Marrow Gallery presents “Soft Fascination” an exhibition featuring the work of Hiroshi Sato, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Stephanie Robison, and Justine Di Fiore. The artists consider the body in form and function, physicality and emotion.

Justine Di Fiore is a recent UC Davis MFA graduate. Her work as a nurse caring for the terminally ill influenced her current body of work as she mines the emotional and physical experience of helping patients navigate their physical limitations. Her large-scale paintings represent the body's distorted, sometimes dark, and messy emotions and physicality.

Kimia Ferdowsi Kline distills her subject matter into body-based lexicons as a tool to decipher the expansive mysteries of human relationships. Cut out from the distractions of place, situation, context, and even gravity, these emotionally charged figures take center stage as they grapple with the complexity of self and each other.

Stephanie Robison is the art department chair at City College San Francisco. Her biomorphic sculptures explore materiality in stone and wool. The incongruous nature of the materials is symbolic of the awkwardness of the body and our relationships with others.

San Francisco-based Hiroshi Sato’s use of light and color, evocative of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, explores abstracted figuration. Sato disrupts the visual cues by which we identify people, utilizing a sparseness of signifiers to lend ambiguity to his characters’ identities in terms of gender, race, and class.