GALLERY ROUTE ONE EXHIBITIONS:
1) Latino Photography Project: She Inspires Me; Nine Latina Photographers and the Women Who Inspire Them / Ella Me Inspira: Nueve Fotógrafas Latinas y las Mujeres que las Inspiran
2) Marie-Luise Klotz, Connected Earth
3) Jenny-Lynn Hall, Diary

On exhibit Saturday, October 31 through Sunday, December 6
Virtual Artist Reception and Artist Talks: Sunday, November 1, 3pm

Exhibitions are viewable online, as well as in person
www.galleryrouteone.org

Project Space
Latino Photography Project: She Inspires Me; Nine Latina Photographers and the Women Who Inspire Them
An exhibition of images by Gallery Route One’s Latino Photography Project, She Inspires Me features iconographic portraits of local Bay Area women in a documentary project produced with the support of the West Marin Fund.

Gallery Route One’s Latino Photography Project is pleased to present “She Inspires Me: Nine Latina Photographers and the Women Who Inspire Them,” an exhibition of photographic portraits of North Bay women in positions of leadership. For the past two years, LPP students have captured images of leading community women. Among others, we are introduced to Esther Vidrio Tejeda through Ana Maria Ramirez’s photograph of Esther holding her wedding portrait. Esther is a leader and a godmother to many locals from her home town of Atemajac Mexico. Jessica Oliva has created a striking image of Madeline Hope, a West Marin artist and community leader.

The culmination of a special documentary project supported by a grant from the West Marin Fund, the exhibit explores the nature of women’s leadership as experienced not only by each photographer, but by the women who inspire them as well. Common to all their stories are the myriad external and internal obstacles women continue to face, whether familial, societal, legal or cultural, as they discover distinctly individual paths to empowerment.

Accompanying the black and white images of these courageous] women will be essays by the photographers about each of their subjects, the text to be presented in both Spanish and English. Available at the exhibit will be copies of a commemorative bilingual book containing all of the portraits and their related essays, these contributing to a vital dimension of West Marin history. Sales from the book will benefit the project.

Gallery Route One initiated the Latino Photography Project seventeen years ago with the support of the West Marin Literacy Services. The LPP students have since then met weekly to learn digital photography and to photograph together, and over the years have become the documentarians for the Latino community of West Marin. In this unique program, students not only learn photography but also acquire English language skills. The Project has rapidly expanded into a nexus of Latino-Anglo collaboration and cross-cultural learning, including the stories and visual images which contribute to the bridging of two distinct cultures through shared knowledge.

She Inspires Me contributes an additional portfolio to the large body of LPP work which has previously been shown in numerous exhibits in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as in publications and venues throughout the county. Panel discussions, story-telling, dances, community mole dinners, celebrations and rituals continue to stem from these vital collaborations. Over the course of seventeen years, fifty photographers have served as the story-tellers and documentarians of the life of the Latino community in West Marin. Among the most recent participants in the Latino Photography Project are the exhibiting photographers of She Inspire Me: Agustina Martinez, Ana Maria Ramirez, Beatriz Gomez, Gisela Alvarado, Isela Orozco, Jessica Oliva, Maricela Mora, Rosa Rodriguez, and Teresa Gutierrez.

Center Gallery

Marie-Luise Klotz: Connected Earth
An exhibition of photographs which consider the extent to which our planet is deeply connected as a single organism that is whole, but which is frequently perceived by humankind as a collection of separate entities.

Marie-Luise Klotz is a photographer and visual artist who specializes in combining environmental photography with her fine art process. Her work is rooted in a deep care for the environment and the natural world. This concern prompts her to utilize imagery found in nature, creating metaphors which depict natural phenomena in their relation to the human condition.

The photographs in Connected Earth consider how our planet is deeply connected, forming a single organism that is whole in and of itself, but which is frequently perceived by humankind as a collection of separate entities. A forest functions as an invisible network in which trees communicate, warn and nourish each other through their root system. Clouds and waterways form the same recurring patterns on micro and macro levels. This body of work contemplates how, within nature, our perception of individuality and separateness may not only be false, but may hinder the efforts of our own species to survive as a global population in trying times.

Annex
Jenny-Lynn Hall: Diary
A series of paintings focused on the relentless procession of time, as portrayed through sea/skyscapes which are expressed in reference to the rapid and irrevocable sociopolitical change of contemporary times.

Inspired by daily trips to the ocean and the minute temporal variations which characterize the sea, Jenny-Lynn Hall’s artwork reflects upon the nature of time itself. She suggests that with the onset of COVID-19 protocols and “shelter in place” mandates, days seems to accelerate and blend into each other, while irrevocable sociopolitical changes now seem to characterize our world. Addressing how these transformations may affect our lives even after the COVID era, the paintings in this exhibit are about the relentless procession of time.

Reminiscent of the Bergsonian notion of time as “duration,” Hall uses dialectics to build a visual lexicon in personal terms. Multiple layers of plaster and paint invoke the passing of time as energy is dispersed, created and renewed. Describing time as a subjective realm of opposing states, she writes, “Opposites exist in the same moment, in the same image, and engender uncertainty: creation and destruction, lightness and substance, stars and Earth. In my recent work, strong texture is used to construct skyscapes addressing and merging the dualism between sky and geological forms.”

Hall has specialized in texture-driven, abstract painting, realized in both plaster and oils. Challenging the notion that there is a necessary division between the decorative and fine arts, she makes large-scale pieces that create an environment; these concepts are also worked through in pieces of small scale. While living in Italy, she developed a painting technique that combines painting, drawing, and lime plaster, allowing her to build a personal vocabulary while taking advantage of the structural integrity and historical richness of ancient building materials.

For the past five years she has been inspired by the transcendental quality found in nature, as well as its capacity to provoke feelings of both profound solemnity and unpredictable strength. “When looking at one of my pieces, whether monumental or modest in scale, I want you to sense that the particular and universal are accessible to you, and present in every living thing, every person that you see. To recognize unfathomable uniqueness while understanding our interconnectedness is an underlying ses light, texture and dimension to create experience.”