The opening reception for my current exhibition Confluence: Reflections on Our Shifting Environment at the Marin Art and Garden Center (Ross, CA) was a blast – it’s always best to share the artwork with visitors in person!

The show features three artists - Arminee Chahbazian, Laura Corallo-Titus and myself – who bring awareness to our shifting environment, and our changing perceptions of it, through innovative techniques in drawing, painting, photography and sculpture.

The *Confluence* artists - Arminee Chahbazian, Laura Corallo-Titus and Cindy Stokes

The exhibition runs through August 28, so if you’re in the Bay Area I hope you’ll visit before then (details here)!

Here are some highlights from the reception and the exhibition generally - thanks to all who attended!

In the main gallery, my installation Close to Home anchors one end of the room. Developed specifically for this site, this installation considers the breadth of man’s relationship to fire - from romance to utility to threat. It incorporates images from family campfires and sketches made with ink ground from burned trees from the CZU complex fire near Big Basin. Together these are built into flames and embers rising high overhead, evocative of wildfire and reminding us of the ever-growing threat of them worldwide. The installation is approximately 25’ x 12’ x 2’, comprising pigment prints and charcoal drawings on paper with protective coatings, Reemay, magnets, and lighting.

Each of the artists gave a short talk describing the motivation and background of our work. I described the genesis of my Close to Home project - both the installation as well as the separate wall sculptures - based on my family campfires contrasted with the overwhelming San Francisco Bay Area wildfires of 2020 during COVID lockdowns.

In addition to the installation in the main gallery, I have a dozen wall sculptures made from my sculptural photographs of fire in the exhibition. These were variously inspired by ways we talk about fire and feelings evoked by the dynamic nature of flame itself. These pieces have names such as Fireline, Contained, Perpetual Motion, Imagining, and Breath.

Laura’s works are multi-media paintings that address the manner in which historic expectations of landscape painting have been hijacked by a more chaotic and disrupted visual conclusion.

Inspired by observations of natural phenomena, Arminée creates large multi-media imagery on paper to explore how recent environmental shifts modulate our desires for nature’s beauty and drama, leading to a sense of displacement. Her stone sculpture compositions on the table retain primal memory while offering narratives that shift with time, light and orientation, just as our own relationship to the earth does.

I so appreciate all who attended! Following are a few more gallery views from the day.

Taking pictures during one’s own reception is haphazard but I managed a selfie with friends from the Bay Area Photographers Collective (first picture) of which I’m a member.

And a special shoutout to Ann Trinca is owed (fourth picture, on the left), as she instigated this exhibition for the three of us with the Marin Art and Garden Center for its climate month theme.