Oracle
at the Art Kiosk, Redwood City, CA
2208 Broadway, Redwood City
Curated by Lance M. Fung in collaboration with the Redwood City Improvement Association

March 2- April 14, 2024

Viewable until Midnight each day.

https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/smdailyjournal.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/eedition/a/03/a03724e2-b6ad-5a48-9b29-2a57ee6363ce/65ec14b275360.pdf.pdf

On Saturday, May 6th, there will be a walk through and talk on the current solo exhibit at Pastine Projects Gallery in San Francisco, What is not and that which is. Sheila Ghidini will talk about her drawings and sculpture currently on exhibit.

At Pastine Projects, we get to see four interrelated directions in Sheila Ghidini’s contrapuntal artistic trajectory:
Framed works in graphic media on mylar depict eye-dazzling pile-ups of chairs that interweave positive and negative space with dimensionality and flat design. These engage the viewer with the meticulous intricacy of their imaginative shallow space, while evoking the collapsed layers of architectural elevation drawings that Ghidini has often created for her work in public art. While largely grid-based, the newest of these drawings incorporate a gestural circular sweep that imbues its composition with movement.
Fully sculptural works in wood also explore grid and circular forms, awash in shades of grey, recalling the monochrome strategy of Louise Nevelson. Repurposed from discarded, sawed up and reassembled chairs found in the neighborhood of her studio, they hint at the artist’s long engagement with site-specificity.
Collages cut out from black mat board amplify Ghidini’s compositional engagement with negative space but incorporate gold thread. Irregularly folded shapes suggest the formalism of Constructivism, while the thread interjects a family legacy of quilting.
Brilliantly enigmatic wall installations each incorporate painted chair fragments and colored threads that extend the forms’ shapes in space, but include drawn elements that enhance actual wall shadows caused by the specific lighting of each’s illuminated environment. The mystery of reflected color and highlighted shadow invite and intrigue our extended gaze by mixing the hard-edge with illusionary ambiguity.
But what about the chairs? Ghidini has written that the chairs hold absence and presence and serve as a container for the contradictions of being alive. But chairs abound in other Bay Area artists’ oeuvre; David Ireland’s play with chair forms can perhaps be related to Ghidini’s explorations. Chairs also provide a station for repose as well as for work; a small sign in Ghidini’s studio reads “work is prayer,” the monastic motto of 6th century abbot St. Benedict. Perhaps we are sensing Ghidini’s channeling of the quiet innovation and integrity of Shaker design.

Mark Dean Johnson

Pastine Projects is pleased to present a solo show of sculptures and
drawings by Sheila Ghidini.


What is not and that which is

Sheila Ghidini writes “I’m interested in calling attention to the ubiquitous, but often overlooked spaces between things, as well as the shadows cast by them…..what’s lost, missing, or obscured is as critical to the work, if not more so, then that which is tangibly present.”

In his seminal book The Poetics of Space (1958), Gaston Bachelard attributes our poetic and imaginative lives to the interior spaces we inhabit unconsciously, but which nonetheless have the power to evoke strong emotions and reconnect us with deeper parts of ourselves and the universe. The domestic space within which we exist stimulates reveries that connect us with our unconscious to form a “poetic image” or creative outlet. Ghidini’s use of the quotidian form of a chair and its negative spaces summons our profound connection to the architecture of the home. For Ghidini, a reconfigured chair, emphasizing the void, “serves as a marker in space, a symbol of both presence and absence, and a fundamental architectural form that also has the potential to hold memory.”

Tapping into what she refers to as “the consumer waste stream”, Ghidini finds her chairs on the street or sources them from hand-me-downs. Playing actual shadows against illusory ones made of graphite and chalk on the wall, she manipulates and re-forms the chairs to confound the viewer’s perception of what is there and what is not, connecting the unconscious with a poetic image.

Ghidini further explores these concerns in her carefully rendered abstracted drawings and assemblages. Her drawings are inspired by her sculpture, Pivot, in which she pivoted a chair on its axis to create a feeling of both movement and stillness. The shapes used in the assemblages are taken from the negative spaces in drawings of chairs, then cut out of cardboard to allow for more folding and dimensionality. Ghidini’s richly nuanced works closely examine relationships between objects, space, and cast shadows, connecting us with overlooked and unseen spaces to reveal the poetry of absence and its relationship to our creative subconscious.

Francesca Pastine

A one-person exhibition at Pastine Projects in San Francisco, CA
Coming up in April 2023.

My drawing, Tower 4 is in a group exhibit, curated by Kevin Chen at Axis Gallery, Verge Center for the Arts, 625 S Street, Sacramento

graphite and colored pencil on mylar, 42X36", 2022

August 5-28th, Opening reception on August 13,6-9

A collaborative installation/dance performance with Jenna Marie, presented at Patine Projects, San Francisco, CA February 12, 2022.

Pastine Projects
360 Langton St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

D U E T : Sculpture and works on paper by Sheila Ghidini and Anne McGuire
Jan,7- February 12. 2022

Root Division
1131 Mission St.,
San Francisco, CA 94103
November 5-November 30th
Reception November 13, 2021 7-9

Opening at SFAI Pier 2 at Fort Mason in San Francisco on September 16th, 2021. Grateful to be one of the participating artists to receive support from the Svane Foundation. Thank you!

A group exhibit at Pastine.Projects, San Francisco, opening Friday, September 4, 2021

A two person exhibit, paintings by Irene Nelson and sculpture by Sheila Ghidini

January 21-March 28, 2020

Opening July 12, 2019
July 12th-September 14, 2019

Featuring California artists whose work reflects on sanctuary- how we make it, where it can be found, and what happens when it is out of reach.

Please join us on Friday June 7th, 2019, 6-8 for the opening reception at Chandra Cerrito Art Advisors, 480 23rd St., Oakland, CA

Built Environments open on February 23rd at SFSU Gallery until April 4
Group show curated by Sharon E. Bliss and Kevin B. Chen

http://www.squarecylinder.com/2018/02/shiela-ghidini-sabine-reckewell-chandra-cerrito/

A solo exhibit at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, 480 23rd St., Oakland, CA
January 11-March 15, 2018
Opening reception Friday, February 2, 6-8PM
Artist Talk Saturday, February 17, 2-3:30 pm

http://www.squarecylinder.com/2017/08/detritus-san-jose-institute-of-contemporary-art/

Exhibition at San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA

June 27-August 6

By-products of creative practices

All levels of drawing abilities welcomed! Learn the fundamentals of observational drawing or be inspired by this gorgeous location to create abstract works on paper. A variety of media will be explored as a means of documenting this experience. Sketchbooks will play an active role in recording and responding to this fabulous location in Northern Italy. Drawing skills will be developed through specific daily assignments as we tour through the area.

October 1-23rd
1275 Minnesota Street
San Francisco, CA

A group show of works which incorporate reused materials and objects

A group installation/meditation by g.l.u.e. (girl's league of urban epistemology) exploring what creates one's sense of home.

May 7-May 27, 2016

Bridgemaker Arts
23 Maine
Richmond, CA 94804

Opening: Saturday, May 7th, 2-5pm

One of my drawings is included in a book of poems, by Dania Ari, One Way to Ask. 2016, published by Norfolk Press, SF

A one person exhibition at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary
Oakland, CA
Opening Feb. 5 -March 25th, 2016

http://weadartists.org/farewell-forest-place

Chandra Cerrito Contemporary
480 23rd St.
Oakland, CA 94612

Cathy Cunningham Little
Lewis deSoto
Lisa Espenmiller
Sheila Ghidini
Dale Kristemaker
Alexandra Lederer
Penny Olson
Jenn Shifflet

December 4-Janurary 28th, 2016
Opening Reception: December 4, 6-8pm

Day Re-dreamed
Sept. 25-December 6, 2014
Berkeley Central Arts Passage
2055 Center St., Berkeley, CA 94704
(between Shattuck and Milvia)

A group exhibition at the Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA
March 9-May 25th, 2014

Two Drawing Fundamentals Classes will be offered by Sheila Ghidini at an Art Retreat in Vittorio Veneto, Italy during the weeks of June 16-22 and June 23-29, 2014,through Art &Travel. Along with developing the skills of drawing, participants will have the opportunity to tour local sites through organized drawing excursions. During the last few sessions, Alma Ortolan will introduce fresco techniques and one drawing will be transferred using a technique called graphitto, onto a tile. The basics of contour line, value and shading, texture and space, as well as an introduction to fresco, will be covered in this enjoyable summer workshop for all levels of artists and travelers. If interested in participating view the website at WWW.ARTANDTRAVELITALY.COM and email any questions.

“Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes the visible.”
Paul Klee
by Summer Lee

The most profound artwork questions what exists, but at the same time what is not there. Sheila Ghidini's exhibition at Chandra Cerritos Contemporary Art Gallery, "Conversations," addresses the seen and unseen through a series of drawings and installations of intricate choreographies of chairs and birds -- and negative space. Her careful drawing and skillful compositional choices remind us: See in order to draw, draw in order to see -- but most importantly, draw in order to illuminate the unseen.

Sheila composes her chairs with an infinite number of graphite marks with the facility of a deftly focused draftsperson, creating a tension between the object's stillness and the energy of mark-making. This intense focus brings equal attention to the swaths of energized negative space surrounding the drawn object. For example, in the piece entitled, "One Chair," the composition precipitates a question, a longing. And what exactly is longed for is the inviolate mystery that makes Sheila's drawings philosophical, bringing an untranslatable insight into the human condition.


The earliest artists, traditional Chinese brush painters, heralded negative space as much as modern, Western artists delighted in filling the entire picture plane. For them the space untouched by brush was the nothing that is something, a space for contemplating what is beyond that something. That space is deeply connected to the philosophical concept of nothingness running through Taoism and Buddhism. In that vein, the Mustard Seed Garden Manual contains an admonishment from the 13th century painter, Jao Tzu-Jan, to always paint a scene with places made inaccessible to humans by nature. Because, as it is here surrounding Sheila's lovingly rendered chairs, the dense, white nothingness obscures the contexts of their existence -- and incandesces what is most beautiful in the mind. And true to the Buddhist aesthetic concept, yugen, we are most entranced by mystery.

Even in a composition of a group of chairs, as in the piece, "Conversation," where different vanishing points for each object are used within the same composition, the same longing persists. The chairs, whether metaphorical or iconic of ourselves, are alone together. They inhabit the same context, but in different perspective realities. Recalling the ubiquitous dark matter that makes up our universe, only detectable by instrument and not by light, these drawings are of presences, interactions, and possibilities that are around us always, but unseen. But here, lights and shadows figure centrally in Sheila's rigorous drawing. The areas of highest values on the chairs are the same as the space engulfing the chairs. One could conclude that the negative space is the same entity as that which reflects light –and perhaps light itself.


Therefore, when her installation of a sculpted, white chair enters pictorial space by a graphite murmuration of birds drawn around and through the architecture of the chair and wall, the chair and wall similarly dissolve. The firmament, the reality, that you and I rely on itself becomes negative space, becomes light. And true to thousands of years of mystical understanding of the mediatory role of birds, as with the Asian affinity for negative space, Sheila's work reminds us to what is easily forgotten outside moments of poetic and artistic attention: There is a horizon beyond our knowing. And let it be full of light.


"We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary, we already see so much." Robert Walser, A Little Ramble.

Chandra Cerrito Contemporary
August 2-September 26th, 2013

A group exhibition at The Hazel Wolf Gallery
David Brower Center
2150 Allston Way
Berkeley, CA 94704

May 16th-August 30, 2013

Sheila Ghidini at Chandra Cerritto Contemporary
June -July 2012

http://www.artpractical.com/review/you_cant_make_art_by_making_art/

Group Exhibit at Chandra Cerrito Gallery, Oakland
You Can't Make Art By Making Art
Honoring the legacy of David Ireland
Oct. 7-Nov.19, 2011