Colleen Flaherty

(American, b. 1974)

Education

2000 - 2002     San Francisco Art Institute, MFA, Painting, San Francisco, CA

1995- 1998     San Jose State University, BFA, cum laude, Painting and Drawing, Minor in Music, San Jose, CA

Group Shows

2010    “Red Dot Art Fair,” (with Bohemian Gallery,) Skyline NYC, New York

                    “ False Doors,” Autobody Fine Art, Alameda, CA

                    “Los Angeles Art Show,” ( with Bohemian Gallery) Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA

2009  “Strange Hope,“ Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco, CA

2008  “juried@bac,“ (curated by: Catherine Clark and Joanne Northrup) Berkeley Art Center, CA

  “sketchy,“ Autobody Fine Art, Alameda

  “Introductions,“ Alicia Johnson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2007  “2 x 2,“ Oakland Art Gallery, Oakland, CA

  “Ripples,“ Oakland Art Gallery, Oakland

2006  “A Flight,“ Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco

  “Oakland: East Side Story,“ Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

  “15/15 Idas y vueltas/one & one again/plastica-organica,“ La Unidad Academica de Estudios Regionales de la Coordinación

   Humanidades dela UNAM, Jiquilipan, Michoacan, Mexico

  “Encuentros/ Encounters,“ SomArts Cultural Center, San Francisco

  “Virus Show,“ Lobot Gallery, Oakland

2005  “Nehman Sie den Bus Zu, 801 Projects, Art Basel|Miami, Miami, FL

  “Legacies Art Exhibit,“ UCSC Women’s Center, Santa Cruz, CA

  “This Is Not Rocket Science,“ Bayennale 2005, Old Oakland, Oakland

  “Various,“ The Crucible Steel Gallery, San Francisco

  Bayennnale 2005, Unity Council, Oakland

  “GroundWORKS San Jose,“ San Jose, CA

  “Post Postcard 2005,“ Outpost for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

2004  “Post Postcard 8,“ The Lab, San Francisco

  “Ground,“ Artbeat Gallery, Berkeley

2003  “Inside of Inside Holiday Benefit,“ The Lab, San Francisco

  “Post Postcard 7,“ The Lab, San Francisco

  “Ocho,“ A.R.T. Gallery, Oakland Box Theater, Oakland

  “Cube Farm Events,“ San Jose Museum of Art, Curators‘ Space, San Jose

  “Moment’s Notice,“ Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco

2002  “Emerging Bay Area Artists,“ San Francisco Design Center, San Francisco

  “Who Are You?“  San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose

  “Cold Cuts Sessions,“ Woolsley St.- Downstairs Gallery, Berkeley

  “Italy Group Show,“ Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco

  “Recent works by Colleen Flaherty,“ Herbst Pavilion, San Francisco

2001  “Passing Through,“ Palazzo Piccolomini, Pienza, Italy

  “(f) Roots of the Blood Orange Tree,“ SomArts Cultural Center, San Francisco

Awards

2001– 2002 San Francisco Art Institute Grant

2000– 2001San Francisco Art Institute Grant

1998 Violet Speddy Scholarship

Residencies

2004       Fundación Valparaiso, Mojacar, Almeria, Spain

By: Michael Miller

The Bohemian Gallery

In her delicate, yet large and complex works on sturdy paper, Colleen Flaherty seems to conflate ancient, modern, and futuristic, as if to observe the astrophysicist’s claim that in the universe there is no time, only space.  She is so adept at moving her viewers through time-space warps and parallel universes, if you will, that her works end up puzzling us with the pretzel logic of a torus – the reflexive form that some have claimed the universe is shaped after, thus producing all this non-Euclidean geometry up there in the starry void. 

Flaherty is not the kind of American-Irish girl content with seeing the Chicago River dyed green on St. Patty’s Day.  She is a type of historical zealot, who upon discovering words like koan, rune, Visigoth, Celt, Eire, etc. is determined to find out as much as she can about her ancient ancestors, and then weave allusions to them into her seemingly contemporary cityscapes suspended in futuristic, space-age domains.  And it does not end with her own heritage.  Flaherty is a polyglot historian whose studies have taken her back to ancient Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa, Assyria, Han China, India, the American Southwest, Babylon, etc. – any cradle of civilization that sparks her natural zest for archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and, of course, the arts of ancient worlds.  In Flaherty’s grandest drawings, we may find New York City bombarded by wavelengths of flying saucer routes, or crop circles adjacent Buckminster Fuller-like domes and American Southwest blanket patterns – all collaged with fragments of “architect’s plans,” as if her canvas were the cauldron from which God made the universe in seven days.

How did all these worlds come together – united in sensual master-drawings that convince the eye of their veracity, inasmuch as hugely expensive Hollywood special effects movies do?  The answer may lie in Flaherty’s ability to enjamb imagery and paint registers not only side by side, or up and down, but in and out, and out and in at both perpendicular and oblique angles.  As with a torus – on which you can place your pen and wind all around the shape only to come to where you started, but on other side of the form! – your eye may set out to trace over and through Flaherty’s imagery and space, only to read later, “You are not in the same time zone or universe” in which you thought you had started!

Other ways in which Flaherty creates these parallel universes enjambing 3-D dissociatives may be her use of a wide range of paint registers and her use of collage.  If by paint register we mean the pitch, tone, aura, tuning or metaphysical place relative to the ground of various strokes in various paints, then we are in Flaherty country.  By enjambing facture that comprises acrylics, charcoal, spray paint, and snake sheddings, the artist seems to have grasped a mixed-media recipe perfect for describing her ancient-modern-futuristic conflations.  It may be that, in and of themselves, acrylics read as modern or contemporary to the viewer, while charcoal feels ancient to the eye, and spray paint futuristic, since its blurry, atomized modeling suggests star gases, wavelength spectra not clearly visible to the naked eye, or radiant energetics that could only be of nuclear origin and thus suitable for your everyday flying saucer!

Flaherty furthermore makes sly use of collage techniques to confuse our time-space orientation.  She will apply organically shaped passages with complicated hatching and cross-hatching systems that say Rembrandt etching plate, as much as they do chemistry-bonds modeling.  Again, have we Fuller’s aluminum armatures, or wheat stacks x-ing the plains, as they stand counter-crossed, so many tiny teepees of grain? 

In Flaherty’s new series of drawings from 2008 and 2009, she has even collaged snake-skin sheddings into her delicate, complex surfaces.  The snake, whether Biblical enemy or sacred Egyptian god-form, is clearly an ancient icon with its own cults of evil and divinity.  The snake is also a streamlined survivor into contemporary times, whose most efficient physiology could earn it a Darwin Prize.  The fact that Flaherty uses snake sheddings and not snake skins further suggests that “her” animals are still alive as we speak in some nearby zoo or herpetarium. “The snake skin sheds over and over, across millennia,” the artist seems to be saying, “and yet the specimen or the species-being, itself, remains intact, forever an efficient living whole, always changing, always shedding off the old and useless.”  We, each of us, are like a snake skin, and humanity, the snake.  We grow old and are tossed off, while the core animal (read:  our species and civilization) lives on. The earth may swallow us whole someday, surely as humans will die, but the transfer of DNA to the next generation will endure. Even the diamond-shaped tessellation of the typical snake-skin pattern reminds us of interlocking geometry from genetic, molecular, artistic, and architectonic viewpoints, to name just a few.  We are sent into the realm of math from its ancient origins to the logarithms of today’s super-computers by a patterned creature as old as time.

Happily, the relaxed viewer finds that not only are these works complex and fascinating in terms of allusions to civilizations, space-time effects, and manifold registers of handling, but that they are simply gorgeous to the eye.  Beautiful inviting colors – dun, taupe, spring pastels, vibrant red, and sleek black and white –  make Flaherty’s work an automatic pleasure to take in.  This is to say, you don’t have to be an archaeologist or an astronomer (nor art critic!) to feel akin to their inherent delights.