Opening Night: “Local” Group Show at Mirus Gallery

For their first show of 2014, “Local,” San Francisco’s Mirus Gallery presented a showcase of local artists with a penchant for abstraction and surrealism. Psychedelia seems to be curator Paul Hemming’s favorite flavor; some of the artists in the line-up, like Mars-1 and NoMe Edonna, were returning exhibitors, while Michael Page, Casey Cripe and APEX had never shown with the gallery prior. Mars-1, one of the evening’s heavy-hitting artists, presented three science fiction-tinged works on canvas with fluorescent, pill-like forms that seemed to float through space like asteroids. In Michael Page’s several large, glossy oil paintings, animal characters flowed in and out of fluid, abstract shapes. Artists like Kevin Earl Taylor and Adam Hunter Caldwell grounded the show’s hallucinatory aesthetic with figurative, albeit surreal paintings. “Local” will be on view through February 15. Take a look at some opening night photos from the exhibition below.