POKE
The Fourth Wall, Oakland, Ca.
July 8 – August 26, 2023
The Fourth Wall gallery is pleased to present new work by Bay Area artist, Frances Lerner. Lerner is one of those rare artists who, for years, has managed and preferred to work under the critical radar. When she does show her work publicly, which is not often, it gets attention.
“It’s this question that led me to the new works offered in POKE. In moving from two to three dimensions, I was excited to add a tactile, spatial, and somehow “real world” component to my previous work—as though the puppets themselves had stepped out of the paintings and created the felt-works while I was sleeping. I haven’t been sleeping, though! I’ve been wool-gathering, dyeing, tearing, wadding, and—yes—poking away. Through it all, my goal has been to evoke a quality of ironic nostalgia, a mixture of pathos and tenderness that I hope is palpable in the softness and shabbiness of these strange shapes that seemed to will their own way through my fingers.” Frances Lerner 2023