Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art is pleased to present new work by two Bay Area artists, Ajna Lichau and Jessica Pezalla.

Ajna Lichau uses video, photography, and mixed-media to create atmospheric installations that explore the body’s relationship with its environment. Her most recent work, centered on the cameo, continues exploring issues of physicality, sexuality, and sensuality. Jessica Pezalla employs simple materials (paper, felt, coated wire) to build sculptures and installations that function as waterless aquariums that “connect the natural world to the domestic.”

Pezalla and Lichau have created site-specific installations for the current show. Though the artists have chosen to work independently, their works share formal and thematic concerns. Both artists play with temporality, change, and metamorphosis, engaging the physical body—as a surface, as an object of scrutiny or fascination—as a means to examine the problems, and properties, of observation.

Lichau’s video works transform the cameo from a static (and passive) aesthetic object, into an unstable temporal experience. Pezalla’s work asks viewers to confront our tendency to equate “truth” with “nature,” by creating objects that are at once “naturalistic” in their organic beauty and “artificial” in their construction.

Lichau and Pezalla first met in the MFA program at the San Francisco Arts Institute. This is their first two-person show together. Born in Montreal, Canada, Jessica Pezalla received her BA from Oberlin College, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Pezalla has held solo exhibitions in San Francisco and North Adams, Massachusetts. She has participated in group shows at the Lola Gallery, the Luggage Store Annex, and the Swell Gallery. Ajna Lichau received her BFA from the Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has held solo exhibitions at Spur Projects (Portola Valley, California), and participated in group exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, the 9th Havana Biennial (Cuba), and the Art Point Black gallery in Florence, Italy. She was selected to participate in the 2005 GenArt: Emerge exhibition.

Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art
49 Geary Street, Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94108