Open Mind Art Space is pleased to present Desire Trails, a group exhibition featuring works by San Francisco-based artist, Vanesa Gingold, and Los Angeles-based artist, Theresa Knopf. An opening reception will be held for the artists on Saturday, June 17th from 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM. The exhibition will be on view from June 17th through July 14th, 2017.

"Desire Trails" is a collaborative exhibition of mixed media sculptures and installations. A desire trail is a path made through continued use, a cut across a switchback, or a path closer towards the edge of a cliff, where the view is more expansive and one can feel the upswell of cool air. It is also similar to the way our brains work, as certain pathways are used, they are simultaneously reinforced. We return to the same thoughts and behaviors, sometimes nourishing, sometimes damaging. We shape our memories and experiences through the lens of our desired trails, sometimes intentional, sometimes habitual. The processes Gingold and Knopf use in their work are similar to these trails; a mixture of habit or craft, and intention or experimentation. Treading where others have gone before, and connecting through making with a haptic history, the artists follow their impulses toward the limits of their materials - the frayed edge, a dangling string, the gleam of the artificial.

Vanesa Gingold works create dynamic interiors and exteriors, an interplay of concealing and revealing, of surface and structure. Delicate handmade paper stretches and tears over intricately constructed armatures, suggesting states of genesis or decay. Intricate ink drawings convey portraits in fragments, illustrations cluster in lumped amalgamations or explode across knotted grids. In all these works, the self and body are permeable, always shifting, always becoming. Like a knotted string, or a rubber band around the wrist, there is a searching to imbue these works with a kind of tactile memory, something felt but only half-told.

Vanesa received her MFA from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2016.

Theresa Knopf combines painting, fiber art, alternative photographic processes, and printmaking to explore archetypes in literature and the cultural collective. Her work examines withholding and restraint, concealing secrets through layering and subtle shifts of tension, while drawing on memory and silence to embody personal narrative conflated with existing fictional stories.

Theresa’s work focuses on specific moments in classic literature that intersect with personal histories to establish new narratives through abstraction and obfuscation. Theresa received an MA emphasizing in painting from California State University, Northridge in 2016.