SAN JOSE, CA.- In May 2015 the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art will open three new exhibitions by three Bay Area women artists. Beginning on May 23, two separate exhibitions, Cassandra Straubing: A Fragile Narrative in the Focus Gallery and Amy M. Ho: Red Rooms in the Cardinale Project Room, will be open to the public. On May 31, the third and largest exhibition, Naomie Kremer: Age of Entanglement in the Main Gallery, will open to the public.

All three artists will be celebrated at an opening reception on Sunday, May 31, from 1pm to 4pm at the ICA, located at 560 South First Street in the SoFA arts district in downtown San Jose. The public is invited and admission is free.

Naomie Kremer: Age of Entanglement will include video, hybrid paintings and hybrid sculptures. Combining large-scale, intensely colored abstract paintings with video projections, Kremer creates hybrids that blur the distinction between the two mediums and alter the physical relationship one normally has to painting. A consistent underlying principle in Kremer’s work has been a disruption of the painted surface. In 2000, Kremer began experimenting with video in order to explore the element of time in her work. She began by animating some texts she'd written, and continued with animating some of her finished paintings. In 2008 she started to explore projecting video onto her paintings. By layering the paintings with moving images, she has been able to incorporate the time component in an immediate way. Kremer states, “Video structures the viewer’s time in a way painting can’t. Marrying the two media, [creates] a “hybrid” – a mysterious object in which the content moves and glows, leaving the viewer uncertain which part is paint and which projection, till the spot where the gaze is resting starts to move.”

Kremer was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and currently lives and works in the Bay Area. She earned her MFA from California College of the Arts, and an MA in Art History from Sussex University in Brighton, England. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is found in museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts.

On Thursday, June 11, at 7pm, Naomie Kremer will give a talk about her work as part of the ICA’s Talking Art education program. Admission is free.

Through her sculptural glasswork, Cassandra Straubing addresses issues of domestic and industrial labor. Her exhibition Cassandra Straubing: A Fragile Narrative explores the sociological aspects of working-class garments and tools of blue-collar labor, and how the objects might symbolize a person’s economic and social position as well as their gender role. The exhibition will include pieces the artist created by employing multiple glass-forming techniques such as blowing, hot forming, and casting. Straubing’s exhibition is presented in conjunction with the 44th Annual Glass Art Society conference to be held in San Jose from June 5-7, 2015.

Cassandra Straubing is the Glass Sculpture Faculty Head and Studio Coordinator at San Jose State University. She has exhibited her work nationally in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Portland, Oregon.

On Thursday, June 5, 7pm to 8pm, Cassandra Straubing will lead a tour of her exhibition as part of the ICA’s Talking Art education program. Admission is free.

For Amy M. Ho: Red Rooms, featured in the ICA Cardinale Project Room, the artist will create a hyper-artificial environment that envelops the viewer and transforms the sense of space by projected light and shadows. Red Rooms is a two-channel video projection that was created by the artist photographing two views of a miniature architectural model lit in two different ways -- one lit from in front and another from behind. Providing the viewer a heightened sense of space, architecture and the environment, Ho states “My work strives to make us actually feel the world around us.”

Amy M. Ho is based in San Francisco and graduated from Mills College and University of California, Berkeley. She is a recipient of the Herringer Family Foundation Prize for Excellence in Art, Phelan, Murphy, Cadogan Fellowship; Jay DeFeo Fellowship; and San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant.