There’s No Place Like Nowhere: Art Exhibition and Public Reception (Benicia)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

The Marilyn Citron O’Rourke Art Gallery at the Benicia Public Library is pleased to present “There’s No Place Like Nowhere”, an exhibition of paintings by Michael S. Moore, on view February 22 to April 2, 2022.

There will be a reception for the artist at 3 PM on Saturday, March 5, to which the public is invited.

This exhibit was originally scheduled to open with the title “Further Afield” on March 17, 2020, as the first in a new series of yearly invitational one-person shows featuring accomplished artists of the region. During the long postponement, Moore was far from idle, and his new exhibition will feature many new works created over the last 2 years in Nevada, Colorado, and Benicia, California.

Michael Moore has focused on landscape, particularly remote regions of the northern Great Basin, both geographically and conceptually, throughout his career. With a few side roads into political and narrative territory, the majority of Moore’s work addresses light, space, and memory, “anchored by more than forty years of rattling around the desert and living to tell the tale”.

While Moore has worked since 2000 in the studios he and his wife, sculptor Linda Fleming, created in a historic brewery and saloon in Benicia, he also spends several months of the year working at Wall Spring, his studio built on restored land in Nevada near the Smoke Creek Desert. Additionally, he works in the midsummer months and early winter at his studio at Libre, in the mountains of southern Colorado.

The northern Nevada high desert landscape consistently recurs in Moore’s work, including work produced in his Benicia studio. Memory of place infuses the paintings; they are about memory as much or more than about depiction. “After years of moving around the country the impressions are so deeply layered that I can never predict what will come back to me in a painting,” says Moore, adding that the common concerns are “light, silence, and the paint itself.”

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.