Judith Belzer: Canal Zone: Recent Work from the Panama Project

For Exhibition 54, we will be showing 13 paintings from Bay Area painter Judith Belzer's Canal Zone series, works instigated by a trip to the Panama Canal she undertook under the auspice of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship. Belzer's painting has long concerned itself with the uneasy relationship between the natural and commercial worlds, and she will often use the borderlands between the two as a motif. She adopts aerial perspectives, surveying the contested zones between back country, cultivated field, industry and the overlay of her own organizing principles. Her theme is not so much the encroachment of civilization as one finds in the pervasive brand-scape, but the crimping effect on worlds caught in the collision of economy and ecology. She paints with the critical eye of a journalist reporting back on the condition of an endangered habitat. She uses oil paint at times like watercolor and at times like colored pencil, folding her surfaces in ribbons of thin wash and sharply meandering line. Judith Belzer has shown extensively in New York, Boston, Chicago and California and has participated in institutional exhibitions at the Sonoma County Museum and The Marin County Foundation; Wave Hill, The Museum of Arts and Design and The Arnot Art Museum in New York. She is a recipient of a 2014 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Fine Arts and a Yaddo Residency. This is her fourth solo with the gallery. A catalog will accompany the exhibition.