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< Back Rose Sellery AUG 29 - JAN 3 Rose Sellery: Fragile Strength Rose Sellery is a multidisciplinary, self-taught artist whose work navigates the charged terrain between beauty and brutality, fragility and strength, and tradition and rebellion. Through humor, irony, and unflinching confrontation, she explores themes of innocence and loss, societal pressure, resilience, and survival – inviting viewers to reflect on how lives, particularly women’s lives, are shaped, constrained, celebrated, and discarded. Sellery transforms everyday materials into evocative sculptural narratives. Her work reimagines objects such as glass slippers, garments, and boxing gloves, imbuing them with layered meaning and emotional resonance. Whether through shattered forms, unconventional materials, or conceptual garments, each piece exposes the tension between vulnerability and power while honoring personal and collective stories. Her sculptures create space for reckoning, recognition, and transformation, challenging the inequities and expectations imposed on women. A storyteller at heart, Sellery brings a sharp, satirical awareness to the social ills and contradictions of contemporary life. Her irreverent approach incorporates a wide range of materials – metal, bone, fabric, cigarette butts, rose petals, and photography – chosen specifically to serve each concept. The result is a body of work that is humorous, thought provoking, and at times unsettling, often moving viewers to reflection, laughter, or tears. Raised in Venice, California, Sellery now lives and works in the mountains of Santa Cruz. Her creative path includes years in the ceramics industry, woodworking and jewelry, experiences that continue to inform her tactile, materially driven practice. She has also played a significant role in the local arts community, serving as Program Coordinator at the Cabrillo Gallery and as a driving force behind FashionArt Santa Cruz, later co-founding Pivot: The Art of Fashion. Rose is currently co-owner and curator at MK Contemporary Art in downtown Santa Cruz and the founder of the Ripple Effect Arts Festival. About the Artist: My work begins with contradiction. I am drawn to the space where beauty and brutality coexist, where fragility becomes a form of strength, and where humor can carry the weight of difficult truths. Through sculpture, conceptual garments, and photography, I explore the complexities of our lives – how we are shaped, constrained, celebrated, and, at times, erased. I use everyday objects and materials as a visual language – glass, fabric, metal, bone, found objects – transforming them into narratives that hold both personal and collective memory. These materials are never neutral; they carry histories, expectations, and cultural weight. By altering or recontextualizing them, I expose the tension between innocence and experience, adornment and restriction, protection and harm. Humor and irony are essential tools in my process. They create an entry point, disarming the viewer just enough to engage with subjects that can be uncomfortable or confrontational. Beneath that surface, my work addresses issues of gender bias, societal pressure, resilience, and survival. I am interested in the stories we inherit, the roles we are asked to perform, and the quiet or radical ways we resist them. I think of each piece as a kind of evidence – of endurance, of contradiction, of transformation. The objects I create are not static; they hold emotional residue and invite interpretation. They ask the viewer to reckon with what is seen and what is implied, to recognize themselves or others within the work. Ultimately, my practice is about holding space: for vulnerability and power, for grief and humor, for anger and tenderness. It is an ongoing act of witnessing and reimagining—an attempt to make visible what is often overlooked, and to honor the complexity of lived experience. Previous Next

< Back Laurus Myth JAN 25 - APR 27 Portals & Passages: An evolution of paintings, sculptures, and social magic Local artist Laurus Myth debuts Portals and Passages, her first solo exhibition at the Triton Museum of Art, 1505 Warburton Ave. (January 25 - April 27, 2025.) Portals and Passages is a reflection point, weaving together Laurus’ portfolio of work across disciplines. From vivid colors, patterns, and layered paintings evolving into sculptural forms, Myth leans into art to tell stories of connection and relationship. Myth’s visual language is influenced by nature, technology, and intuition as they use symbols to decode their experience. Portals and Passages transforms Triton’s Warburton Gallery with works that draw viewers through moments of connection. This expansive body of work bridges dualities: technology-nature, movement-stillness, internal-external, and day-night. About the Artist: Laurus Myth is an Asian-American interdisciplinary artist raised in Silicon Valley. A born innovator, Myth follows a creative and intuitive path as she fabricates and curates intentional spaces. Drawn to sacred architecture and mental landscapes, her work is colorful, symbolic, and deeply immersive. Myth’s experiential practices birthed several installations she calls “Social Magic.” Visually drawing– these playful and often temporary installations invite us to connect with our narratives and become part of a larger story. The artist turns the museum's gallery into a spatial story with codes and keys leading us to places unseen. Portals and Passages distill the last decade of Social Magic into new queries, forms, paintings, and sculptures. Previous Next

< Back Harry Clewans AUG 29 - JAN 3 Eye/Hand Harry Clewans is largely self-taught and has worked in his studio in Oakland, California, since 1983. Clewans creates unique large-scale woodblock prints by assembling hundreds of smaller printed images. Exhibited extensively in California, nationally and abroad, his work been awarded the James Phalen Award for printmaking and a fellowship at the Kala Institute of Art and has been collected by The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art, the Mills College Art Collection and the Judah L. Magnes Museum. About the Artist: I’ve always been drawn to things that are in a state of disrepair or decay, things one might find in a gutter or washed up on a beach––a broken light bulb, a battered plastic toy, a dried piece of kelp. For me, such objects reveal the effects of time and use, and offer insight into how they work and how they were formed or put together. I’ve been making woodcuts of found objects like these for thirty years and have built up an extensive library of images from which I make prints that I cut up and arrange to create larger and more complex compositions. Like mosaics or jigsaw puzzles these larger works are typically comprised of hundreds of individuals pieces that I fit together to form a picture, which I then adhere to a wood substrate. For every woodcut I’ve made I have a print pinned to a wall in my studio. I think of this wall as a kind of periodic table, and each woodcut as an element that I can use to create a picture. I may use a woodcut of a seedpod to describe the skin of an octopus or the surface of a tree trunk, a woodcut of a dried-up pear to articulate the ground around an old well or the wings of a butterfly. Just as everything in our physical environment is composed of the same matter, my large pieces are composed of the same collection of woodcut images. This approach, I hope, communicates the idea that all things by virtue of their makeup are connected, that all things participate in a cycle of composition and decomposition in which the old, the broken down and the disposed of becomes material for the new. Previous Next

< Back Cynthia Ona Innis JAN 17 - APR 19 Seams Cynthia Ona Innis is a visual artist based in Berkeley, California. She holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from Rutgers University. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the San Jose Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Crocker Art Museum, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others. Innis has been recognized with numerous awards, including a 2025 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a James D. Phelan Award, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award. She is represented by Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles. About the Artist: My work begins with painting, then moves through disassembly and reconstruction—an ongoing exploration of connection and division. Where there is a seam, two or more things converge. These seams mark the joining of materials as well as the meeting of times, places and states of being. Moments such as sunrise and sunset, moonrise and nightfall fold into one another, revealing how change itself creates continuity. In a fractured world, the seam becomes both metaphor and method: a site where rupture and repair coexist. Seams explores the interplay of light, landscape and weather as a way to map perception and memory. The shifting glow of the sun, the stillness of the moon and the vastness of the night sky form a temporal and spatial framework for orientation and reflection. Informed by distinct weather patterns of coastal California, the marine layer, coastal fog and rays of light emerge as visual language that mirrors the mutable rhythms of the natural world. My approach to abstraction is rooted in a physical, process-driven practice. Pigments are poured directly onto fabric, or bleached to remove color, to create a dialogue between accumulating and editing, masking and unveiling, presence and absence. Materials such as cotton, canvas, nylon, and silver lamé hold equal weight to the pigments. Cut, reassembled and stitched, the surfaces echo tectonic movement and natural cycles of fragmentation and repair. Recent wall installations expand this practice through scale and suspension and the responsiveness of materials. Often beginning with recycled or discarded textiles, painted and sewn fabric panels are attached to wooden supports allowing them to hang freely and respond subtly to air and motion. In Fixing on a Horizon, multiple horizon lines reference sunrise and sunset as shifting points of equilibrium and orientation, while Blue Slip traverses gradients of blue, from pale to near-black that evoke twilight’s liminal expanse between clarity and obscurity. Across these works, stitching, knitting, layering, and suspension become meditations on connection and fracture—memory and material, permanence and impermanence. The resulting surfaces reflect the layered experiences that shape how we see and move through the natural world. Previous Next

< Back Katherine Young MAY 3 - AUG 3 What Do You Treasure? Katherine B. Young, MD, MFA fell in love with the ocean when she was a small child. She spent a lot of time on the water before going to medical school to train in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. After working for 10 years as a plastic surgeon in San Francisco, she fulfilled her dream of becoming a full time artist. She specializes in drawing and painting vast spaces of ocean and sky. Her work has won numerous awards and has been exhibited and collected throughout the United States. She is currently creating an exhibition for the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, CA which addresses the ocean plastic pollution problem. The following galleries represent her artwork: HANG ART in San Francisco, Claire Carino Contemporary in Boston, and The Gallery at Tree’s Place in Cape Cod. She maintains a studio at 1890 Bryant Street in San Francisco, and lives in the city with her husband and daughter. Her artwork and creative process are featured in creativity expert Tina Seelig’s book, Insight Out. About the Artist: My connection to the ocean and art-making began in childhood, growing up in the Tidewater region of Virginia near the Atlantic. Though I initially pursued science—studying engineering and medicine at Duke University and training as a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at Stanford—I ultimately returned to my artistic roots. After a decade of surgical practice in San Francisco, I earned an MFA and committed to a full-time career as an artist. The ocean is both majestic and meditative, a force of awe and tranquility. My paintings and drawings capture its vastness, immersing viewers in its beauty. However, my relationship with the ocean was profoundly altered when I learned about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—an immense collection of plastic waste polluting the waters I love. This realization compelled me to confront this crisis through my art. 'What Do You Treasure?" emerged from my reflections on our paradoxical relationship with nature. We revere the ocean and its life, yet contribute to its degradation through rampant plastic consumption. This exhibition invites you to examine this contradiction and reconsider the choices we make daily. The paintings and drawings lining the walls evoke the ocean’s sublime power. Many incorporate genuine gold, referencing early Renaissance religious icons and illuminated manuscripts—symbols of reverence and contemplation. The sculptures interspersed throughout the space, however, disrupt this serenity. Cast from discarded plastic and gilded in gold, they serve as objects of reflection, mimicking sacred artifacts yet exposing the false idol of consumerism. These pieces also nod to the economic forces that sustain our dependence on plastic, making change feel daunting but necessary. As you move through the exhibition, allow yourself to experience the ocean’s grandeur, then confront the unsettling reality embedded in the sculptures. What do you treasure most—nature or convenience? The answer to this question carries weight beyond this space. If you choose nature, let that commitment extend into action. Even small steps—reducing plastic use, supporting sustainable initiatives, advocating for systemic change—can have a profound impact. This exhibition is not just a reflection; it is a call to action. The choice is yours. Previous Next

< Back Visual Duets Group Exhibition MAY 16 - AUG 16 Visual Duets: The Art of Creating Together To many, art may seem like a solitary activity – a way for us to pour our individual souls into whatever we choose to create while commenting on or escaping the world around us. But for others, the process of creating art is a collaborative effort – one where we can find joy in experiencing it with others. The Triton Museum of Art is proud to present Visual Duets: The Art of Creating Together. This group exhibition features the works of four significant and talented artist couples: David Einstein and Judith Cook – painting, mixed media Era and Donald (Aldo) Farnsworth - printmaking Ellen Konar and Steve Goldband - photography Tandem Painting (Suzette McDonough and James Whitehouse) - painting Each of these couples creates artwork in connection and conversation with each other. In their practices, they have learned the delicate balance of working with another creative to produce not only something that is unique to the pair, but something that also carries their individual voices. About the Artist: Artist Information PDF Previous Next

< Back Qiuwen Li AUG 30 - JAN 11 Echoes in Color Born in China, Qiuwen Li moved to the United States to pursue her education in Design, earning a BFA in Graphic Design from St. Cloud State University and a MFA in Visual Studies with a concentration in Graphic Design from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Now working as an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Santa Clara University, Li’s teaching and research focuses on the integration of typography, data visualization, and graphic design. Incorporating her knowledge and expertise into her art, Qiuwen Li seeks to delineate, deconstruct, and reconstruct the assumptions of multilingual communication and reframe them as more contingent on idiosyncratic understandings. About the Artist: In my designs, graphic elements (shapes, colors, forms, and type) are constructed, deconstructed, and then reconstructed to create a richer experience and extend their meaning. As a designer, I understand the need for legibility, but I am more concerned with communicating something more visceral, expressive, and imaginative. My work engages viewers in a way that evokes playing games and figuring out puzzles; they simply can’t get enough of it, and that’s a good thing, because that’s the key to engagement. Previous Next

< Back Mark Engel AUG 16 - JAN 4 Shifting Terrain Mark Engel is a figurative painter whose practice investigates the body as a site of transformation, perception, and psychological depth. Drawing on themes of connection, involution, and the fluid nature of selfhood, Engel constructs layered compositions that merge the figure with elements of landscape, gesture, and abstraction. His paintings explore the tension between form and dissolution, using fragmentation and distortion to reflect transitional states and the porous boundaries between interior and exterior experience. Engel’s approach is rooted in process and intuition. Each composition unfolds through cycles of addition and subtraction, allowing unconscious associations and emotional resonance to emerge. By balancing structure with flux, his work invites reflection on the instability of identity in a world shaped by constant change and relational complexity. He has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, including Shapeshifters at Know Future Gallery, Constellations at Vargas Gallery, and group shows at Baton Rouge Gallery Center for Contemporary Art, Limner Gallery in New York, and 33 Contemporary Gallery in Chicago. His work has been featured in Create! Magazine, Artsin Square, and Curatory Magazine. Engel is a professor at Mission College in Santa Clara, California, and has contributed to arts education through teaching residencies and faculty exhibitions. His ongoing exploration of the figure offers a visual language for the complexities of becoming. About the Artist: I use the human figure as a central motif to explore themes of connection, transformation, and involution. My work revolves around the ever-changing motion of selfhood and explores the dynamic interplay between external forces and internal experiences. Process is an essential component in my work, and I build compositions that combine the figure with landscape, fragmentation, distortion, and gesture to reflect transitional states. Relying heavily on intuition, I feel my way through each composition by adding and subtracting elements to arrive at an image that is broader than my conscious awareness and infuses the work with a deeper level of meaning. I strive to find a balance between retaining form and dissolving into abstraction to capture the fluid nature of becoming and soften the boundaries between self and other. Previous Next

< Back Khat Zorig & Kyle Dell'Aquila SEPT 28 - JAN 5 Energies Khat and Kyle are partners in life, business, and creativity. They explore the intersection of nature, humanity, and machines. Their work embodies the cross-section of internal and external energies with the shared mission of empowering those often overlooked. Khat’s energies focus on internal empowerment, nurturing resilience, and healing within individuals, particularly the underprivileged. On the other hand, Kyle's energies are channeled into external empowerment, manifesting through technological innovation and artistic expression. About the Artist: Our commitment is challenging the status quo and envisioning a future where creativity, technology, and courage intersect to shape our better world. This commitment was inspired and encouraged by our mentor, Bill Warner, a visionary who transformed the film industry. His influence motivated us to follow our energies and create ZORIG, which means "Courage" in Mongolian. It is not just a sci-fi movie and futureware brand; it embodies the spirit of bravery and the conviction to speak and act from the heart. Through ZORIG, we explore the power of science fiction as a medium to dream and visualize the future we want to live in - one that’s nature-loving, techno-optimistic, and humanity empowering. Movies profoundly impact shaping mindsets and influencing the collective imagination, yet the current state of the film industry disheartens us. Real stories are often overlooked, lacking diversity, and commercial interests frequently stifle creativity. Our mission is to disrupt this narrative by telling stories our way, inspiring change, and empowering the underrepresented. Our work extends beyond the screen into the tangible world of fashion. We have seen the devastating effects of the fashion industry on the environment, and we refuse to contribute to its harmful practices. Instead, we embrace a made-to-order approach, ensuring that every piece we create is a statement of power, style, as well as a commitment to sustainability and responsible consumption. Both through our futuristic Mongolian themes and our earth-loving designs, we hope to make people feel like powerful techno-warriors when they’re wearing our garments. As we continue to develop our sci-fi movie, we release snippets and showcase products that reflect the themes and values of our story. Each piece we create is a fusion of art, technology, and storytelling, designed to inspire others to imagine and build the future we all deserve. Previous Next

< Back Stephanie Metz SEPT 14 - DEC 29 In the Glow Stephanie Metz is an accomplished Bay Area fiber arts sculptor. She has an affinity for the natural world, which is often echoed through her artistic creations. Her artwork is created through a sense of curiosity and her desire to explore the meaning of things around her. The Triton is pleased to present a new body of Metz's work in her exhibition In the Glow which will combine smaller works with a large scale immersive installation, specially created for the Cowell Room gallery. About the Artist: I use fiber media to sculpt solid, freestanding forms that embody the complex experiences of womanhood within contemporary American culture. Created from wool fibers needle-felted into intricate, robust, writhing shapes or meticulously stitched from pieces of thick, smooth wool felt, my sculptures evoke the female form rendered in soft, tactile media to engage viewers on multiple sensory and intellectual levels. Current works incorporate subtle reflections of intense pink pigment, a color laden with cultural significance long associated with femininity. The organic forms I create are seductively approachable yet mildly alarming; they serve as vessels for exploring the multifaceted nature of living in a female-identifying body—a spectrum encompassing strength and vulnerability, the beautiful and the grotesque, pain and resilience, control and the lack of agency. "Soft power" refers to persuasion through indirect or non-confrontational means; it captures the way I learned to navigate my world as a girl growing up in 1980s America, as well as my visually alluring approach to feminist topics in a world that still undervalues women. I want to be part of the dialog that ushers in a future in which gender equality, positive body images, reproductive rights, and sexual empowerment are the norm. My sculpture invites audiences to reconsider their preconceptions and assumptions, fostering a sense of shared connection within the larger human experience through a visceral, visual language. Previous Next

< Back Phillip Hua SEP 28 - JAN 12 You Can Never Go Home Again Phillip Hua is a South Bay Area native whose art speaks of the delicate relationship between nature and commerce. As someone familiar with the ever-changing landscape of the Silicon Valley, Hua visualizes this shift in his art using unique processes that combine creative digital and traditional techniques. His work presents a call to be aware of how we're affecting the world around us and to question what our priorities are. This exhibition will include a selection of the artist's 2D works. About the Artist: When I was growing up in San Jose, fields, orchards and wild, undeveloped lots were abundant. In the house that I spent most of my adolescent years in, there was a small personal farm behind our backyard. I could hear crickets when I went to bed. Today, that small farm is now replaced by new housing. The nights are mostly silent. The fields and orchards that I remembered are now office parks and commercial spaces. Where the change has been an economic boon to the Bay Area, I question what was replaced. The tide of redevelopment fueled by the relentless march of tech washed away so much of the beauty of nature. My memories of San Jose no longer align with what it is today. My artistic process is a blend of traditional and digital techniques, revolving around creating photo composites that I print, rework, scan, and digitally rework again. I incorporate dots to represent printing, ink bleeds to represent painting, and squares to represent pixels, influenced by our blended digital and corporeal lives. I draw inspiration from Asian brush painting, technology, and nature. While political, my goal is to always lure the viewer with beauty and color to provoke contemplation. This exhibition draws from over 17 years of work, ranging from portraits that invoke nostalgia and childhood to works that portray the intersection of the environment with the economy. Previous Next

< Back Jacqueline Boberg JAN 24 - APR 19 Edge of Silence About the Artist: With thirty years of exploration across watercolor, pastel, oil, and acrylic, I’ve continually sought new ways to express light. A decade in abstract mixed media reshaped my artistic vision, and my recent return to landscapes and still lifes merges contemporary experimentation with timeless observation. My landscapes are born from fleeting moments — a slant of light, a shift in color, a spark of inspiration that demands to be caught in the mind’s eye before it disappears. Working in acrylic allows me to chase that immediacy and not fuss around as the paint dries instantaneously. Each canvas becomes a dialogue between instinct and experimentation, between what I see and what I feel. In the studio, joy lives in discovery — the thrill of pushing paint, of finding new challenges in every composition, of not knowing exactly where a brushstroke will lead. I embrace the possibility of failure as part of the creative process. Like Silicon Valley’s mantra, I believe in failing big and failing often — because each “failure” reveals something unexpected, something truer. My goal is simple: to capture not just the landscape itself, but the energy of the moment that inspired it — alive, imperfect, and full of wonder. Until I move on to the next thing…. Previous Next