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Artists Gallery Fort Mason

Stephanie Peek, Annette Corcoran, Adrienne Defendi

Saturday, Nov 12, 2011

1 p.m.

Stefanie Peek’s work examines the transient, fragile nature of life while serving as a reminder of the permanence of art. Her oil paintings are a unique hybrid of the classic still life and modern abstraction: they are at once technical studies of the effect of light and dark on a flower, and, in their careful, detailed study, also come to symbolize the ability of art to capture that which otherwise inevitably decays.

Annette Corcoran, a California native, discovered her love for working with clay 38 years ago. In her decades of relentless experimentation with the medium, two distinct forms emerged in her work: the teapot and the bird. Corcoran merges these two forms in ways that are both surprising and full of whimsy. Her work plays with the strange duality between the stable and static nature of the teapot form and the moving, living character of birds.

Adrienne Defendi’s series of photographs, aptly entitled Remembrance, provide a poignant exploration of the decay of monumentality but also of the powerful ways in which art can sometimes revive art. Her work focuses primarily on Italian monuments, sculptures and statues that, despite their past grandeur, are often overlooked in the commotion of our contemporary lives. Her black-and-white photographs reinvigorate the long-forgotten power of these monuments and in doing so evoke the grand historical narratives surrounding them that are too-often ignored.