RTS is excited to host Artist Talks with artists Jess Baer and Sean Howe on Tuesday December 3, 7-9pm.
Jessica Baer is an artist, educator, and activist who has lived in Oakland for more than 10 years. Originally from Minnesota, her first creative outlets were horseback riding and poetry. Jessica graduated from Beloit College in 2005 with a BFA in Creative Writing. She received her Master’s in Special Education from San Francisco State University in 2017.
Her art is bright and bold. Her work offers messages which sway between legibility and ambiguity, encapsulated in her energetic forms and blocks of color. Elements jostle for space within her collages, paintings, and assemblages, however, her confidence compositionally, ensures that all perspectives, the irreverent, the urgent, the skeletal all seem to find their right place within the frame.
Her work as a public school educator and the years spent in the Oakland Unified School District has informed the way she creates art. Text works such as There’s No Such Thing As A Bad Kid have hints of sign-painting, scrapping, collaging–calling to the educational space to be a generative, passionate, and brave space for creative hearts and minds. Teachers must inspire. No better than a teacher such as Jessica, who can use her art to motivate the viewer, the student, the fellow teacher, and members of the community to think critically and to act out of passion, love, and style.
Sean Howe is a painter and sculptor focused on the interaction of objects and animals within fantastical worlds. His work is a dialogue between painting, objects, autobiography, and fantasy and is influenced by the ecological sciences, world-building, and the practice of permaculture. He graduated from the University of Washington in 2007 with a BFA in ceramics and later worked for many art museums in Seattle and the Bay Area as a preparator. A Permaculture designer since 2010, Sean has designed and implemented food forests in Washington state and edible gardens in California.
Observation within the landscape, in forest environments, in particular, reveals distinct stores about interconnection, shared resources, and animal movement. Sean feels forest composition can teach him how to structure some of his paintings and drawings. Scientific knowledge about our environment is essential; however, so are personal experiences, imagination, and intuition. These ingredients, when used within the picture-plane, can generate a unique ecology of their own. Sean is a recent graduate of Stanford’s MFA in Art Practice.
Sean and Jessica met at Ocean Beach in 2012 after a day of surfing. This fateful day would lead to many more surf days, up and down the coast of California and eventually afar, surfing places such as Alaska, El Salvador, and Peru. Their love of surfing is surpassed only by their love for each other, for humor, and for art.
They have been collaborators since 2012 when they created a two-person show called Great North American Bird Dog at VAMP record store in Oakland. This summer, 2019, however, was the first time since 2013 that the couple was able to make a substantial body of work together. They are excited to continue to work together and explore a dialogue with one another’s art. Sean and Jessica live and work in Oakland, California.