Shimmery art poses perception quiz
To celebrate 50 years of open studios on the Sausalito waterfront, the artists’ collective known as ICB has ventured away from its old shipbuilding plant to mount its first off-site group show at the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael.
Fifty-nine ICB artists are represented in the Civic Center Galleries but, amid a hallway of paintings, one photograph stands out in the sky-lit gallery. It is a mosaic of skylights printed on a shiny sheet of aluminum, a piece called “Skyhooks.”
The longer you stare at it, the more it works on the brain. That’s the desired effect of the artist, Brooke Armstrong, who has a doctorate in perceptual neuroscience and a day job as a psychotherapist in San Francisco.
“I start with something that is identifiable and known, and then pull it into abstraction,” says Armstrong. “I create a place that hovers between real and unreal, and then the observer can chart their own path through it.”
Her photography fits under the academic category of “brain crumbs,” and she has been pursuing it back in Fort Worth, where she grew up. She became a family outlier when she left Texas for Stanford University and never went back. Instead she went to the campus darkroom every day, her own form of therapy.
“It’s a way of dancing with demons,” says Armstrong, who calls herself Dr. Brooke and spent years dancing in solitude while waiting for the right studio space to come along.
A year ago, she was looking covetously at a warehouse space in the Mission during an open studio when she became mesmerized by the natural light coming through leaded windows. Pulling out her iPhone, she photographed it from all angles.
Back home in Larkspur, she digitally manipulated the images one atop the other, to form a mosaic, which was then transferred to aluminum to form “Skyhooks.”
“The silver of the aluminum shows through the white of the images and gives it a certain iridescence,” she explains.
“Skyhooks” is part of an architectural series that covers the wall of her new studio. After 20 years of looking for the perfect place to display the series, she discovered the top floor of the Industrial Center Building in Sausalito last summer. It’ll be where she plans to debut her architectural photos during the 50th Annual ICB Winter Open Studios Art Market, Nov. 30-Dec. 2.
Four tall windows face the bay and there is a couch to recline on while absorbing Armstrong’s explanation of the perceptual neurobiology in her photography.
“I want to understand how perception works because it’s a miraculous thing,” she says. “Perception is a constructive act. Every day we are creating what we see in a biological way, and that’s exciting to me.”