Renée Carriere

Renée Carriere: Helen's Yard

When: Fri., Nov. 21 – Sun., Feb. 1, 2009
Where: Jacquelin Pilar Contemporary Gallery
Conversation with the Artist: Fri., Nov. 21, 2:00 pm

San Francisco born sculptor and mixed media artist Renée Carriere’s early years were spent in Northern California’s Marin County. She now lives in Windsor, one of Sonoma County’s suburbs, in a co-joined home composed from three formerly ramshackle buildings. Behind the house and rambling garden of old oak trees, native scrubs, and climbing roses, Carriere has built a light filled studio where she fashions striking paper-mâché birds with an uncanny eye for capturing each species individual characteristics. These are birds in flight, sometimes poised for a moment of stillness before darting into nectar filled flowers, or beginning their long journeys to the place of their original hatching – moments of sheer loveliness and wonder.

The bird’s shapes are fashioned from piles of yesterday’s newspapers and speak to the vulnerability and fleeting aspects of the passage of time. In each sculpted shape Carriere’s work captures a sense of aliveness that is sharpened by the delicate balance between the permanent and ephemeral themes that motivate human concerns. The artist is enamored by the ideas of time and motion as well as the vulnerability and impermanence of life. Using discarded newspapers she has found a language within the fragile forms she molds from cast off text. The pattern is reinforced by the surprise of subtle color from the type itself.

Following years of study and work in wax and bronze at Kentfield’s College of Marin and a graduate tutorial at Oakland’s College of Arts and Crafts, Carriere spent a year in Paris, where she stumbled across bundles of old newspapers that began her investigation into the use of paper for the expression of her art form. She has found that shredded bits of paper can be used to create feathers. From the brightly colored newspaper ads everchanging patterns emerge like words on a page or notes of music – much like multiple birds sitting upon wires in various configurations themselves create a pattern.

Renée Carriere’s work has been shown at the Triangle Gallery in San Francisco since the mid 1990s and has been displayed at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the Sonoma County Museum; the California Museum of Art in Santa Rosa; the Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael; and at Gallery 5 in Washington, DC. She has been awarded with a solo show at the Manville Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno; the Jurors Award at the Fourth Annual National Exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center; the Merit Award for the 62 Annual Crocker-Kingsley, Sacramento; the Jurors Award from the 61 Annual Crocker-Kingsley; the Jurors Award for Exhibition 86 at the Sun Gallery and the Hayward Forum of the Arts; and the Marjorie Cutler Memorial Award from the College of Marin in Kentfield.