Conjure
An Exhibition by Siy Gallery for Artists Midori and Stephen & Birthday Celebration For Stephen Seymour
@ZONE 3
(Suite 287 at the Shops at Tanforan)
Opening Reception
Saturday April 22nd from 4 to 7. Exhibit runs through May 31st.
STEPHEN SEYMOUR AND MIDORI
A recipe for magic making:
Find two disparate elements never before combined.
Throw together into a cauldron of creativity.
Stir gently with a provocative challenge.
Step back.
Have faith in art.
We invited two artists with distinctly different practices and expressions to come together, then challenged them to imagine new possibilities through collaboration.
Stephen Seymour paints the texture and joy of the world around him with bright, playful colors, elevating the mood of anyone who gazes upon them.
Midori sculpts and performs in a restrained color palette, exploring chaos, disorientation, and the subconscious.
In this exhibition, experience each of their work in their elemental state, then step into their new invention and vision - their answer to the challenge to make uncommon magic.
Stephen Seymour
Stephen explores the texture and patterns of everyday life using a colorful palette to express himself. As a student at Parsons School of Design in New York City he studied textiles with a focus on weaving and silkscreening. He would screen print the patterns of urban life to use in making clothing and shoes.
Links
- IG: ssworld49
- Stephenseymourpaintings.com
Stephen continues to be influenced by the time spent in NYC. Today he paints large colorful canvases, many of them are used to create patterns used in a series of scarves he is making.
Stephen was born in Lubbock, Texas and settled in Huntington Beach, California where he started his love for the arts and culture. As an avid traveler his love for texture and color have been influenced by his Mexico and Latin America travels. Today he spends time in San Miguel de Allende where he paints with several accomplished artists. His passion for culture, color and texture can be seen in the brush strokes and layers of his paintings and fabric.
In 2018 Stephen was appointed to the San Mateo County Arts Commission, he manages the Visual Arts Exhibition at the San Mateo County Fair, and in 2021 he co-founded the Peninsula Art Foundation with the late sculptor, Ruth Waters. He opened the ArtZone in San Bruno’s Tanforan Mall where he offers affordable artist studio space, teaches and has his studio.
Stephen’s works are in private collections throughout the world. He has shown his work in Mexico and the USA.
MIDORI
Midori ( 美登里 ) blends performance, installation, and social practice into art that questions social norms and cultural biases, instigating new questions. Tossed with sweet and sly humor, she serves up challenging, bitter topics. Made in Japan, ella vive en San Francisco ahora. Lately, she’s feeling pretty crispy around the edges.
Links
- PlanetMidori.com
- IG: planetmidori.art
- Patreon.com/PlanetMidori
(longer more traditional bio)
Midori ( 美登里 ) is a queer, Japanese American artist. She creates work that gives shape and texture to emotion, desire, repulsion, collective memory, and subconscious revisions of experience. Her performances are physical and durational, often inviting the audience to join in and become co-conspirators in the labor of art.
Reclamation of material and collaboration are core values that inform almost everything she creates, and the multiplicity of perspective and disorientation are ongoing themes in her work.
Born and raised in Japan with Japanese and German American heritage, Midori grew up loving Japanese folk art and traditional survival technologies, even as she struggled against the pressures of racism and sexism. Now a San Franciscan of thirty years, her body, like her art, bridges multiple cultures.
After serving in the military, she began her art career performing in queer nightclubs, collaborating with other ‘weirdo’ transgressive and experimental artists, saying “Sure, I’ll do it!” to even the oddest of opportunities. She describes herself as “born an abomination, traveling between worlds seeking other monsters – we are so many monsters.”
Midori’s work has been shown at San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Leslie Lohman Museum, SoMArts, Das Arts Amsterdam, Gorilla Gallery Oaxaca, Root Division, among others.
