Latitudes|Longitudes: Work by Isabelle Sorell

Text 'o-&-Figura
Curated by Rolando Castellon

29 July - 4 September 2010
Opening Reception Thursday July 29, 6-9 pm

Latitudes|Longitudes: Work by Isabelle Sorrell

Latitudes is the title of an artist book Isabelle worked on from 1986 to 2006, in which she created visual responses to poems by Bill Berkson.  Sorrell says she she choose Berkson's poems because they, "encompass the feeling of life in every cell, and hand out plain quotidian generosity."

Longitudes is the title of selected drawings and paintings that oscillate between abstraction and representation as they explore the relationship between the lines of French partarre gardens and the calligraphic brushstroke.

Born in France, Isabelle Sorrell is an American citizen who lives in California.  She graduated from l'Ecole de Sevres, Academie de Versailles in Fine Arts and Graphic Design, and from l'Ecole Corvisart, Academie du Paris in Graphic Design.  She studied Intaglio under Master Yasu Esaki.  She received an MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, at which time she studied with Bill Berkson.  She later attended New York University working on a special project for "Intaglio and Artist Books" with Krishna Reddy.

She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, at Pasadena Art Center (the Suisse Annex in La Tour de Peilz, Switzerland), at the Unversity of Lusanne, and at the American College of Leysin in Switzerland.  She has exhibited in France, Japan, Switzerland and the United States.  In 1991 she bought an intaglio printing press and in 1995 she founded Frontier Press.

Text'o-&-Figura
Curated by Rolando Castellon

Text'o-&-Figura is an international travelling exhibition that began at the National Gallery of Costa Rica in February 2010 and will continue to travel after Meridian to Lisbon and across Europe.  The show grows slightly with each exhibition, with each venue able to invite an additional number of participants.  In Castellon's own words:

"Text'o-&-Figura is an artist project about current graphic work from various countries.  Ninety artists were invited to participate with one work each.  The exhibition includes work that reflects the interrelation of language, body, and communication: figures that speak, text that flows, and symbolic gestures that inform.

From the drawn line to the gestural paint stroke, or from the imprinted digital mark to the written work; from an accusative social lament to a personal identity code; from a versified line to a cryptic graphic calligraphy or a mechanical publicity statement - these are some of the elements discussed in this project.  The small sized works in this series have been realized on paper, cardboard, plastic, or simply on the wall, echoing popular street graffiti. 

Text'o-&-Figura is not a didactic exercise about language and meaning, it is a collective graphic manifestation of expressive and artistic work from any point of view or culture."

Rolando Castellon is an artist, curator, and poet, co-founder of Galeria de la Raza, and former director of the Mary Porter Senson Art Gallery of the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Castellon made an indelible mark on the Bay Area as SFMOMA curator from 1972-81 during which, among other things, he invited the artist-directors of three prominant San Francisco-based alternative spaces - The Floating Museum (Lynn Hershman), Musuem of Conceptual Art (Tom Merioni), La Mamelle, Inc. (Carl Loeffler) - to program at the museum, highlighting their role as producers, promoters, and publishers.  Each exhibition touched on a similar aspect of their respective projects (including live events), while activating the transformed gallery space(s) from a zine library of correspondance art to the social function of a simulated bar environment.  He currently lives in Costa Rica and Lisbon.