Photo by Elias Funez/efunez
The psychedelic genre in visual art is being delineated at The Chambers Project in Grass Valley. This Saturday will feature the gallery’s first solo show, which will continue to explore transcendent motifs — through texture and optics — to comment on human relationships with technology.
Local artist Candace Thatcher, 32, describes her art — and her process — as movement from analog to digital.
“What I’m doing is appropriating a preexisting image from image based platform — Instagram, Google, Tumblr — just loading imagery on my phone in low-Wifi areas so there’s the preexisting image and then painting the topographical read of that image,” Thatcher said.
The dark and light colors present in the computer graphics make the sculptural form, which Thatcher then “translates” into Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to play with optical color mixing. The mixed media optic artist takes the loaded image into 3-D modeling to eventually create this wire form out of ‘bump map.’
According to Thatcher’s artist statement, ‘bump mapping’ is a technique in computer graphics that stimulates texture onto an object.
“I enjoy that contrast between this really old technique in conjunction with new technologies and then also creating something that is kind of devoid of reality,” Thatcher said. “It’s a simulated environment, it has no perspective — just that relationship.”
Thatcher’s art renders a snapshot of a texture of something originally two dimensional and reimagines the way the new form takes space.
Photo: Elias Funez
Thatcher said she enjoys finding spontaneity amid a processes embedded with technology.
“After the computer simulates it in 3-D modeling or I 3-D model it, it turns into this biomorphic form, and then just playing with it,” Thatcher explained. “I don’t know where it’s going to go until the end and I like that degree of chance with technology and the 3-D modeling program.“
Method or meaning?
Like Chambers’ last exhibit, wherein gallery visitors witnessed five psychedelic paints work in tandem on two separate canvasses, Thatcher’s work is about process.
Thatcher said she was aesthetically drawn to wire frames, but the draw goes beyond appearances.
“I started exporting art with very detailed images because they are grounding,” Thatcher explained, adding, “and I struggled with anxiety my entire life.”
When Thatcher first made the wire frame sculptures out of wood after she started 3D modeling, she thought to herself, “I would like to make more of these.”
At the same time Thatcher said she began to read more Marshall McLuhan and Sherry Turkle, a sociologist from MIT who wrote on “the effects of technology and the extended nervous system and the global village and how technology is changing our behavior and the way we interact.”
Technology influences the way art is made because every person is processing “so much imagery and images every day,” Thatcher said.
Photo: Elias Funez
Thatcher’s work is meant to recreate the experience of “our preoccupation with screens all the time.” The multimedia artist uses neon paints and medium to illuminate pixels of the proverbial screen most keep within arms-length 24 hours a day.
The aesthetic of digital culture has Thatcher “thinking about how we’re all connected” — but she’s not the only one.
Thatcher said she is not surprised at Chambers’ interest in her work because of the longstanding relationship between optical art and elements first found in the sixties concert posters Chambers made it his mission to collect.
Thatcher said her childhood home — which she shared with her sister and co-collaborator Jessie — had at least two psychedelic concert posters she knows Chambers must be familiar with.
Jessie Thatcher, Candace Thatcher’s older sister by four and half years, went to Mills College in Oakland.
Jessie Thatcher said she and her sister’s works are not necessarily gendered but said that the women were influenced by their grandmother, a former student of the Chicago Art Institute, and their mother’s drawings.
Jessie Thatcher said she could see a common theme in the bauhaus movement as she and her sister play with textures on a different mediums because “there is a woven element.”
“I don’t know why I’m attracted to those patterns, those depths, the light reflection,” Jessie Thatcher said. “It circles back to op art because you’re dealing with art on a certain level.”
Brian Chambers saw the connection when Thatcher’s family friend — and Chambers’ architect — Richard Baker introduced the gallerist to her work.
Chambers said Julie Baker, Richard’s wife, was the head of Grass Valley Center for the Arts, and that the couple’s recommendation has already been fruitful.
“All of her pieces sold,” Chambers said of his very first show, “and my audience seemed to enjoy it.”
Photo: Elias Funez
By employing old techniques with new technology, Thatcher’s 3-D modeling creates “a simulated environment, detached from reality and perspective — I enjoy this relationship with imagery from social media platforms.”
“I’ve always been a fan of optical art,” Chambers said, “but how she creates her art is different than all the other artists that I work with. It still appeals to the 3-D element of everything I gravitate toward.”
Chambers, who started collecting art when he was in high school, said Thatcher is of a younger cloth than the artists he generally works with.
“I think that younger generation has a different approach — and different relationships with their approach with creation and to get the finish line of her product,” Chambers said. “I don’t know of anybody else in my typical realm of operation that is approaching creation the way she does. I find it fascinating, unique and inspiring.”
Chambers said every show he has scheduled in the gallery space he began occupying in November 2021 is “going down in the books as an important part of art history.”
For Chambers, that means Grass Valley is going down in the history books too.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve created and what we’re building toward and I think a young, female artist doing the first show is relevant,” Chambers said, adding that the show highlights one of many key payers already on and encroaching the psychedelic art scene.
Thatcher said she works at the collective makers space called the Curious Forge, the artists’ collective known as the Nail Factory and has had the fortune of working in the studio of Evan Nesbit, a Yale University alum who teaches art at Sierra College.
Chambers said he is honored to be part of what he thinks may be a special moment for Thatcher.
“I don’t think she’s done a show at this sort of level that will get as many eyes on it,” Chambers said, adding. “I think it’s a really cool thing for the local community.”
Rebecca O’Neil is a staff writer with The Union. She can be reached at roneil@theunion.com
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