Neocles Serafimidis and Leah Virsik Exhibit at Mercury Twenty

Neocles Serafimidis and Leah Virsik Exhibit at Mercury Twenty

PHOTO COURTESY MERCURY TWENTY GALLERY

Cornell Ave., 10:16pm, 2017 by Neocles Serafimidis will be up at Mercury Twenty along with work by Leah Virsik.


Two artists at Mercury Twenty, Neocles Serafimidis and Leah Virsik, create photographs and textiles, respectively, that engage with and transform reality.

The art world occasionally seems uncomfortably like our broader society in this age of shameless fakery: bereft of values and integrity—in the holy name of freedom. Fortunately, there are artists who resist the siren calls of aesthetic anarchy.

Two artists at the Oakland cooperative gallery Mercury Twenty, Neocles Serafimidis and Leah Virsik, create photographs and textiles, respectively, that engage with and transform reality. In our fast-food (and fake-news) age, they make work with—ahem—fiber.

Serafimidis, who has an academic background in philosophy, photographs old cars, houses, and other artifacts to investigate nostalgia and loss. He writes: “As possessions age, they take on layers of meaning . . . [and] accrue a certain psychological power. I see these artifacts as our culture’s power objects, which develop slowly over time both in individuals’ personal experience and in public, inter-subjective reality.”

The objects have a personal resonance for their users, but also poetic meaning for others whose memories of similar artifacts may have been triggered. In his moving Object/Memory/Power series from 2009, Serafimidis documented the possessions of his 90-year-old mother as he moved her into a care facility and cleaned out his family home. Equally poignant and mysterious are his Neighborhood Nights series, frontal views of houses, cars, and driveways, hushed in the silence of darkness; and his Cars series, of the same subjects, taken by day, with the cars—weatherbeaten Detroit iron from the ’40s to the ’80s—and houses cropped into abstract compositions.

Virsik’s nostalgia takes the form of recycling “bits and parts of material and items no longer used for their original purpose. Through an act of unmaking, by my own hand or otherwise, the material I use is no longer a castoff, but speaks of potentiality and a remaking of the self.”

A collagist, fiber artist, and book artist, Virsik creates soft sculptures and sculptural installations, as well as elegant wall abstractions. Her Domus collages, vertical-format arrays of printed paper strips, suggest curtains and hiding places—perhaps like the Roman domus, the residence favored by those able to escape crowded apartment life. The shows run through March 23, Mercury Twenty Gallery, 475 25th St., Oakland, 510-701-4620, MercuryTwenty.com.

This article was originally published in our sister publication, the East Bay Monthly.