Opening Reception: September 7th | 5pm–8pm

Municipal Bonds is delighted to announce our inaugural exhibition Openness,  presenting four important female artists: Austin Thomas, Bara Jichova Tyson, Danielle Dimston, and Yvette Taminiau.

Openness features complementary bodies of work, wherein each artist investigates a singular direction, inspired by materials and their consequences: Austin Thomas with ghost marking monoprints; Bara Jichova Tyson with analog collages; Danielle Dimston with chiaroscuro watercolors; and Yvette Taminiau with associative newsprint paintings.

Each distinct inquiry develops as a passageway through the work—an openness—driven by a point of view from the artist’s relationship with her chosen medium. The material language conveys a shared exploration and interplay between exterior and interior, sensibility and surprise, experience and perception. Herein, openness is about freedom, imagination, transparency. It is also referential to the premiere exhibition of Municipal Bonds: yes, we are open!

Austin Thomas has developed a form of monoprinting that employs ghost marking, in which she prints several times on the same piece of found paper: book covers and pages, ledger sheets, and loose-leaf notebooks. Her monoprints feature shapes, sometimes overlapping and sometimes in translucent colors, made by using craft foam and templates she borrows from a metalwork shop. The resulting images have an improvisational buoyancy, combining spontaneity and precision, and referring to a range of modernist styles, including Russian Constructivism, Minimalism, and Color Field painting.

Bara Jichova Tyson’s The Hatch House Series, a group of analog collages, is inspired by the experimental Hatch House cottage on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and is a complement to her award-winning short film. Designed by Jack Hall in 1960 for Robert Hatch, an editor of The Nation, and his wife Ruth, a painter, the Hatch House was a sanctuary for artists and intellectuals in the 1960s, like Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy, and the Boston Brahmins. Hand-cut and collaged photographs of the cottage reference a place in time: a fragile, amateur structure living at the cultural crossroads between DIY “work of the brain” and the rising tide of American bourgeois, consumerist values.

Danielle Dimston’s watercolor series, Chiaro/Scuro, is inspired by the Italian term for light-dark. Each work in the series is created with a minimalist palette, undulating lines, and an equal respect for both painted and negative space. She captures a luminescent gradation anew in every piece, with a long or short interval of shape, like a subway train passing through a tunnel, experiencing intermittent light and dark. At the same time, there is a levity with drips and drops of paint, as if to show the acceptance of imperfections alongside the precision of brushstrokes.

Yvette Taminiau’s newsprint paintings comprise a dialogue between the artist and the page. She transforms newspaper pages in an associative manner, responding to the images, headlines, articles, and the layout of the page. Her approach is intuitive and suggestive—while her academic background, with its strong reliance on analytical frameworks, is reflected in her selection of topics and articles from the newspapers. Dutch, French, and English news act as her referential canvas, from economic issues to political coverage to cultural icons.

GALLERY STATEMENT
Municipal Bonds—our name as well as our purpose—is a symbolic play on words. Municipalities form and encourage a concentration of people and ideas, where bonds are the connections and strengths between us. To that effect, we have launched Municipal Bonds, a contemporary art gallery with a nomadic exhibition program devoted to emerging and established artists, international in scope and cross-cultural in intention. Founded in Oakland, California by Emily Miller, Municipal Bonds seeks to enhance artists’ support, development, and exposure; and to increase the diversity of art showcased for the betterment of community, collectors, and creativity.

Learn more about the gallery and Openness here.