Sarah Shepard Gallery is pleased to welcome back Rachelle Reichert for her second solo exhibition, titled Rock, cloud, cloth. Reichert’s art is in the spirit of the classical muse: drawing inspiration from the natural world. Her newest work is a meditation on nature, history, and technology, weaving a narrative that spans geological time, historical events, and contemporary issues. With a practice rooted in research and material exploration, Reichert offers poignant commentary on environmental challenges, presented through the forms and materials that occupy the physical planes of her work.

The intersection of environment, history, and material is laid bare in the wall-based mixed media sculptures, hanging artworks, and silkscreen of Rock, cloud, cloth. Bronze, clay, and, most notably, salt inspire Reichert to investigate the complexities of our delicate relationship with the environment, in turn encouraging viewers to do the same. Her micro and macroscopic explorations of these physical minerals reference histories of manual labor and satellite images of extraction.

Salt—harvested from the San Francisco Bay and Caribbean Sea—grounds this body of work. “I began working with salt in 2013 to develop a sense of place through a material”, says Reichert, referencing the naturally occurring salt in the San Francisco Bay, near where she resides. “Salt illuminated the tides, drought, heat, wetland development, and housing along the Bay, leading me to think about the landscape through both geologic time and much shorter, human-centered processes. Salt is from the sea, like water it connects us to the rest of the world”. Her saltworks record the region’s environmental and cultural transformation. The colors of these pieces—referencing mercury, verdigris blues, charred wood and the red, pink, and green hues of salt—allude to the land’s history, while the shapes —moons, clouds, and natural forms—echo salt’s synchronous relationship with the sun, sky, and sea.

Adjacent to this mineral usage is a metallic interest. In the piece, In formation, Reichert pairs bronze, manifested as cloth, with sea salt: an homage to her classical art training and interest in art history. Reichert began this exploration of bronze during her residency at the Space program, a San Francisco based arts residency, which helped make the production possible. Inspired by her time working alongside ancient Greek bronzes when employed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reichert created sculptures of drapery, which reference a himation–a wrapped garment worn by ancient Greeks. Where we may expect to see a figure clinging to “fabric”, the dramatic folds of clothing Reichert has cast in bronze instead cradle piles of salt. Past and present unite here. The materials, shapes, and techniques of the Hellenistic period draw thematic parallels between eras marked by political instability and turbulence, considering the human touch across time.

Rock, cloud, cloth meditates on and considers evidence of human activity. In Spectral, Reichert used an AI system to reproduce satellite renderings of U.S. lithium extraction sites, resulting in blurred images that she paired with wild clay dug on site. This juxtaposition of natural materials with algorithmically generated images exposes contemporary ways of seeing the landscape through technology. Created from and informed by the natural world, these works embody the complexities and emotional connections between human and machine, exploring human behavior’s terrestrial legacy.

Rachelle Reichert lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Reichert has presented her practice at the California Climate Change Symposium, San Francisco State of the Estuary Conference, and the American Geophysical Union Meeting. She earned her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA and a BFA from Boston University. She is a charter resident of the Minnesota Street Studio Program. Select exhibitions include the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Center for Contemporary Art at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Autry Museum of the American West, San Diego Art Institute, and Mills College Art Museum. Her work has been reviewed and published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Make Magazine, California Home and Design, and New American Paintings. Artwork and research is included in many public and private collections, including the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Archive, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Library, Facebook, and Adobe, Inc.