Bronwyn Dexter is Bay Area visual artist and per-forming musician. When she’s not blowing up the stage with her Cowboy Glam Rock band, Raven Marcus, she can be found covered in ink in the printmaking lab. A Seattle native, Bronwyn moved to San Francisco in 2009 and has been building communities in queer culture, art practice and musical awareness ever since.

Arion Press matches the finest contemporary art with the finest literature, past and present, in books that are beautifully designed and produced. Founded by Andrew Hoyem in 1974, the Arion Press publishes deluxe, limited-edition books, many of them printed by letterpress, illustrated by prominent artists, and some accompanied by separate editions of original prints. Since 2001, Arion Press has been a cultural tenant at the Presidio, the National Park in San Francisco, where it shares a handsome industrial building with its second division, M & H Type—the oldest and largest type foundry in the United States, serving the font and typesetting needs of letterpress printers around the world—as well as its nonprofit adjunct, the Grabhorn Institute.

Colleen Mullins' work, for the last several years, has focused on an area of Sonoma County in which her family camped in their VW van in the 1970's, based both on personal exploration and an archive of her father’s work dating back to the 1940’s. In addition, she has work of great breadth, from flamboyant high-end luxury cruise ship revelers to the urban forest of New Orleans, as well as work in the book arts.

A 3rd generation San Franciscan, Mullins recently relocated to her hometown from a 22 year stint in Minnesota, where she taught college level photography and book arts until last year. She was the 2013 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board (her fourth), a two-time recipient of the McKnight Artist Fellowship (1998 and 2011), and a recipient of the Women's Studio Workshop Production Grant, with which she produced a limited edition artist book, Opening Day. Opening Day recounts her father's crossing of the Golden Gate Bridge on Opening Day, crossing together on the 50th Anniversary, and the crossed wires that occurred when her father succumbed to senile dementia.  Her work is in several national museum collections including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Southeast Museum of Photography.

seeing is just your best guess ...

Life’s ambiguities, human behavior, love, loss and longing have become the subject matter for my artwork. The images that result mimic tableau photography. They are realized through my personal successes and failures as an artist, teacher, traveler, twin and lover. Found objects speak to me like the words of a poem. The narratives/stories evolve through an intense engagement with materials, art history, attention to detail and the search for meaningful content. These images are intended to amuse the viewer through open-ended interpretations. Ideas come to me not as tangible thoughts but as ideas and events that happened as the result of unconscious and intuitive reactions.

Working in limited space I position objects like the actors on a stage, with a momentary pause in the action. The camera records this action which seems closer to sculpture and painting than photography. Using only natural sun light, my 35mm camera and found objects, I insert myself into the dialogue created by the objects. The collage techniques coupled with bright contrasting colors make the photographs appear other worldly, yet with elements of realism. The process to create a single image can take up to 3 months from start to finish. The resulting images reveal and conceal ideas that rely on the viewer’s personal experiences for interpretation. Often, the staged objects create a mood, a feeling of expectation that something has just happened—or is about to.

I am lucky to be an artist.

Collage is wonderfully open ended and it appeals to many artists of all ages, experience and skill. It is a forgiving process. There are those who practice perfection which can dazzle even the most jaded. Others like myself, move quickly through ideas, moving along in an expedient way, layering over mishaps, building to a conclusion without regard to ‘proper’ technique and materials. My intent as an artist and writer is always to find the poetry in the materials while being in the moment to reach something that feels fresh and new. I offer this poem, a collage of words that I wrote in 2009.i

What is Left Out

syllable by syllable

line by line

shunning adjectives

evading metaphors

silent, impatient connections

dots of the imagination

this seamless composition

once finished echoes

like the singing bowl, 

struck once

reverberating 

 over and over

Joan Schulze

Candace Loheed's orangeland is a small jewel of a gallery on Mason Street at Jackson, in what she refers to as "Nob Valley". The gallery is currently hosting the orangeland Botanical exhibition showcasing a wonderful collection of Bay Area Artists in many mediums. Drawing on nature produced a great variety of interpretations and the show is varied and exciting.