Downtown Santa Cruz homeware and clothing store Stripe is featuring artist Rhia Hurt and her collaborative jewelry project Faith and Rhia Jewelry for its July exhibition. This monthlong exhibition highlights Hurt’s work from her ongoing Balancing Acts series, in which she explores contemporary abstraction through evocative surfaces, associative color relationships and material experimentation.
Inspired by action painting and natural phenomena, Hurt uses a process she dubbed “deconstructed paint,” where she layers pigments to create tactile geological surfaces. “Paint must fall apart to reveal itself,” Hurt said in describing her signature organic abstractions, where she reduces landscapes into four stacked ovoid forms, where pigment settles and separates to echo natural cycles of erosion, sedimentation and renewal.
Additional works by Hurt on display include paper collages and translucent film compositions that play with stacking and transparency. A large-scale installation of colored round frames transforms one corner of the store into a site-specific visual experience as well. “The emotional tension in the work between quiet beauty and planetary emergency echoes the way we experience nature on a human scale,” said Jennifer A.González, professor of art history and visual culture at UC Santa Cruz.
Stripe invites locals to its store at 107 Walnut Ave. downtown for an opportunity to meet Hurt and experience this immersive exhibition on July 19 from noon to 5 p.m.
For more information on the showcase and the artist, click here.
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