JAMES CHRONISTER & SAM SHOEMAKER

FOG DESIGN+ART | FOCUS BOOTH 502

JANUARY 23 – 26, 2025

OCHI is pleased to participate in the 11^th edition of FOG Design+Art to take place in San Francisco, California from January 23 through 26, 2025, with a Preview Gala on Wednesday, January 22^nd. Located at Fort Mason Center for the Arts & Culture within Pier 2, Booth 502, FOG’s FOCUS section—an invitational designed to showcase emerging artists and galleries integral to the creative ecosystem of the Bay Area—OCHI will present new paintings by artist James Chronister and new sculptures by artist Sam Shoemaker.

James Chronister and Sam Shoemaker both examine temporality and permanence in their media and precision—resulting in contrasting yet complementary methods of distilling nature into art. Chronister’s black and white cropped compositions of the natural world depict singular moments of the everyday—flowers blooming in a field, snow draping trees in the winter, or a creek flowing on a fall day. Precise dry brushing and stippling techniques achieve texture, depth, and refinements of form. Shoemaker works directly with fungi to create sculpture that emphasizes its organic, ephemeral qualities. Highlighting the intricacies of ecosystems while focusing on textures, forms, and natural hues, Shoemaker cultivates the fruiting bodies of mushrooms into their most vivacious states.

James Chronister (b. 1978, Helena, MT) paints deeply intricate, monochrome paintings. Though landscape in concept, Chronister’s spectral hues and cropped forests proffer tension between abundance and its representation rather than the idyllic and unaffected scenery of canonical landscape painting. Chronister begins his process by photographing the environment surrounding his home in Missoula, Montana. After digitally distorting contrast, focus, and tones, Chronister moves from computer to canvas where minuscule individual marks reveal scrupulous technical application. Onto a white or carefully hued off-white background, Chronister meticulously recreates source photographs by repeatedly applying, shaping, and erasing black oil paint. The result is a unity of marks presenting veristic, all-encompassing scenes of the natural world.

Sam Shoemaker (b. 1991, Orlando, FL) is an interdisciplinary artist and mycologist making work inspired by ecosystems, radical pedagogy, architectural design, and environmental psychology—by facilitating ongoing collaborations with rare, native, and medicinal fungi. Drawn to responsive and relational objects that behave, react, change, grow, and carry rhythm, Shoemaker collects and propagates mushrooms, manipulating them in a highly controlled environment of his design—a laboratory workspace constructed in the basement below his studio. Shoemaker has developed unique substrate materials that he casts into molds or embeds within hand-built ceramic or blown glass vessels, enabling reishi growth for several months. Comparable to long exposure photography, Shoemaker carefully moves LED lights, adjusts the temperature, or changes the saturation of CO2—in order to choreograph growth from within each vessel. Archiving reishi reactions to environmental change, Shoemaker captures good moods, tantrums, or other unanticipated expressions of mushroom fruiting body language.