SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Nancy Toomey Fine Art announced a group exhibition titled Some Really Great Things, on view from July 8 to August 27, 2022, with works by Miya Ando, Jud Bergeron, Casper Brindle, Claire Burbridge, Brian Dettmer, Chris Natrop, Matthew Picton, Gregg Renfrow, Carole Silverstein, and Ray Turner. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street.

Traditionally, the season of summer suggests a relaxed and joyful response to long slow days that serve as templates of calm. As global events and at-home shenanigans unfold, that quiet tranquility has been upended. This exhibition allows our gallery artists to demonstrate and translate the enormity of our world to a scale that is more relatable, exploring the role of perception and innovative use of material to create its own meaningful experience.

All the works and artists featured here express the concept of this topic in their own individual styles: the ongoing exploration of radiant and reflective surfaces continues with new work by Miya Ando and Casper Brindle, while the poured minimalist work of Gregg Renfrow creates layers of overlapping hues that appear to be glowing form within. Claire Burbridge and Chris Natrop depict rich tapestries of real and imagined flora through their respective mark-making and cutting, creating worlds in which color, shadow and form coalesce into meticulous works of art that reference landscape and natural phenomena. Brian Dettmer and Matthew Picton share a process that cuts and reconstructs collated images providing a lens in which the viewer can find their own recognition of the patterns of history, while Carole Silverstein invites us to slow down and dream with her traces of patterns from many cultures and places in an effort to understand and embody the sacred languages they symbolize. Finally, a layered landscape painting by Ray Turner is aptly titled “With Solace,” while the ceramic works by Jud Bergeron are an exuberant experiment in material and technique in a medium he only began to explore at the onset of the pandemic, as they were the only materials he had on hand.

All of the artworks exhibited present the viewer with the opportunity to experience the world, real or imagined, through a twenty-first century lens transcribed through each artists’ perception and process. Though uncertainty reigns, these works counter existential foreboding by offering visions of future days.