WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE
SUSAN O’MALLEY & LEAH ROSENBERG
EXHIBITION DATES:
SEPTEMBER 17 - OCTOBER 29, 2022
STRIPE CLUB:
WEDNESDAY, OCT. 26TH
6:00 - 8:00PM
A special chance to view the exhibition after hours with complimentary drink + snack pairings (inspirited by stripes!) served from the gallery windows.
Artists Susan O’Malley (1976-2015) and Leah Rosenberg (b. 1979) met at Romer Young Gallery ten years ago, where O’Malley’s exhibition My Healing Garden Is Green was on view. This first encounter was the beginning of many thoughtful, engaging, and generous collaborations and conversations between the artists, both in O’Malley’s lifetime and beyond.
We’ve Been Here Before presents—through text, color, and daily rituals—the parallel play of these two Bay Area artists and their ongoing mutual belief in art’s ability to affect people’s lives for the better. The show stages an exploration of time not in the conventional Western sense as a linear continuum of successive moments, but in terms of repetition, continuance, inclusivity, generosity, reflexivity, and, perhaps most importantly, presence.
This exhibition features a series of text pieces from O’Malley’s 2009 exhibition at the gallery, You Are Exactly Where You Need to Be, previously unshown ephemera from her San José Artist-in-Residence series, and a single small drawing that reads, in black script, a red hot rose. O’Malley found inspiration in the crisp and authoritative language of optimism. By inviting the viewer to just be, she invites an active participation. Ultimately, her heartfelt, sometimes humorous, always fiercely compassionate calls to action celebrate our collective humanity and a collective need for healing.
Rosenberg’s conceptual paintings and process-based drawings, reflect O’Malley’s generosity and invite their own experience of openness. Rosenberg’s 2008 large-scale striped diptych, All Together Now, is made up of margins of consecutive paint layers, one laid over the next as days or weeks pass. For Rosenberg, paint serves as a medium for layering, duration and accrual, recording boundaries of time spent dedicated to a particular process. The series Moments in Time, made in 2022, offers a fresh commentary on recording through color and repetitive mark-making. The pieces speak to a practice predicated on ritual and discipline; of making as a way to stop and start to see from a different perspective. Together, they form a record of the artist’s self-directed process, like journal entries, on her meditative journey.
The works by O’Malley and Rosenberg on view were selected for their complementarity in terms of repetition—of idea, of gesture, of action—and encouragement of interpersonal connection. The show suggests a return to the time when the works were made, the return of visitors to the space, and brings O’Malley, in a way, back to the gallery to share in the occasion of collectivity. The work is the same, but with a different resonance now.
We’ve Been Here Before is ultimately a prompt to notice where we’ve been, an acknowledgment of our collective resilience, an invitation to be where we are, and an encouragement to continue.
We also hope you can join us at the gallery on Wednesday October 26th 6-8pm for STRIPE CLUB; a special chance to view the exhibition after hours with complimentary drink + snack pairings (inspirited by stripes!) served from the gallery windows.
For additional information, please contact the gallery at 415.550.7483 or email info@romeryounggallery.com.
INSTALLATION IMAGES:
