In PERMUTATIONS FROM NATURE’S PERIMETER: RADIUS 2009, Juror Karen Kienzle, Director of the Palo Alto Art Center, has identified seven regional artists who explore the phenomenon of transformation against the backdrop of nature: Tracy Burk, Sukey Bryan, Dana Harel, Amy Hibbs, Ulla de Larios, Catie O’Leary and Sarah Ratchye.

DANAE MATTES: WETLANDS premiers new paintings by the Berkeley artist. Unique in their surface veneers of clay and pigment on canvas, her works evoke poetic atmospheric conditions and striking geologic formations. Viewers are invited to visit the exhibition time and again throughout the summer to witness the forces of permeability in the artist’s site-specific work “Evaporation Pool.” The piece will evolve from a lustrous and fluid sacred circle of poured and manipulated clay into a slaked, sculptural object.

STEPHEN DE STAEBLER: CONTINUITY pays tribute to the leading Americansculptor and acknowledged master in the California clay movement. Theeight sculptures in the exhibition, 1975-2008, bear the tension of dualand contradictory associations: as ancient relics and contemporaryfiguration and as body and landscape. They combine the earthly andspiritual, as well as the fragile and resilient. The exhibition STEPHENDE STAEBLER: CONTINUITY is presented in anticipation of the artist’sretrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art.