"Global Entry" Oolong Gallery's Inaugural Exhibition

June 4 - July 23 2022

Grand Opening 5 pm - 8 pm June 4

Private Preview 5 pm - 8 pm June 2 rsvp here

349 N Coast Hway 101 Solana Beach CA 92075

@oolongallery | [email protected]

     Oolong is pleased to present "Global Entry" an inaugural exhibition to the art world stage, featuring an international collection of thirteen prominent and emerging artists. The show brings together core mediums in contemporary art: video, sculpture, painting, illustration, mixed media, and installation work. "Global Entry" was born from the doldrums of the pandemic and thus focuses on pleasure, convergence and the artists' mastery of a quarantine studio practice. All thirteen artists have been making work for more than a decade or two and have exhibited in major cities and galleries around the world.      — Eric Laine

• Sara Carter — veteran abstract painter from Texas, studied at SF Art Institute in early 90s

• Bas Louter — Dutch mixed media artist published in "The Age of Collage, Vol 3" (Gestalten)

• Kinga Kielczynska — Rietveld Academy artist from Poland, nature vs artifice in video art

• Timothy Ernst — dark paintings of SoCal nocturnal urban and desert settings, Tulane MFA

• Alika Cooper — acclaimed LA artist originally from San Diego, showing bronzes and painting

• Carlos Valencia — NY bred freehand graphite work on paper, Filipino American from SF

• Fay Ray — represented by Shulamit Nazarian, aluminum sculptures inspired by the Mojave 

• Robbie Simon —  CA painter of flat abstract graphic compositions, bright unique palettes

• Carrie Marill — Cornell MFA,  paintings of modern art in relation to folk art and sculpture

• Jason David — wood sculptor Art Inst. Chicago, fine line between figuration and landscape 

• Griselda Rosas — needle thread work painting from Tijuana, teaches at SD State, in MCASD

• Matthew C. Green —  thick paintings flirt with abstract pattern & figuration, UC Lecturer

• Michael Decker — prolific CA mixed media artist, sculptor, and former Mike Kelley assistant

Sara Carter, installation view from "The Depths" at de boer Gallery 11/21 - 1/22

Sara Carter is a Houston-born abstract painter based in Austin, Texas. Carter studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1990s, receiving her BFA degree in 1994, and remained in the Bay Area until 2017, when she returned to Austin. Carter sees the works as embodiments of her psychic state, emitting a ‘frequency’ that induces an energy vibration in sympathetic, attuned viewers.

Sara Carter’s paintings have been exhibited at de boer, Los Angeles, CA; Edward Cella Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, CA; di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA; Octavia Art Gallery, Houston, TX and New Orleans, LA; Graystone Gallery, San Francisco, CA; the Monterey Museum of Art La Miranda, Monterey, CA; Aureus Contemporary, USA; Octavia Gallery, Bath, United Kingdom. They have been acquired by di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art; Black Stone Minerals Company, Houston, TX; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Commack Expansion, Commack, NY; and many other public, corporate, and private collections.

Bas Louter “The House that Lee Built” 2021, transfers on canvas, 48 x 36 in  

Bas Louter is a Dutch artist living and working in LA: when looking at the floating, muted images by Bas Louter it is hard to see them as distillations of imagery taken from print advertising and pop culture. Yet that is exactly what they are. They are images reconfigured and transferred onto canvas into work that veer closer to drawing or print-making than collage (from "Age of Collage Vol 3" published by Gestalten).

Louter established his career as an acclaimed graphite artist but has moved more into transfer works in recent years.  He was born in Alkmaar the Netherlands, attended Rijksakademie in 2001-2002 and is currently a Los Angeles resident. His work is in several private collections in the Netherlands, Germany and the United States. He has had solo exhibitions at Ambach & Rice LA, Falko Alexander Gallery Cologne, and Autocenter Berlin, Germany. 

Kinga Kielczynska, video still from "courtesy of infinity / bee" 2021

Kinga Kielczynska was born in Poland and received her BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, followed by an MFA from the Sandberg Institute, also in Amsterdam. Her multidisciplinary art practice reflects upon our relationship with nature. Her mediums include video, drawing, text, and installation. Several of her projects are centered around the Bialowieza primeval forest in Poland, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Her work has been shown at Exile Gallery, Berlin; Manifesta 12, Palermo; Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; MOMA, Warsaw; Mediamatic, Amsterdam; Aether, Sofa, SAVVY, Berlin; FOAM, Amsterdam; De Appel, Amsterdam; among others. She is represented by the Exile Gallery in Vienna, Austria.

Timothy Ernst "High Desert Afternoon" 2022, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in

New Orleans and LA raised Timothy Jason Page Ernst makes paintings as a way of life focused around quintessential Southern Californian and Lynchian themes. The works show nocturnal urban, desert, and interior compositions that are emboldened by intense contrasts of light and vibrant color, materialized in surreal American imagery. Ernst finds a language with common things often found in SoCal-used cars, city and urban vistas, empty lots and buildings, calm afternoon siestas indoors, unmade beds, etc, that evoke the presence of people. 

Ernst holds a MFA from Tulane where he was awarded a fellowship and scholarship for painting. He has previously shown at The Riverside Art Museum, Royale Projects LA, The Gresham Art Gallery San Bernardino, Alternative Art+ Film Space Joshua Tree, Art + Industry Palm Springs.

Alika Cooper, install shot from Wet Suit series 2020, bronze, 4 x 10 x 16

The use of classic patterns, fabrics, tone, and color set against themes of sexuality, beauty, and unease in a duality is endemic to the work of artist Alika Cooper. Cooper's art aims to reverse the way we view traditional landscapes and the human form, encouraging the viewer to observe the body as a landscape and the landscape as a "more ambiguous line between abstraction and representation."

Alika Cooper lives and works in Los Angeles but is originally from San Diego. She received both her MFA and BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Solo and two­-person exhibitions include Madeleine Cake, SITUATIONS, New York; Wet Suits, Good Weather Gallery, Little Rock; Have A Sex, fort gondo, Saint Louis; Buoy, Odd Ark, Los Angeles; The Disguised Edge MULHERIN, Toronto; UPBRAID Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and GLASS Eleanor Harwood Gallery, San Francisco. She was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant, the Magic­ Trillium Press Yesland Prize, and the Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fellowship. She has participated in The Viewing Program at The Drawing Center, New York; MOTION PICTURE at The Saint Louis Art Museum; and was Artist in Residence at Galleria Studio Legale in Marzano Appio, Italy. 

Carlos Valencia "Untitled" 2020, graphite on paper, 48 x 36 in

Former NY now LA based artist Carlos Valencia delves into the meaning of cultural pictures from cartoons to photography to text based print in his studio practice. The labor of manipulating and rendering these images in freehand-textured graphite works on paper adds new meaning to given sources, which could otherwise be disregarded, consumed, or discarded.

Valencia is originally from SF and holds a BA from San Jose State. He has had two solo shows with the Journal Gallery, now called The Tennis Elbow. He has been in group shows at Primary Projects, Miami, Celine Artist Project in Paris, Patrick Parrish Gallery NY, NADA Art Fairs with Eric Laine of Oolong Gallery. His singular works on paper have been widely collected.

Fay Ray "Seaweed" 2021, aluminum, 102 x 44 in

Los Angeles-based artist Fay Ray explores the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity through high-contrast, monochrome photomontages and metallic sculpture. For her three-dimensional works, Fay Ray compiles cast aluminum objects, bored volcanic rocks, wire, chain, and natural materials into suspended sculptural masses. Ray’s sculptures and collages hint at the presence of a rematerialized body through a mysterious yet systematic organization of abstract form.

 Fay Ray (b. 1978, Riverside, CA) received her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2002, and her MFA from Columbia University in 2005. She has exhibited at galleries within the US and internationally, including Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2016 & 2018); Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris (2016); Louis B James Gallery, New York (2016); JOAN, Los Angeles (2015); Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles (2012); and Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills (2011) and New York (2007), among others.

Robbie Simon "We Sing Between Two Mountains" 2022 acrylic on canvas, maple frame 30 x 40 in

Robbie Simon is an artist and designer working in Los Angeles, CA. His work revolves around flat abstract graphic compositions that resist simple interpretation or functionality, often powered by bright and unique color palettes. The compositions invite the viewer to consider the mindfully crafted juxtapositions that can drift between finessed mirages of figurative concepts and jovial 2-D sculptural graphics. The overall practice comfortably weaves between commercial and fine art applications of this aesthetic language , ranging from exhibitions of paintings to event branding, on to album art and even apparel. Robbie has deep roots in the music community and is a member of the Reverberation Radio collective. Simon has shown at The Lodge LA; Pilgrim Tokyo, Japan; The Slow Bali, Indonesia; Galleri Geo Bergen, Norway; Cirrus Gallery LA; Subliminal Projects LA, Edward Hooper House Museum Nyack NY.

Carrie Marill "Surfy Surfy" 2022, acrylic on linen, 60 x 48 in

Carrie Marill is a meticulous artist, sophisticated and considered in her techniques and also in the concepts that underpin each of her artworks and series. Drawing on a broad variety of inspirations, her paintings investigate the definition of ‘high’ Modern art in relationship to craft and folk art. As the artist has remarked: “pattern is an inherent part of my artistic practice, it triggers the creation of new work.” Painting on raw linen canvas as well as shaped supports, Marill pushes the interplay of formalist elements of line and shape as well as the loose boundary between painting and sculpture.

Marill has an MFA from Cornell University and BA in painting from San Francisco State University. Her work is shown nationally and has been reviewed in New American Paintings, Wired Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Modern Painters, LA weekly and the LA Times. Marill is represented by Lisa Sette Gallery in Phoenix and past shows include: Chandler Center for the Arts AZ, Conduit Gallery Dallas TX, Jen Bekman Gallery NY.

Jason David "Cutoffs" 2019 wood, paint, glue 65.5 x 27 x 9 in

"Mirrored reflections, process and decay. The fine line between figuration and landscape. These are the elements that run throughout this body of work."

Jason David, born in Los Angeles, is a LA based artist. He first started painting in Florence, Italy at La Scoula Lorenzo De Medici. He holds an BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. David later studied with local sculptors in The Bush residency outside Johannesburg, South Africa. His work has been exhibited nationally, including at Flowers Gallery, New York, Jail Gallery, Sabina Lee Gallery, Arturo Bandini, Harris Gallery, 16:1, The Lodge Gallery Los Angeles, The Muse Gallery Arizona, Internationally Flowers Central London and Mário Sequeira Gallery Portugal. 

Griselda Rosas"Colonialism" 2020, embroidery over faux ostrich skin, 37 x 25 in

Born and raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Griselda Rosas is a visual artist whose practice encompasses textile art, collage, painting, drawing and curating as she explores themes of cultural hybridity as they relate to identity. Her work is guided by her experiences living and working between San Diego and Tijuana in the US/Mexico border region, an area in constant migratory flux. Through the study and deconstruction of symbols in colonial history, Rosas’ work is a wide- lensed study of the entrenched amalgamation of religions and cultures in modern day Mexico. Rosas' studio is located in the infamous Bread and Salt Collective building in downtown San Diego, and she is represented by Quint Gallery in La Jolla. Her upcoming work will be on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD).

Matthew Clifford Green "Under the Marquee" 2017, oil on linen, 9 x 12 in 

Matthew Clifford Green was born in 1982 (Puyallup, WA), and currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He has shown at Nicelle Beauchene (New York), Artist Curated Projects (Los Angeles), Fourteen30 Contemporary (Portland), Capital Gallery (San Francisco), and Artist Curated Projects (Los Angeles), among others.  His pictures often portray a raw cast of characters in various psychologically charged environments. Nestled within fields of discordantly vibrant color and pattern his figures vibrate across highly textured surfaces emoting deep hallucinatory narratives. In addition to his studio practice, he runs a record label called Radical Documents. Founded in 2017, the label focuses on unique, experimental, and obscure transmissions of sound from a wide range of artists. 

Michael Decker "Ghosts” 2022 found packaging, clear tape, resin on wood panel 35 x 24 in

Decker is a multi-disciplinary artist with a penchant for collecting mundane objects and breathing life into them. His aesthetic explores the peculiarities of American consumerism through the repurposing of daily objects. 

The artist lives and works in LA and holds a BFA from CalArts with notable past works exhibited at: Gavin Brown Enterprise NY, Odd Ark LA, Ambach and Rice LA, Pomona College Museum of Art, Actual Size Gallery LA, Human Resources LA, ForYourArt LA, Night Gallery LA, Zic Zerp Galerie Rotterdam, Steve Turner Contemporary LA, Dan Graham Gallery LA.