425 Kirkland Urban – Central 1st floor Lobby: Ruby Lindner
The simplest definition of a painting is colors dividing space on a flat surface. How the colors divide the space determines not only the image you see but also how you react to the image. A representational painter uses color to divide space very precisely, finely grading the color divisions to guide the viewer’s gaze to a specific image and often to a specific desired reaction.

Ruby Lindner’s abstract color shift paintings use the division of color fields on the canvas in a looser, less specific manner. The canvases are broken by irregular color and tonal shifts and harsh jagged edges. The shapes are themselves ill-defined and not readily identifiable as specific objects. The fixed color breaks on the canvas in these paintings are still on the canvas but are fully energized for the viewer. The color blocks and their breaks and shifts are tectonic plates in motion, jewels tumbling through space, or electric bolts breaking the air and the ground. The objects themselves are irrelevant. Instead, the focus of my paintings is pure energy, motion and the emotion called forth without a specific subject to underpin the reaction. Ruby’s goal with these paintings is to give the viewer a sense of action and energy that can be seen and felt. How do these colliding and shifting colors and their interplay make you feel?

425 Kirkland Urban – Central 2nd floor- Right Side of Lobby: Blake Carter
Blake Carter’s recent drawings abound in dichotomies. Crudely scribbled figures are arranged into carefully structured compositions, and though the pieces are figural, they appear abstract at a distance. The figures look repetitive until closer inspection reveals that each one is unique.

Conceptually, the grouped figures suggest a sense of togetherness and community. Each of us is flawed, but with organization and collaboration, we as a society can prosper. Most of the figures are anonymous, like the people we see but don’t get to know in everyday life. A few cultural and historical references playfully invite a closer look.

Blake’s choice of drawing on porous substrates adds an expressionist element of risk, limiting any possible revisions and creating a record of his time-intensive process. While expressionism is often associated with impulsive, emotional outbursts, the pieces exude an obsessively controlled balance of chaos and order.

425 Kirkland Urban – Central 2nd floor-Left Side of Lobby: Kimberly Balla
Kimberly Balla is interested in experimentation to get patterns and textures that are unusual to her. Thinking about paint in a chemical way allows her to create these unfamiliar textures. By mixing various painting mediums Kimberly has developed a blend of liquids that chemically react with each other to create unique patterns and contours. Over the past seven years of working with her found technique, she has come to know and harness the mysterious process as her own. Kimberly uses a new approach to the old medium of oil paint; she mixes materials from the modern era with the timeless oils of the past.

She is entrapped by her alchemical obsession with this magic-like chemical approach, which captures a natural process, freezing it in time. Continually drawn to a process that seems to touch on the endless cycle of nature and existence. The cycle of building and breaking down materials to form textures that eternally exist in the universal reality of nature and consciousness. Kimberly focuses on these patterns and textures which seem oddly familiar with the intent to create an otherworldly intimacy.  She strives to create hypnagogic lands of ethereal figures free-floating in a space in which the viewer can dive into and escape the noise of everyday life. She wishes for her work to create a void in a world that seems familiar yet unfamiliar and encourages the discussion of the micro-macro make-up of life and distant realities.  An invitation to see the world beyond wonder.