Opening November 23rd, 2018, The Reclaimed Room Gallery presents Collage & FUSE, the art of Asher and Muse. It features the works of two Bayview based artists, Lani Asher and Jes Muse. Together, they bring the hard and soft in the juxtaposition of mediums. From paper to metal and vinyl to glass, Asher and Muse find whatever materials they can use and reuse to create two and three-dimensional works of art. The Opening Reception will be Thursday, November 29th from 5-7pm. This exhibit will be on view daily through January 4th with the exception of December 25th and New Year’s Day.

Untitled, by Lani Asher

Lani Asher lives and works in San Francisco. She maintains a studio in a San Francisco industrial park alongside motorcycle and classic car repair shops and Chinese food wholesalers. Born in Los Angeles, Lani Asher attended the University of California Santa Barbara where she studied with Charles Garabedian, John McCracken, and James Turrel at the College of Creative Studies. Afterwards she moved to New York City and taught art, worked at an erotic bakery, and attended film classes at NYU and Columbia. She spent a year studying video, photography, book making, and film at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. After living in Madrid, Spain, she landed at the San Francisco Art   Institute in the New Genres Department for graduate school. During her independent study project in Brazil she created a video examining the relationship of Brazilian Baroque art and architecture to the beauty of imperfect pearls, and transgendered Brazilian sex symbol Roberta Close. Over the years she has taught art for numerous Bay Area non profits, including teaching art to prisoners, elders, artists with disabilities, and is an online arts writer. Find her online thru laniasherart.com .

City, by Jes Muse

Jes Muse, a resident of the Bayview here in San Francisco, is a native New Yorker with BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase. Jes is a third generation artist following in the footsteps of her grandmother, Jean Cobean, and her mother, Lisa Muse. Having found a balance between the aspects of the mid-century modern shapes and forms of Jean’s sculptural stone work and the figurative forms of Lisa’s two-dimensional works, Jes creates work ranging from mid-century inspired, brutalist works to figurative three-dimensional constructions. Jes enjoys reclaiming industrial refuse like railroad spikes, horseshoes, horseshoe nails and live-edge wood from the forest floors and northern California rivers. Jes’s incorporation of railroad spikes is a tribute to her father’s work as a Track Supervisor for the commuter railroad in New York.

The main body of Jes’s work is in steel and glass. Having different cooling and heating points, steel and glass are not the most compatible mediums. The glass becomes marred by the sparks created in the act of welding and if heated too much will crack and split apart, so it is a challenge to secure the glass well enough without overheating it. Jes dabbles in many mediums and was recently inspired by the work of Bay Area duo, t.w. five, to create pieces with adhesive vinyl, in fact, you may have seen her cruising around in the Mondrian Volvo Recently.