Opening Reception: Saturday, October 20th | 5pm–8pm

Bass and Reiner Gallery is pleased to present Near Misses, an exhibition featuring recent works by Pittsburgh based artist Imin Yeh and San Francisco based artist Jon Gourley. Clever prints, quirky sculptures, and a nostalgic video installation litter the space with languages (written and visual,) finding moments of incongruity that both provide a clarity of meaning and comic relief.

The opaque and often hermetic language of contemporary art can rankle the average viewer, presenting as a means of exclusion and obscurance an inside joke that only a specific elite understand or have the guile to fake understanding convincingly. The methods most often employed by Yeh and Gourley (counterfeiting and wry wordplay) pose no such problem by allowing the viewer, at bare minimum, to comprehend that which they don’t “get.” To paraphrase Mark Twain, art and frogs both die if you dissect them.

Jon Gourley’s work primarily investigates failed communication, its poetics, and the ensuing tragicomedies. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his BA from the University of Iowa. He has exhibited at the Des Moines Art Center, Southern Exposure, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Queen’s Nails Projects. Originally, from Des Moines, IA, he currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Imin Yeh is an interdisciplinary and project-based artist, working in sculpture, installation, participatory events, and print. The projects use repetitive handcraft and mimicry as a strategy for exploring the issues around the unseen labor and production that lies behind our many unconsidered everyday objects. She holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco CA (2009), a Bachelor of Science Studio Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison (2005) and a Bachelor of Art History with Asian Option University of Wisconsin, Madison (2005). She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art.