Serena Bocchino, Phong Bui,
Mia Brownell, Yvonne Estrada,
Brian Friedman, Yoko Inoue,
Roy Kinzer, Pam Longobardi,
Sandy Litchfield, Stephen Maine,
Karen Margolis, Jim Osman,
Gary Petersen, Holly Sears,
and Christopher Walsh

BREATHING SPACE is a group exhibition suggestive of the long exhale, a subtle transportation to another plane of engagement like yoga for the brain, a needed stretch, a moment to pause and breathe. One purpose of art is to provide the viewer with breathing space, with an experience that moves one from quotidian "reality" to a place where contemplation can yield a measure of transcendence. It is a brief lift but a necessary one. For artists the effort to define and communicate their relation to the physical world constitutes a search for a sense of meaningful balance that it is possible to find in the work of art. In our Attention Deficit Disordered world constant streams of shifting information form a dense matrix through which we navigate. In this context, works of art, though themselves a form of information, can provide respite. As intensely compressed containers for ideas and experiences, artworks ask of us only to pause and participate as viewers, returning for our gaze another level of consciousness. The artists in Breathing Space provide a focus for just such a journey of art viewing afterwards allowing us to return to the world with our minds excited and our eyes a little more open.