“Unexpected Reflections: The Portrait Reconsidered features innovative, sometimes stunning, cutting-edge interpretations of the portrait.

JD Beltran’s work splits a single composition into four different media, compelling a comparative dialogue between painting, photography, film, and video.

Jim Campbell’s work travels a color-sampling pixel across two crisp portraits, illuminating the relationships between and complexity of perception, memory, and light.

Gigi Janchang’s striking and disturbing composite photographs highlight provocative issues of beauty, symmetry, race, and bias.

Marion Gray’s archival prints present a unique and multifaceted portrait of the remarkable individuals and events that have defined the San Francisco Bay Area art world and beyond over the past 40 years.”

“It is a mark of contemporary life that personal identities have become fractured, and are in a state of constant re-definition. Because we live in a global society that is fragmented socially, politically, economically, and culturally, the search for basic life experiences that remind us of our commonality become a binding cultural tie. Reflecting this circumstance, contemporary art has become progressively heterogeneous and metanarratives notably absent, raising fundamental questions of individual identity and subjectivity as primary areas of interrogation. The conceptual and technical amalgamation of disparate elements by contemporary artists reflects this fragmented reality, and has been a critical means to form new integrative models of thinking and representation.

It follows that much recent artistic discourse addresses the premise that identity is a relative rather than a fixed construction. The mapping of the self from personal and conceptual perspectives as means to process and site our ever more complex lives within an information-based society has been central to this dialogue. As a result, it is not surprising that our ideas about the portrait as a fixed representation of subject and identity have been stretched and challenged on theoretical and technical levels.

The genre of portraiture is a particularly rich means to understand the complex trajectory and evolving ideas about representation. Although we presume how things are from exterior appearances, portraits also have the potential to both reveal and mask the interior persona of an individual or group. Unexpected Reflections: The Portrait Reconsidered explores the implications of this duality, as well as the nature of memory, social relationships and phenomenological experience…”