On Thursday, March 8, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm, Stremmel Gallery will host an opening reception for South Lake Tahoe artist Phyllis Shafer. Shafer's exhibition of new works, entitled "A Painter's Journey: The Sonoran Desert to the Sierra Nevada," are observations from her personal explorations of the rugged Sierra Nevada landscape and the Sonoran Desert. The show will continue through March 31.

The Lake Tahoe resident and plein-air painter creates compelling, poetic paintings of the rugged landscapes she studies. She says, "I see and feel the narrative possibilities in nature and read them as a metaphor for the human condition." Shafer finds patterns in her subjects both up close and far, using exaggerated perspective to create a heightened contrast between fore- and background. Her use of these intensified spatial extremes addresses "the relationship between 'world' and 'self.'" Through her intuitive process of painting her subjects, her artistic goal, she states, is "to distill and crystallize" their "essence and the vital rhythms that animate it."

Phyllis Shafer received her M.F.A. from University of California, Berkeley in 1988, and is a full-time instructor in painting, drawing, design, printmaking and art history at Lake Tahoe Community College. She has shown widely throughout the region, including Sacramento's Crocker Museum and the Nevada Museum of Art. In 2006 she was invited to participate in an exhibition at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, entitled "Yosemite: Art of an American Icon, Part II: 1970-Present." Her works may be found in numerous private and public collections, including the Nevada Museum of Art.

On Thursday, March 8, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm, the public is invited to the reception to meet the artist and view her work. The show will continue through March 31. Stremmel Gallery is located at 1400 S. Virginia Street. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm, and Saturday from 10 am to 3 pm. For more information, contact Stremmel Gallery at 786-0558.

VIEWABLE WORKS

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PRESS RELEASE

Phyllis Shafer