MIRRORED DREAMSL Arminée Chahbazian and Minami Oya, TINT Gallery, San Francico, August 8 - October 4, 2026

MIRRORED DREAMS
Arminée Chahbazian and Minami Oya


TINT Gallery
August 8 - October 4, 2026

The idea of art as a mirror to life is appropriately dual in nature: an objectively rendered duplicate reality is twinned with a distorted or disturbing one—the view into a funhouse mirror, or even a world of dreams and mysteries, as in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass, or the films of Jean Cocteau. In the French SUrrealist’s films, Death of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast, and Orpheus, mirrors—pools of shining water, filmed sideways—serve as portals into other worlds, both seductive and dangerous, according to the poet-filmmaker: “Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.”

Brought together for Mirrored Dreams are two Bay Area artists producing complementary artworks. Arminée Chaubazian, a multi-disciplinary artist born in Colorado, and educated at Yale and Scripps, has enjoyed  a forty-year career spanning the eastern United States, France, and Holland. Minami Oya, born on the small, mountainous Sado Island, a paradise of wildlife set in the Sea of Japan, was educated at San Francisco State. San Jose State, PIlchuck Class School, Pittsburgh Glass Center, Corning Museum of Glass, and D.F. Glassworks in Murano, Italy, and now teaches glassworking.

Chaubazian is showing eight large graphite and colored pencil drawings on layers of paper and translucent duralar drafting film, to which she sews glass beads in intricate patterns, lending her dreamy imagery a jolt or reality, like rapports materialized from the ether during séances. Chahbazian’s poetic juxtapositions of natural motifs —clouds, birds, shadows, trees—all presented without obvious narrative connections—suggest photographic double exposures and the avant-garde cinema of a century ago (miraculously effective even today , despite their primitive technology), along with the Magrittean darkroom collages of the Californian Jerry Uelsmann, a half century ago, before Photoshop and the rest of the digital armamentarium.

The surprise effect of Charbazian’s unfettered floating objects may derive from Surrealist theories of dislocation and decontextualization, forcing the viewer to create his or her own interpretations, but these drawings read more as images creating arcane linkages than the Surrealist provocations of young Parisian intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The dripping honeycomb covering above the parched and cracked river bed in “Bee Gone” may refer to threats to the natural world—Begone!—but it also hints that, with moisture; life returns; and honey is immortal, in effect, as egyptologists can attest. “Eye of the Storm” carries a similar environmental message, with an orb which we interpret as the earth, engulfed in thunderhead clouds;  a bird falls from the sky as if poisoned by the mephitic vapors of Avernus, a volcanic crater lake said by Romans to lead to the underworld, its emanations fatal overflying birds. “Float” depicts the strange encounter of an iceberg in placid waters, and a child’s balloon, still tied to a string, through which we view the iceberg; both objects are lighter than their surroundings and are supported by them—as long as they stay buoyant. “Phoenix Falling” depicts the American badlands of Western movies, replete with hoodoos and a chimney rock, with the outlined urban skyline below contracting with the dark silhouette of a predatory birds diving downward from the top.

Oya is showing ten small to medium-sized sculptures of hand-blown silvered glass spheres that capture their surroundings, including observers, in miniature worlds of infante reflections; imagine Lucas Samaras’ 1996 ”Mirrored Room” crossed with the crystalline spheres and polyhedrons in M.C. Escher’s metaphysical still lives, with their hints of the transcendent and mystical contained within a room of ordinary objects laid out on a tabletop.

If Chahbazian’s poetic scenarios, suggesting still photos from unmade movies, hint at transformation and metamorphosis, and even the consolations of mythology, Oya’s silvered blown glass sculptures transform virtuosic craftsmanship into philosophical games or game boards (“Energy Portraiture in Black and White No. 69,” ”Energy Portraiture  No. 70,” “Emergence,” “Transitional Plane No. 2,” “Transitional Plane No. 4”). Think of the interpenetrating complementary black and white elements —birds, fish, reptiles, elves—that swarm across M.C. Escher’s prints (or prints within prints), locked into position by their perfectly complementary outlines. If games are one metaphor useful for Oda’s work, liquid dynamics is equally inescapable, with the frozen droplets, faultlessly rendered in gleaming, black and white glass and silvering, evoking, sensuously, the motion-studies scientists and photographers who shot bullets shooting apples and the like when strobe light enable ultra-fast exposures. Oya’s dualistic invites metaphysical mediations.

Chahbazian and Oda,complementary yet harmonious, prove that modest scale, a quiet minimalism, and a subdued, nearly monochromatic palette can create thoughtful, poetic effects that punch way above their weight class; that aesthetic limitations can stimulate creative growth.



TIM WILLIAMS: 21ST CENTURY SUCKS, Heron Arts, San Francisco

TIM WILLIAMS: 21st Century Sucks
Heron Arts

In 1971, the Kinks released “Twentieth Century Man,” a rollicking indictment of the contemporaneous 

age of machinery
A mechanical nightmare
The wonderful world of technology
Napalm, hydrogen bombs, biological warfare
This is the twentieth century
…too much aggravation
It's the age of insanity

In 2026, many of us might find ourselves in rueful agreement with 21st Century Sucks, the bluntly humorous  title of Tim Williams’ painting exhibition at Heron Arts. A rejection of the present along with nostalgia for a real or imagined past and dreams of utopian future is nothing new in art. Classical painters depicted a bygone Golden [i.e, pre-industrial] Age, blending pagan and Christian myths; the Futurist painters of a century ago, conversely, loathed the industrial backwardness and conservative culture of Italy at the time, adapting the revolutionary style of Cubism to promulgate an aggressive future regime free of deadening museums, moonlight and pasta: (Unfortunately for them, and for Italy, they fell victim to the malignant spell of fascism).

Art, however, comforts and heals, as well as occasionally critiquing the nightmare of history, to paraphrase Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. Tim Williams’ semi-abstract mixed-media paintings on wood panel, employing the fractured planes of Cubism and the borrowed mass-media imagery of Pop, are engaging collage-puzzles of colliding, contradictory elements culled from the chaos of our ‘sucky’ times, organize and transformed. Williams embraces “…images shaped by excess, speed, contradiction, and collapse. Using collaged imagery from my own photographs, planes, trains, automobiles, and the debris of modern life, I build dense compositions that reflect a world already coming apart. Within that chaos, there are still moments of beauty.” 

WIlliams’ image scavenging impulse is balanced by his compositional mastery, so that the cutout elements never seem random, but held in a gravitational dance, with centripetal and centrifugal forces perfectly balanced. Along with the artist’s ability to mix and match disparate and discordant elements is a compositional device that was discovered only a few years ago, the Einstein tile, a irregularly shaped polygon or polyhedron resembling a fractured hexagon that, rotated variously, covers a flat surface not only completely, interlocking, without gaps, but also without forming a predictable repeating pattern. Wikipedia defines it as “a single prototile that by itself forms an aperiodic set of prototiles; that is, a shape that can tessellate [cover with tiles] space but only in a nonperiodic way. Such a shape is called an einstein, a word play on ein Stein, German for "one stone”.

Devotees of M.C. Escher’s prints will remember his works employing tesselation patterns of ‘opposite elements, like, say birds and fish, and flat 2D shapes alternating with rounded 3D shapes, like the crocodlians in “Reptiles”  (1943) that crawl out of a book illustration into the ‘real’ space of the artist’s desktop, and back into surface flatness, an infinite cycle of metamorphosis— the ancient tetrapod invasion of the land.

Williams’ heady mixture of illusionism (in his commercial imagery, deconstructed and recontextualized) and pure abstraction (from his predilection for bright colors and strong; graphic patterns) may suggest Pop and proto-pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Stuart Davis, and even at times, Fernand Léger, who enjoyed the brash modernity of postwar American culture. Williams’ wryly humorous titles —e.g., “Chaos has a way of finding you,” Quietly yearning for what you don’t have while dreading losing what you do,” “Short con, long odds,”  “Objectively better, subjectively worse,”  and Bendzamine” (a jokey version of the name of an oral anesthetic)—poke fun at artistic pretentiousness while the extraordinary craftsmanship of the paintings proves that the artist takes the game and the work seriously. While the large works deftly interweave their representative and abstract elements, the smaller paintings are more abstract and intimate, and because of their smaller scale—think of Paul Klee— and more subdued palettes, seem addressed to the solo viewer, presenting surfaces that seem solidly packed, but threaten to disintegrate, like ice floes: “structure, but never symmetry. Order, but never resolution…. something that keeps shifting, something that doesn’t resolve.” Don’t miss these playful small treasures amid the other riches of this large show: “All work and no plagiarism,” The gates of perception,” “Thinking of you,” “Fate, and the “Einstein Tiles” series with their archaeological layers of tile floors or walls, partially exposing art and artifacts as bright as if freshly created.




HENNA VAINIO: OPPOSITE KNOTS Casemore Gallery, San Francisco

HENNA VAINIO: OPPOSITE KNOTS
Casemore Gallery, San Francisco



Eugène Ionesco’s play, The Bald Soprano (1950), with its chattering English couples, the Smiths and the Martins conversing in nonsensical non-sequiturs, is a classic of absurdist drama. It was inspired by the playwright’s efforts to learn English with a  bilingual French/English language book, English Without Pain (incidentally, Ionesco’s original title) full of instructive banal sentences that,, transposed into dramatic dialogue ,sound insane, like parrots’ monologues. The play ends with the repetition of its opening lines spoken by the Smiths, now repeated, in the Smiths’ home, by the Martins. The arbitrary nature of language and culture—or convention—has been the target of jokes in art before: Magritte’s primer paintings, which label generically rendered images that one might find a a child’s dictionary, with the wrong name, stand out: the image of a horse, for example, is labeled, instructively, la valise. Even rough-edged blotches of paint take on names in theseTeach-Yourself-Wittgensteinese language-and-being paradoxes.

The Finnish sculptor Henna Vainio, in her first solo exhibit at Casemore Gallery, might claim aesthetic kinship with Ionesco, as a fellow student of the complexities and contradictions of hybrid, polyglot English—although it should be noted that she attended art school in London, and her other work marshals other materials in a deconstruction of portraiture and figure sculpture. Here, n “Opposite Knots,” a group of eleven tinted and glazed ceramic sculptures, all from 2025, she spells out specific words that have caught her attention, transforming them into linear tangles, like unfurled typewriter ribbons. The pieces fall into two groups: six airy “Opposite Knots” wall pieces, three large and three small,  composed of a few layers of words aligned in different orientations; and four densely packed pedestal sculptures, suggesting industrial or architectural constructions in geometric forms, 

Knots hold things together, and Vainio’s opposite knots are flattened arrays of superimposed words that are barely legible, though they make for wonderful linear abstractions in the Brice Marden mold .“Opposite Knots (Stop)” repeats its peremptory command, which we associate with LED traffic signage, in looping letters, with the clay possibly extruded and slip-joined, that suggest willow branches or other woodfcrafts, the archaic visual sspect contradicting the urgency of its automated message. “No Net (peach)” and “No Net (blue)” simulate open-form weavings, in  vertical and horizontal formats, respectively, replete with the catenary droop of hanging yarn or rope, repeating—persevarating—the single word ‘no.’ No exit, no escape; everything not mandatory is forbidden. The three smaller “Opposite Knots” pieces, each sixteen inches square,  pair linguistic opposites, held together as if by magnetic polarities: ‘the you’ ln “Opposite Knots (You)” iinks with ‘me; ‘“Give)’ with ‘take; “Yes:” with ‘no.’; and (More)” with ‘less. What better metaphors for our current overly complicated culture of contradiction and flooded zone?

Four pedestal-sized sculptures, all under two feet square, are dense. compact, hedge-like arrays of words in the geometric forms of square or cube, rectangular prism (extended cube) and octahedron (pyramid)—skeletonized down to their wintry semiotic bare branches. ”Doubt Janus” is a vertical layer of letters, like a billboard scaffolding, the opposite faces of which say ‘yes,’ referring to the two-faced Roman god of doorways and transitions, Janus (hence, January), looking forward and backward, and perhaps, for modern neurotics, the god of second thoughts and over-thinking. The interlocked letters of the cubic (but off-kilter) “Win” suggest strength in unity, but also, carried to extremes,  paralysis and stasis, while the impenetrable verbal thicket of “Tender Change” suggests that money—legal tender—is both a magical protean substance capable of assuming any form, and a potential trap. Finally, “Anti-Age,” with its pyramidal form suggesting both campfires and the crushing monuments of pharaohs, suggests that the anti-aging properties of modern cosmetics and surgery have limited power against the flow of time and life’s oxidations.—if we choose to read subtextual moralizing lessons into these witty contemporary artifacts.




Wayne Armstrong, "Between Here and There," Manna Gallery, to Feb. 14

WAYNE ARMSTRONG: BETWEEN HERE AND THERE
Manna Gallery

It is almost incomprehensible to us today, but landscape paintings a genre or subject idid not exist in European art until fairly recently—a few hundred years ago—until the Romantic era. Before then, the natural world was seen as a stage set for various holy or allegorical dramas, but gradually the backdrop came to the fore as scientific rationalism prevailed over religious mystery, and individualism superseded communitarianism, to the displeasure of the novelist Leo Tolstoy, who saw art’s role as fostering religious feeling, and the critic John Ruskin, who coined the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ to attack the ‘falseness’ of aesthetic subjectivity.

The title of Wayne Armstrong’s landscape painting show, Between Here and There, may remind viewers of Tolkien’s subtitle for The Hobbit, or Paul Klee’s definition of a kine as a dot that went for a walk. It also defines the traditional esthetic view of art as an adventurous journey through obstacles an trials. Armstrong’s dozen-plus oils on canvas, all made in 2025, take the viewer on a journey into the California landscape that inspired them—note the blue and gold palette—and, the artist’s mind, perceiving and organizing the overwhelming and contradictory sensory data of real life into maps of painterly emotion. The Oakland artist, now retired after a long career teaching art, and impressively prolific, expresses what many Bay Areans feel about our famously scenic region: “How lucky am I to always find something in these e environments to inspire me.” 

Armstrong’s commitment to inspiration and the painting process place him within the Abstract Expressionist tradition, but his interest in landscape allies him with the Bay Area Figuration artists who returned to examining and interpreting the external world; Richard Diebenkorn, for example, felt that pure attraction had become too easy: a trap for creative sterility. The medium-sized and large paintings presented here may have their roots in what some art viewers consider the “creed outworn”—to quote or misquote  Wordsworth—of modernist painting, but Armstrong’s landscapes/mindscapes, with their almost geological slipping planes and metamorphic structures echoing Cézanne, de Kooning, Guston, and Thiebaud, belie the dictates of art fashion and marketing. 

While some of the paintings are entitled to suggest specific locations (“Hidden Valley,” “White Bridges Road”), the majority of the titles. including “Between Here and There,” “That Lies Between,” “The Surrealist Picnic,” “Not San Andreas Fault,” “A Collection of Ethereal Thoughts,”  and “Proverbial Setting” playfully assert their independence from traditional realism with imaginatively extrapolated  images striking in their aesthetic reality and rightness. The artist who created “A Landscape Indifferent to the Rules” can only have done so by imbibing the rules so completely that violating them in order to pursue an internal vision without plunging into chaos became not only possible, but a kind of artistic mandate.

Armstrong’s ostensibly aerial views of the landscape, with the horizon lines and swaths of sky raised to the top of the paintings, render the ground planes composing most of the canvas a field—both literally and metaphorically—for improvisation; they suggest geologic cross-sections as well as quilts or magic lands of counterpane, or manuscripts and maps—or all of the above. There is the relative realism of the rocky cliffs in “A Collection of Ethereal Thoughts” and “What Lies Between” and the verdant foothills of “Not San Andreas Fault” loosens into the jumble of hillocks of “Hidden Valley.”  More abstracted, ambiguous landscapes emerge in the virtuosic works, “A Landscape Indifferent to the Rules,” “Between Here and There,” “The Surrealist Picnic,” and “White Bridges Road,” each one an aesthetic adventure. Wherever you go, there you are, as the folk wisdom of the 1970s intoned.







 















David Deweerdt, "Excessive Body," at Ryan Graff Contemporary, San Francisco

In Roger Corman’s 1963 sci-fi horror movie, “X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,”  Ray Milland plays a scientist, Dr Xavier, who discovers a serum that gives him X-ray vision. At a cocktail party he is able to see through the clothing of gyrating dancers, but the vision intensifies alarmingly. His eyes go inky black and madness ensues. There are some things Man is meant not to see or know!

The Belgian artist David Deweerdt has happily evaded such punishment, exhibiting his penetrating figure paintings in Belgium and France for the past twenty-five years, and showing for the second time at Ryan Graff Contemporary. “Excessive Vision,” a collection of eighteen works executed on on Mylar, a plastic paper, presents solitary nudes partially fully denuded of flesh. While they recall the plaster flayed figures (écorchés) that academic painters used to learn anatomy, following the precedents of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Andreas Vesalius, or the contemporary plastinated cadavers of Gunther Von Hagens or the morgue-sourced art-historical pastiches of Joel-Peter Witkin, sensitive, triggerable viewers should be advised that the artist’s subcutaneous “body envelopes” of muscles, tendons, bones and viscera are not literal, but stylistic. Dew
eerdt’s knowledge of anatomy merges with painterly improvisations to evoke the feeling of the thing, bypassing the bother of literal illustration, to paraphrase the expressionist painter, Francis Bacon. Dew
eerdt:

My characters are mediums, … only pretexts... I try to produce a sensation, based on on what the character exudes and… something awakening in the viewer.. For many years, I have painted physical differences and deformities by questioning the aesthetic norms of … current Western societies. Today, my work questions Man in his paradoxes … [through] a new aestheticism, a new approach to the pictorial representation of the body.

Deweerdt’s untitled “excessive bodies” are painted in acrylic and ink glazes onto sheets of vertical-format 100x70-mm white mylar, and mounted to the walls, unframed, a few inches apart. There is no apparent sequence or narrative; we interpret each portrait individually, and interpret them as we can. At the same time, the works are so closely spaced , each on its clinical white backdrop, that we cannot forget the array, which exceeds the sum of its parts to form a sobering yet beautiful procession.

Several paintings clearly derive from figure studies. “Unitlted (02)” and “Untitlled (14)” depict a large-bellied man of middle age standing in profile and seen from the rear, respectively, cropped at the neck and knees, and thus headless. Rendered in a warm palette of siennas, earthy reds and oranges that suggest both muscle and fat, complemented by patches of icy, brilliant blue, we may be reminded of the temperature differentials revealed by infrared thermal imaging (à la Predator, to cite a nonmusical example) “(04)” and “(16)” present, respectively, hunched and slumping figures of a younger male adopting studio poses that express despair or remorse, and will be familiar to devotees of Rodin. “05” and “(13)” depict young females, respectively, kneeling and standing, but again cropped and incomplete, with fiery emanations that suggest ectoplasmic eruptions. “(07)” further challenges our notions of bodily image with a figure seen from the back, kneeling, legs crossed, and hands positioned as if bound, so that the limbs resemble flippers, and, with the head submerged behind the hill of his upper back, suggesting some flattened, fleahy sea turtle minus its shell.

Hybrid figures that are partly skeletal or partly animal animal suggest the medical specimen bottle and the carnival sideshow. The disembodied skulls and vertebrae in “(01), “(12),” and ”36)” remain mysteriously alive with painterly color and energy, as do the eviscerated female torso in “(03)” and the scapula-batwing form creature or specimen in “(10),” and the hung-beef carcasses of “(09),” reminiscent of slaughterhouse-pathos works by Rembrandt, Soutine and Bacon (aptly named), a cheerful pessimist who was fond of reminding artistic London drinking pals like Lucian Freud, “You have only to consider the meat on your plate.”

Deweerdt’s gravitational dance of attraction-repulsion is perfectly calibrated to hold us in orbit around these strange bodies that are secular, unsentimental contemporary counterparts of Renaissance memento mori. paintings and medieval transi sculptures. They are bracing stuff—perhaps even medicine—to awaken us from our dogmatic slumber in these inhuman—and potentially post-human— times.