Cut From The Same Cloth
Maya Kini - Jewelry
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Kate Nichols - Silver Gelatin Photograms
June 02 - July 29, 2018
*Opening June 02, 5-8pm
SHIBUMI GALLERY presents Cut From The Same Cloth a show featuring jeweler Maya Kini and painter Kate Nichols.
Both artists begin with organic matter as the foundation for their work. They juxtapose the ideas of beauty and complexity, illuminating the differences and similarities between. While the artists work in very different mediums, material families play a significant role in each artist’s processes and final work. The viewer is drawn into the often surprising surfaces and details of the pieces allowing them to make their own connections.
MAYA KINI was born in 1977 in Boston to parents from vastly different cultures, a mother from an Italian-American family and a father from India. Maya studied sculpture and literature at Reed College and earned her MFA in Metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2007. Her jewelry and sculptures have been included in numerous publications, most recently in CAST: Art and Objects Made Using Humanity’s Most Transformational Process. Maya’s work is exhibited nationally and internationally. She taught at Sacramento City College and California State University Sacramento until her return to San Francisco in 2017.
Maya’s focuses on the movement of material and its many iterations as it is transformed from matter to object and back again. Part artist, part historian, she seeks to understand how materials perform physically and poetically. Cut from the Same Cloth is made up of four material families: diamonds, trees, silk and gold. Maya draws the viewer into this quiet world of details where the pieces of jewelry illuminate individuality through form, texture and stone quality while also making clear the common threads and connections between them.
KATE NICHOLS synthesizes nanoparticles to mimic structurally colored animals, grows artificial skin from microorganisms, and makes her own paints, following fifteenth-century recipes. The long tradition of painters as material innovators inspired Nichols to become the first artist-in-residence in the Alivisatos Lab, a nanoscience laboratory at UC Berkeley. In 2010, she was appointed a TED Fellow and was awarded a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. Her artwork has been featured on the cover of the journal Nature, on the TED stage, and in The Leonardo Museum’s permanent collection. In 2015, Nichols was awarded the Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship, an honor SFAI extends to one early- to mid-career painter each year. At Shibumi, Nichols will show unique silver gelatin photograms documenting cellulosic skins she grew in collaboration with the Arkin bioengineering lab at UC Berkeley.
Maya Kini, Silk Cuffs and Ring, oxidized silver.