comprised of 20 members, Mercury 20 exhibits high quality, innovative work from emerging and mid-career artists, and promotes art in the community. Gallery hours are Friday 4-7pm and Saturday, 12-3pm, and by appointment.   www.mercurytwenty.com