IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT
Zoya
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT
Mia Bergeron • Cara Enteles • Willow Gelphman • Mila Libman • Aondrea Maynard Gigi Mills • Elise Morris • Danielle Rante • Zoya Scholis • Jenn Shifflet
May 6th – June 18th, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 10th, 3-5 p.m.
Bryant Street Gallery is delighted to present It Happened One Night, a group exhibition that embraces the allure and mystique of the shadowy hours between dusk and dawn. This curated collection features works by Mia Bergeron, Cara Enteles, Willow Gelphman, Mila Libman, Aondrea Maynard, Gigi Mills, Elise Morris, Danielle Rante, Zoya Scholis, and Jenn Shifflet. The midnight intrigues of It Happened One Night are on view from May 6th – June 18th, 2025. The gallery and artists welcome the public to an opening reception on Saturday, May 10th from 3-5pm.
It Happened One Night stemmed from a desire to celebrate the peculiar nuances and dichotomies concealed under the velvety cloak of darkness. The nighttime experience is broad, ranging from the quiet comfort of a peaceful sleep to an overwhelming sense of awe at the vast beauty of a limitless starlit sky. It encapsulates the uniquely ethereal quality of moonlight juxtaposed with the candy-colored glow of artificial lights pulsing through the dark. The night’s tolerance for mischief is balanced out by the quiet serenity that comes from being the only one awake in a slumbering world.
The works and artists represented in this show portray a varied complexion of nighttime happenings. Mila Libman and Willow Gelphman depict the natural world under the thrall of a moonlit sky. The fine details of Libman’s trees stand starkly picked out against her moon-touched cloudy sky. Gelphman’s use of layered collage enhances the deep shadows cast by the full moon gracing her desert giant. Their ghostly moonglow is a sharp contrast to the incandescently bright bursts of colored lights radiating out from Mia Bergeron’s tiny but powerful nocturns.
Cara Enteles and Elise Morris also interpret the night through nature’s lens. With an empathetic brush, Enteles spotlights the night pollinators whose praises are so often unsung. Meanwhile, Morris’ impeccable sensitivity to color and gesture captures the subtle shifts of a twilight breeze filtering through the branches.
Aondrea Maynard, Jenn Shifflet, and Danielle Rante look skyward to the stars and the space beyond. There is the vastness of the cosmos and a celestial otherworldliness ensnared in Maynard’s deep moody starfall paintings. Shifflet’s delicate paper works evoke shimmering shades of eclipses, waning crescents, and lunar halos. The sky dominates in Rante’s large-scale desert landscape–the grazing herd down below rendered insignificant under the immense cacophony of a starry night.
The figures in Zoya Scholis’ paintings occupy the other end of the spectrum–secure and safely inside with the unparalleled comfort of curled-up cats for company. While there is a vulnerability to the characters in Gigi Mills’ narratives, there is also a roguish sense of play in their night swims under star-dusted skies. The collection of works by these ten artists is wide and varied but still just a mere glimpse of the possibilities the night affords. It is, after all, only one night.
It Happened One Night will be on view at 532 Bryant Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301 from May 6th to June 18th, 2025. For more images and information please visit the website at www.bryantstreet.com or email us at bryantst@mac.com
MIA BERGERON
Mia Bergeron’s interest in art was cultivated early on, beginning with continuous exposure to visual works through her parents’ graphic design firm in New York City. In 1998, Bergeron studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. She went on to study and teach at the Charles H. Cecil Studio in Florence, Italy, a small private painting atelier primarily focused on the naturalistic tradition. In 2010, she was named one of the “Top 21 Artists Under 31 Years Old to Be Collected Now” by SouthWest Art Magazine. Her painting “Disperse” won both a Certificate of Excellence at the Portrait Society of America’s International Competition, and for Artistic Excellence in SouthWest Art Magazine’s annual competition in 2013. Bergeron’s hope is to use her abilities not only to share her views through painting, but also to help bring visibility to other women painters.
CARA ENTELES
Cara Enteles is best known for her nature and landscape paintings on Aluminum and Plexiglas panels. Her work is a visual diary of an ongoing fascination with the natural world, drawing from the western Catskill mountains where she lives, the large garden she keeps, and her various travels. A lover of nature, she subtly addresses environmental issues that plague the natural world. She has made bodies of works based around plastic pollution, fracking, oil spills, climate change, and the declining numbers of pollinating animals.
Enteles has developed a painting technique that mixes silkscreen printing and oil painting. She collects botanicals in her travels and creates silkscreens from them, often returning from a hike with bundles of branches and leaves. Using a simple printing process, the shapes of the botanical forms are layered into the paintings as repeated shapes. Over time, she has accumulated a large library of plant material to draw from.
WILLOW GELPHMAN
Willow Gelphman is a Bay Area artist and writer. Untethered to a single medium, Gelphman’s work flows naturally between art and writing, incorporating narrative elements into visual art and illustrative language into fictional works. Inspired by the medium of comic art, which embodies this balance, Gelphman cobbles together ink, watercolor, charcoal, colored pencil, and digital elements into multimedia pieces that draw from the language of comics, relishing in graphic linework and exaggerated visual cues.
Gelphman was featured in the show Futurescapes in 2023 in Santa Cruz, has been published in the magazines filling Station and Reed Magazine, has illustrated for various magazine covers and music concert posters, and has won several awards, including the Irwin Grant and the Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures.
MILA LIBMAN
Libman begins her process by taking photographs in the Sierras, then distorts the photographs until she arrives at the images that she wants to recreate in her drawings, ultimately allowing the drawing process to take its own form of representation. Libman creates her works using a subtractive process. Most of her drawings are made with dry pigments rubbed over large sheets of paper and erasing a pattern into the medium, lifting pigment and revealing the paper to create a pattern of light. Her ultimate goal is to arrive at the place where the drawing leaves the viewer with a sense of wonder, the same feeling that she has when she photographs nature in the first place. In the end, Libman is not trying to imitate reality, but to create reality from within.
MILA LIBMAN CONTINUED:
Mila Libman was born in Minsk, Belarus and immigrated to the US in 1988. She studied graphic design at Montclair State University, continued her art training at the New York Studio School, and received her MFA in 1997 from Yale University. She currently lives in works in San Jose, CA.
AONDREA MAYNARD
Aondrea Maynard’s paintings are modern interpretations of the natural world that explore the emotionally evocative powers of color and light. They are infused with an effervescence that connects the viewer to their own ethereal nature. She grew up enjoying a special relationship with Nature, spending much of her childhood playing in streams, climbing trees, and communing with the flowers and fruits in gardens. This was the beginning of a lifelong relationship with nature that she now weaves into her work. Her paintings are “a celebration of the beauty of this world and a love letter to humanity to remember this gift we’ve been given.”
Her work can be seen in public and private collections all over the world from San Francisco to London, Copenhagen, and Dubai. Clients and collectors include Google, Apple TV, Norwegian Cruise lines, Pottery Barn, Nordstroms, Crate & Barrel, Sutter Hospital, and The Hyatt Hotel, to name a few.
GIGI MILLS
Gigi Mills is a contemporary artist renowned for her unique and evocative approach to painting. Her distinctive style and imaginative compositions have left an indelible mark on the world of contemporary art. She aims to bear witness to, and elevate in beauty, what is frequently considered unwanted. She works with oil on various surfaces, such as linen, canvas, birch panel, paper, and cardboard, playing around with different surfaces and the way in which paint soaks into or lays on top of them. Her subjects, often enigmatic and introspective, invite viewers to reflect on their own journeys, emotions, and inner landscapes. Mills’s work serves as a mirror to the human soul, allowing us to connect with our shared humanity.
Gigi Mills received her BA in Theater from the College of Santa Fe and received her MA in Choreography from the University of New Mexico. Her work has been shown in over 40 exhibitions since 2004
ELISE MORRIS
Elise Morris seeks to understand nature’s point of view, particularly fleeting moments of growth and change. Finding beauty in the unexpected, she works from a deep desire to know her natural surroundings. Morris begins each piece with a simple line drawing, then adds layers upon layers of translucent paint. The resulting paintings and drawings explore concepts of nature at the edge of abstraction. She is particularly interested in light, and is drawn to how it is filtered through trees, in heavy clouds, and reflections in water. Morris received a B.A. in painting and printmaking at U.C. Santa Cruz in 1997, and is the recipient of the Hyde and Benteen Irwin Scholarship for excellence and promise in the visual arts. She has exhibited extensively, and has work in corporate and individual collections throughout the U.S. and internationally. Morris currently lives and works in Northern California. She is also the founder of The Studio Work, a blog in which she documents studio visits and interview with Bay Area artists.
DANIELLE RANTE
Danielle Rante's work explores our personal relationships to landscape, communicating a deep sense of contemplation and awe She looks for environmental shifts that feel larger than herself: subtle changes in light as the sun moves across the sky, the stark arctic contrast of Iceland, the geologic juxtaposition between rock and water. These scenes and locations invite introspection and rumination on the complexities of human-place relationships, ecology and environmentalism, and the topographic history of a place. From the ancient mounds of the Aena people in her southwest Ohio home to the elves that inform environmental decisions in Scandinavian countries, she looks for the intersections and collisions of magic and reality. She seeks to open up the spaces she visits and inhabits without their usual cartographic markers or obvious landmarks, inviting the viewer to project their own interpretation back into the image. In her large scale works on washi paper, she employs the sea, space, and mountains as characters in these illusory foreign realms.
ZOYA SCHOLIS
Zoya Scholis is a Monterey and Bay Area denizen with a BA in Studio Arts (1993). A former bilingual school teacher, she became a full-time artist and instructor in 2007, creating and leading Art for Personal Growth workshops. Primarily a process painter, most of Zoya's work feature abstract forms from nature–figures, birds, leaves, petals, fruit. Much of her figurative work has a dreamy Fairytale feel. For Scholis, art making is an exploration of psyche and an experiment with the Divine. She is interested in communication through body language, which is far more subtle, honest, and nuanced than words. In painting, the female figure is symbolic of inner life. Scholis works in that tradition. Her works are classic and traditional not a lot of edge unless the edge is soft. Her idea of feminism is about recognizing, appreciating, and celebrating “soft power.” She still references fairy tales when trying to understand the world.
JENN SHIFFLET
Jenn Shifflet is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the poetic realms of luminosity, color, and the fleeting qualities of life, as mirrored by reflections of the natural world. She uses light both as symbol and medium for exploring the inner world and the expansive beauty of nature. Her work speaks of dream-like realms, fleeting moments of radiant light, and interconnection between self and nature. Themes of sky, luminous inner worlds, reflection, layered time, alchemy, and the feminine permeate Shifflet’s work. She works with light to create moments of perception: reflective, transparent, iridescent, and refractive pigments, mirrors and glass. Mediums made fluid through watery pours and drips elevate a feminine wisdom that wears down and tempers hard edges. Time unfolds slowly through endlessly layered transparent compositions that create a saturated, spacious, and luminous depth through auras of gradated color.
Shifflet holds an MFA in Art and Consciousness Studies from John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, California. Her work has been exhibited nationally since 1988 in solo exhibitions at venues all across the United States
Pollinating Bat
Mixed media on Arches
The Beast of Balboa Park Ink, colored pencil, oil pastel, and gouache on paper 25.5” x 19.5”
Oil-based ink, monotype
and colored pencil on gessoed hot press watercolor paper
19.5”
Acrylic and watercolor on gessoed hot press watercolor paper
We are Made of Stardust
Acrylic and watercolor on gessoed hot press watercolor paper
27.5” x 19.5”
