Brian Caraway’s acrylic paintings are inspired by skateboarding culture, mathematical patterns, and the polyrhythms of modern music. Caraway uses a clean, controlled visual language that draws from 1960’s California hard-edge painting, color-field painters like Barnett Newman, and op-artists like Bridget Riley. Bands of vivid color of varying widths are masked off to create clear demarcations. Their linear patterns are devised through systems related to both math and musical rhythms. In some works, gradually diminishing or expanding bands create illusions of warped space; in others, visual vibrations result from interference between adjacent colors. Recently, Caraway has employed early skills he learned from building skateboard ramps to construct wood panels that are sloped or curved, emphasizing their sculptural quality and adding another dimension to the flatness or illusory space of the painted surface.
Mitra Fabian’s intricate sculptures incorporate found objects, like electrical resistors and capacitors, recovered from computer manufacturing refuse. Swarms of these circuit board elements are embedded in porcelain structures or fastened to paper, resulting in biomorphic shapes reminiscent of coral, sea urchins or lichen despite their high tech components. Like artists Tara Donovan and Gay Outlaw, Fabian re-presents accretions of manmade materials in unexpected and evocative ways. In Fabian’s case, remnants from technology consumption are transformed into hybrids of the machined and the organic. In this duality, nature seems to dominate by providing the overriding sculptural forms, perhaps suggesting a long-term view in which even the most advanced human innovations will be subsumed by the natural world.
About the Artists
Brian Caraway was born and raised in Southern California. He moved to the Bay Area to attend San Francisco State University, where he earned a BA in Painting and Printmaking in 2000. In 2009 he earned an MFA from Mills College in Oakland. Caraway has been showing actively throughout the Bay Area as well as in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY since 2004. Exhibitions include those at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, Root Division in San Francisco, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Richmond Art Center, Amp Gallery in Brooklyn, and Art Market San Francisco as well as installations at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and Art on First, a series of temporary public art installations in Napa. He has been awarded the Herringer Prize, the Nell-Stinton Grant and a residency at Kala Art Institute. This is Caraway’s sixth exhibition and second solo exhibition at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary.
Mitra Fabian was born in Iran and raised in Boston. She earned a BA in Art and Anthropology from Kenyon College in Gambier, OH in 1996 and an MFA from California State University, Northridge in 2005. She relocated to the Bay Area in 2005. Fabian has been exhibiting nationally since 1997 including at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR, the Laguna Art Museum, the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, and Ampersand in San Francisco. In 2007 her work was featured in a solo exhibition at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Other exhibitions include those at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco, Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State University, and Oliver Art Center at California College of the Arts in Oakland. Fabian has completed residencies at San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art and Centre d’Art Marnay in France, This is Fabian’s first exhibition at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary.
About Chandra Cerrito Contemporary:
Established in 2007 as a curatorial project space, Chandra Cerrito Contemporary features exhibitions and site-specific installations that highlight exceptional regional and national artists, with an emphasis on conceptual strength, refined craftsmanship, contemporary vision and art historical relevance.
