January 1, 2003

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PLACE A CLASSIFIED AD |PERSONALS | MOVIE CLOCK | REP CLOCK | SEARCH

'The Gift of Art'
Through Jan. 19, Cecile Moochnek Gallery

IT MAY BE holiday themed, but it's certainly not too late to check out this show, which features recent works by 18 (mostly local) artists. While nearly all of them have a minimal, abstract style, their choice of media ranges from painting to sculpture, photography, and even garbage. Lucy Matzger, a Berkeley artist, creates kimono-like shirts out of used coffee filters. The shirts aren't altogether functional – even dried and treated with acrylic lacquer, the filters are still rather fragile – but their shiny, burnished-gold surfaces are surprisingly pretty. To make the kimonos, Matzger arranges the filters in semicircular and pie-wedge patterns, then quilts the finished material with gold and red thread to create the overall effect of leather armor. It's a remarkable material transformation that manages to be all kinds of things at once: Eastern and Western, masculine and feminine, craft and fine art, modern kitchen detritus and garment of ancient warfare. Another Berkeley artist, Emily Payne, also makes inventive use of ordinary media. Her paper-pin mosaics are somewhere between two- and three-dimensional, possessing both a sculptural depth and a very painterly interest in the nuances of color. Payne clearly intends her work to be playful and lighthearted, but it also has an element of careful precision that demands lingering contemplation. She asks us to muse along with her on the subtle material properties of paper: the way it soaks up pigment, fits its torn edges together, hangs on the pins, and suffers its tiny puncture wounds. Other featured artists of note include Seiko Tachibana, whose delicate intaglio prints resemble watercolor views through a rainy window, and Michael Ehrlich, whose unbelievably heavy sculpture fuses steel and sunlight into a simple, enigmatic architectural experiment. Wed.-Sun., noon-5 p.m. 1809D Fourth St., Berk. (510) 549-1018. (Lindsey Westbrook)