Nature Refract

We are greeting the landscape in real time in new ways. We are trying so hard to better understand our scorched and bogged earth as it rolls through its next transition. Within this space, there is reverence, memory of how it used to be, and fear of where we are going.

Nature Refract is an art exhibition led by two contemporary artists, Melissa Dickenson and Nicole Markoff. The show includes the works of contemporary artists working with the current experience

of fire, flood, and climate change.

These works, made within the last two years since the Tubbs fires, will consult the realities of the changing systems- be it grief, joy, reverence, or the whole spectrum. This show features works from artists who live and reside in West County, Sonoma (Cazadero, Guerneville, Camp Meeker, Occidental and Sebastopol) and select artists from San Francisco who have great concern for and work with a focus on the North Coast.

About Melissa Dickenson

Melissa Dickenson’s works are comprised of raw canvas, acrylic and organic pigments she collects from nature. Dickenson forages for earth pigment while hiking, to create abstract landscapes that reflect the terrain in which they were found. She chooses the landscape format as a method of comparison and assertion of her body to material and place. Each work presents depth perception and alludes to geological formations and the ever present light and energy surrounding us.
Dickenson has shown her work nationally on both coasts and in between including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Washington D.C., Baltimore, New York, Boston, Telluride, Dallas and Santa Fe. International exhibits include Tokyo, Krakow, and Barcelona. She is represented in San Francisco by K. Imperial Fine Art.

About Nicole Markoff

Nicole Markoff’s art and design practices cultivate works that navigate the analogous links between landscape and thought production, from a tantric/nondual perspective.  Working with textiles as medium and subject, and photography, projection, and video as process, she has built a compendium of work that includes drawings, studies, writings, photography, videos, and daily practices. She works with the earth as the most reliable form of reality and is currently captivated by regenerative agriculture principles.

In 2015, she moved to West County Sonoma, California, where fires and floods have challenged the land and people these last few years. This has directly influenced her artwork and collaborative endeavors. Her newer works seek to recover a regenerative narrative that uncovers our potential to understand and work with the landscape, as it is now, and to turn the mothership around. She invites you to join her in that effort at any time.

Nicole holds an MFA in textiles from California College of the Arts, and a BA from NYU’s Gallatin School. She has also received the privilege of being an artist in residence at Jentel Foundation, Brush Creek, UCross, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She has shown her work nationally, including a solo show at the San Francisco Four Seasons Hotel, the Muskegon Museum of Art, and Georgia State University to name a few. She practices and works from her home in Cazadero.