While commercial galleries flock to San Francisco’s Dogpatch and Bayview neighborhoods for ever-larger exhibition spaces, inside a new office and small business compound one block from Oakland’s MacArthur BART station, Sweeney Kaye proves a shipping container might be all the room you need.
San Francisco-based artist Kristina Lewis’ current solo show, Heavy Foam, consists of just nine sculptures on sleek white shelves and six framed prints hung opposite them. The sculptures may look familiar. Each brightly colored, slightly textured form is culled from an assortment of packing foam, their shapes and contours determined by the objects that foam used to protect.
epoxy clay, polymer varnish; Right: Kristina Lewis, ‘Void on Hard Waves,’ 2017. Papier-mâché, pigment,
polymer varnish. (Courtesy of the artist and Sweeney Kaye)
The interplay between positive and negative space is further compounded by the fact that Lewis’ sculptures are all cast objects, made with an impressive list of materials: hydrocal, fiberglass, papier-mâché, epoxy clay, polymer varnish. Titles like Double Heavy, Full of Holes and Void on Hard Waves further hint at the heft of these once lightweight forms. It’s hard to contain the desire to test their solidity.
Across the shipping container a series of archival pigment prints shed the sculpture’s playful colors to focus on positive and negative spaces against a black background. Removed from their original packaging and flattened into just two dimensions, the silhouettes in the prints become abstract units of composition. Lewis seems to enjoy symmetrical arrangements and jaunty angles.
Lewis’ show is the first in a year of all women artists, a fact gallery owner Andrew Berg is proud to point out. Sweeney Kaye is Berg’s first foray into exhibiting artists, but he’s also the owner of the frame shop Small Works SF, which helps explain the meticulous presentation of Lewis’ works.
