June 27 Vallejo/Vacaville Arts and Entertainment Source: At the di Rosa Center, exploring the ecology of mind and language

It is much more than the regular elements of the visual arts — color, form, line, shape, space, texture, and value.

By her account, San Francisco-based artist Isabelle Sorrell, the newest exhibit at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa’s Carneros region, “M is for Water,” explores the relationship between human consciousness and language.

Opening Saturday at the gallery on Highway 12 between Napa, the show, which continues to Oct. 6, is the latest in a series of exhibitions curated by Sorrell that probe the origins of language and its relation to human consciousness.

She has gathered together figurative and abstract works from a diverse group of 11 artists, as the exhibition, she said in a press statement, ponders the limits of “elemental materiality,” examining the roots of language where the different meanings of “water” and “mother,” for example, begin to diverge.

By one definition, elemental materiality appears to be at the intersection of ecotheory and the environmetnal arts and humanities, as described in the 2015 book by Jeffrey J. Cohen and Lowell Duckert, “Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire.”

In the exhibit, Sorrell may be striving to deconstruct elemental materiality as it challenges and offers a chance to rethink the relationship between consciousouness and language, in a sort of ecology of the mind — and a decentering of humans in the material world — that possibly will invigorate environmental ethics and materialism.

In the prepared statement, Sorrel said, “‘M’, believed to be one of the first letters of the Phoenician alphabet, had an antecedent in the Egyptian hieroglyph describing ‘water,’ and its history is intertwined with its mirror: ‘W.’ Words with a common etymology convey meanings that reveal the source of life in nature and humans alike …The letter ‘M’ reflects the sacredness of these shared origins: there is no life without water, there is no child without mother.”

Besides her own work, she curated pieces by Shiva Ahmadi, Mari Andrews, Mildred Howard, Paul Kos, Hung Liu, Cheryl Meeker, Susan Middleton, Gay Outlaw, J. John Priola, Isabelle Sorrell, Theodora Varnay Jones, and Wanxin Zhang.

The artists, in brief:

Shiva Ahmadi is an Iranian-American artist based in the Bay Area who uses a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, and animation to tell stories. She combines luminous colors and mystical beings with violent imagery, drawing attention to global issues such as migration, war, and brutality against marginalized peoples. She has had solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, and Asia Society Museum, New York. Ahmadi’s work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the  Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is a professor of art at the University of California, Davis.

Mari Andrews is known for delicate, haiku-like sculptures that she has been making for the past 20 years. Her three-dimensional drawings combine collected natural objects like seeds, leaves, moss, and stones with linear man-made materials, such as metal wire. She has had solo exhibitions at the Monterey Art Museum, Palo Alto Art Center, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco.

Paul Kos, a leading member of the Bay Area Conceptual Art movement since the 1960s, is best known for sculptural installations incorporating video, sound, and interactivity. Having received his MFA in 1967 from the San Francisco Art Institute, he went on to teach at the institution for more than 30 years. He has been the subject of major retrospectives at both di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. His work is included in public museum collections,  including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards, among them multiple National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

Hung Liu (1948-2021) was a renowned contemporary artist known for her powerful paintings based primarily on historical Chinese photographs, and installations addressing the racial and cultural complexities she witnessed upon immigrating to the United States at the age of 36. After receiving her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, she exhibited internationally at institutions, including the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. She was a professor of painting at Mills College, in Oakland, for many years and was the subject of solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and Oakland Museum of California.

Cheryl Meeker is a visual artist based in San Francisco whose work ranges from photography to installation, drawing, painting, archives, video, interactive web projects, and social sculpture, often touching on the fundamentals of sustenance in our environmentally destabilized world. Her ongoing activism with the housing and climate justice movements and recent work in the public library system inform her approach. She was one of the organizers of Capitalism Is Over! If You Want It.

San Francisco resident Susan Middleton is an artist, photographer, author, and educator specializing in the portraiture of rare and endangered animals, plants, sites, and cultures. She was chair of the Department of Photography at the California Academy of Sciences from 1982 to 1995, where she now serves as research associate. Her most recent book, “Spineless: Portraits of Marine Invertebrates, the Backbone of Life,” was published by Abrams in 2014. Middleton was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2009. Her photos have been exhibited and published throughout the world and is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art and the National Academy of Sciences.

Gay Outlaw is an American artist working in sculpture, photography, and printmaking. She is the recipient of awards and honors including SFMOMA’s SECA Award and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and elsewhere.

J. John Priola received his MFA from SFAI in 1987. His work has been shown in many exhibitions, including “In A Different Light,” Berkeley Art Museum and “Prospect ’96,” the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,  San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,  and the Art Institute of Chicago. Arena Editions published a monograph of his work in 1998.

Theodora Varnay Jones is a visual artist working in 2-D and 3-D mediums. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in public collections in the U.S., Hungary, Costa Rica, and Japan. She was born in Budapest and lives and works in San Francisco.

Wanxin Zhang is a Chinese-American sculptor based in San Francisco, known for his large-scale ceramic figures, formless ceramic structures, and bronze pieces. His works have been showcased in various international competitions and biennales, including The 22nd UBE Sculpture Competition in Japan, Taiwan Ceramics Biennale, and the Anren Biennale in China.

About the Center

The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art is a nonprofit art center and nature preserve specializing in the art of Northern California. At 5200 Sonoma Highway, on 217 acres at 5200 Sonoma Highway, it includes two large art galleries, a lake, birding opportunities, walking trails with vineyard views, outdoor sculptures, and picnic grounds. Besides exhibitions, the center maintains a permanent collection of notable works by artists with ties to the Bay Area from the mid-20th century to the early 2000s.

An opening reception on Saturday will welcome di Rosa patrons at 5:30 p.m., and the public from 6 to 7 p.m. Public reception $10 general admission, free for di Rosa members.

The center will host an artist panel discussion, moderated by Sorrel, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. July 13. The artists Kos, Zhang, Middleton, Andrews, and Outlaw will discuss their work and the exhibition themes. A $25 ticket includes gallery admission; free for members.

IF YOU GO

• What: “M is for Water”
• Where: The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, 5200 Sonoma Highway (between Napa and Sonoma)
• When: Saturday to Oct. 6
• Regular center hours: 11 a.m. 4 p.m. Thursday to Sunday
• Tickets: Free for ages 17 and under, free for educators with school ID, free for members; $17 seniors, military and students; $20 general (prices will increase after July 5)
• Online: www.dirosaart.org