---

Mary Hughes - Yi-li Chin Ward
March 8 - April 27, 2013

---

Two mid-career women artists from the inland empire brought together at Gallery 57 Underground for the first time.

Mary Hughes has exhlibited all over the region, establishing herself as painter of darkened and elusive dreamscapes, in which forms appear and disappear from behind seemingly arbitrary and random patterns of paint, and recognisable objects move from background to foreground depending on the viewer's focus.

Yi-li Chin Ward: also mid-career, has had a career notable for her consistant and persistant interpretations of the female form. Ms. Chin's paintings are economical of line, and seem not at all that particular. Yet, if one spends the time with them, one sees that they are very particular, and very specific about thought and emotion.

Yet, for all the divergance in their careers, both artists share a sensibility: creating an art of objects that are both familiar and yet unfamiliar. Forms that appears to float in front of the viewers' eyes. Cloudy forms that reward the viewer's attention by becoming more and more specific. Each artist paints from the inward, to the outward and then forward and on towards the viewer. Such artwork aims to gather us in, and include us all within her own particular distictive way of dreaming...

Artist Statements:

Mary Hughes:

Mary Hughes attended Chatham College, a women's college in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was born. Her MFA is from
California State College, Long Beach. She has taught at several colleges in California and Ohio. She has resided for many years in Claremont where she is active with the art community.

Mary is interested in using bold linear marks which connect abstracted figures with their background environments. Inner and
outer worlds connect through relationships of pattern and texture with marbled paint flows which imply natural harmony. She has done aseries of women in woven hammocks which explore the evolving feelingsconnected with resting, dreaming, memories and growing insight. These feelings are tempered by the human struggle to understand life.

Yi-li Chin Ward:

Yi-li Chin Ward is a long time resident of Southern California, and a Fine Arts graduate of Mount St. Mary's College in Brentwood, California. She was born in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China in 1954, and came to the United States after English High School in the Phillipines, where her father was stationed with the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.

For the past 18 years as an artist, Ms. Chin-Ward has been primarily drawing and painting the human female figure. Her focus is not to particularize a model, but merely to provide a point of departure to explore her own experience of "what it feels to be female". As the long series progesses, Ms.Chin has gradually begun to include face, foreground. Her latest efforts, point to interior conflicts, and bi-polar feelings, hinted in expessions, but solidified in her use of deft lines and in acrylic washes and swirls of color.