Flaming Furbelows explores uneasy encounters between attraction and repulsion, tenderness and terror. From inside fleshy mounds of fur and yarn, Marina Vendrell Renaut’s soft sculptures emit eerie music-box squeals, not unlike a wind-up-doll soundtrack to a horror film. Using minks from cast-off fur coats spliced together with stuffed animals and yarn balls, Vendrell’s plush and bulbous monstrosities offer up wooly orifices and suggestive pleasures that might make you feel a tad dirty for desiring their tactile charms. Kate Eric’s Bug Wars invoke similar unsettling dioramas of violence and seduction, as their other-worldly insects wage battles across landscapes of post-apocalyptic glee and Dr. Seussian wonderment. Snaking lines and figures creep through surreal pastures of gelatinous dread, suggesting an unhinged children’s book dissolving into prickly delights and scabland nightmares. Taken together, these artists present visions of a phantasmic post-natural world, where desire warps into perverse narratives and cross-contaminated forms.

Marina Vendrell Renaut was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2000. Her work has exhibited throughout the United States and China at venues such as Cultural Transmission Center, Beijing China, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, China, Lizabeth Olivera Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Jose Museum of Art and the 13th National Juried Exhibition Viridian Artists, New York, curated by Robert Rosenblum of the Guggenheim Museum, NY. She currently teaches visual arts at Marin Academy. Kate Eric is the collaborative identity of Kate Tedman and Eric Siemens. Kate originally hails from Oxford, England and Eric from Oregon. Currently their time is split between San Francisco and Italy. Since the two began creating art together in Barcelona in 2000, they have exhibited their work in London, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Hong Kong, and Dubai. They have received international press including recent reviews in ARTnews, Art in America and Art Week. They are represented by Frey Norris Gallery.