Grace Colletta

The song you heard singing in the leaf

Andre Woodward

installations

Oolong Gallery

June 28 – July 23 2025

Wednesday – Saturday‎‎‎ ‎ 11 am – 5 pm

Opening June 28 6 – 8 pm

6030 La Flecha

Rancho Santa Fe CA 92067

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Rancho Santa Fe, CA – Oolong Gallery is proud to present "The song you heard singing in the leaf," a solo exhibition of local plein air work by second generation painter Grace Colletta. The title was chosen by the artist from a line in the poem “What Can I Say” by Mary Oliver. There will be an opening reception Saturday June 28 from 6–8pm at Oolong Gallery RSF.

Grace Colletta was born and raised in Encinitas, CA, where she currently lives. She studied art practice at UC Berkeley and earned an MFA in painting from Boston University in 2015. She has been an artist in residence at Mount Gretna School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, Cuttyhunk Island, and Inside-Out Art Museum. Her work is held in public collections at Inside-Out Art Museum in Beijing and Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

“I paint from observation, working outside in the landscape and refining in the studio. Through a combination of painting on the spot and referencing drawings, I translate what I see to evoke the feeling of being in a particular place. As I look and revise over time, memory of a place also informs the work.

When I go outside to paint, I revisit familiar places in my surroundings such as a pathway to a side yard or a tree outside my door. These everyday views become a starting point for studies of shape, light, and color. In observing how the light intensifies during different times of the day and shifts with the seasons, I am drawn in by the way a closed gate becomes a screen for unexpected, momentary shadow forms. The glimmer of light radiating through boards of a fence creates an abstract pattern that divides up the space and invites me to look closer. Among the fleeting and dynamic organic forms, I also find geometry, structure, and stillness. I am intrigued by the visual rhythms found in nature and the compositional curiosities they create within the rectangle of a canvas or panel. 

Over the past ten years, I have been tending to a backyard garden, planting vegetables and flowers, which has informed my painting practice. Through a cycle of working on the garden and then making paintings from the garden, a recurring theme for me has become the tension between the wildness of nature and a maintained landscape. Despite any of my attempts to shape, weed, or prune, the garden inevitably shapes itself, reaching and bending with the light, going to seed, and becoming more interesting than I could have designed. While the organic forms I am looking at are continually transforming, the built environment around me is also changing with time as my father builds a new fence, my mother lays bricks around the perimeter, and my brother mows the lawn. This body of work is rooted in my experiences outside at home and in my local surroundings around Encinitas, CA. Through observing and painting, I learn to bend with nature, slow down, and become more attuned to where I am standing. Through a sensitivity to the natural world and the process of painting, I seek to share an inner place of possibility and wonder."

CV

Rancho Santa Fe, CA – Oolong Gallery is proud to announce "installations," a site specific living and sound installation presentation by Andre Woodward. This will be the first presentation of its kind in the Oolong program and features indoor / outdoor pieces running parallel to Colletta's landscape / architecture oriented painting show. Woodward originally first exhibited his signature cube sculptures in San Diego (2009) at a project space called Spacecraft, run by artist Chris Puzio and featuring such sculptors as Matt Wedel, Christian Tedeschi, Andy Ralph, amongst others.

Andre Woodward is a Southern California artist. His work focuses on the intersection between nature, technology, and humanity, using a mixture of manmade and natural materials, inspired by the unique dynamics of the Southern California landscape. Woodward received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art from University of California, Irvine and a Master of Fine Art degree in Sculpture from California State University, Long Beach. He was presented with the Vision from the New California Award in 2011. His art has been featured in “The Language of Mixed Media Sculpture”, “My Green City” and on the covers of Sculpture Magazine and the most recent Visions from the New California catalog. His projects have been exhibited with Studio La Citta in Verona Italy, at the 18th Street Art Center, the Laguna Art Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, with solo exhibitions at the Huntington Beach Art Center, Whittier College, and Villa Montalvo. Andre Woodward is a Southern California artist whose work examines the very complicated relationship we have with nature. His work has been exhibited internationally.

CV

"Woodward casts trees in concrete, almost as a strange play on the traditions of bonsai. Combining his passion for biology and fine art, he has long been interested in the contemporary landscape that surrounds us: concrete parking lots pressing down the roots of trees, the façade of heavily manicured parks and neighborhoods, and the constant push and pull of negotiating an environment made up of both the natural and manmade. His sculptures nod to the cubes of Donald Judd, while foliage outgrowth interrupts the severity of Judd's minimalism. Woodward states, 'I think of the work in terms of a paradox, which leads to the gaining of a sort of spiritual awareness. The truth of the matter is that our human environment is dictated by a perpetual struggle for control for control between the human and natural environments, where at any given moment one or the other will have the advantage.'”

– Grace Kook Anderson

"I will be exhibiting a redwood slab sound sculpture with two accompanying cube tree wall pieces. The redwood piece is an amalgam of nature’s analog recordings (represented in the grains of the redwood and the growth of salt crystals) and digital recordings playing through the work. Formally the work alludes to mid-century design and while harking a reliance on digital technologies."

– Andre Woodward

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Opening Reception: Friday, June 28 from 6-8pm 

Exhibition Dates: 06/28—07/23, 2025

Location: Oolong Gallery, 6030 La Flecha, RSF, CA

Gallery Hours: Wed–Sat, 11AM–5PM | appointments advised w/ wider availability

Oolong Gallery

6030 La Flecha, Rancho Santa Fe, CA 92067

Telephone +1 858 229 2788  Mobile +1 917 340 0877

www.oolongallery.com