di Rosa Downtown: Second Nature | March 8 – June 1, 2025

On view at di Rosa Downtown at 1300 First St., Ste 251, Napa.
March 8 – June 1, 2025.
Free and open to the public Thursday – Sunday, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Second Nature features work by three Northern California artists: Annette Goodfriend, Ruth Tabancay, and Esther Traugot. Straddling the line between art and science, these artists craft dream-like representations of the natural world. Using varied media, ranging from organic materials such as insects, urchin shells, and tea bags to industrial steel and rubber, Goodfriend, Tabancay, and Traugot examine the changes human activity has wrought upon the world, and the need to better care for all the planet’s creatures.

Working primarily with epoxy, resin, rubber, wax, and plaster, Annette Goodfriend creates sculptures that explore human anatomy, often hybridized or contrasted with non-human animal or plant forms. Goodfriend’s works featured in Second Nature depict an oceanic world in retreat: starfish crawling on human finger-like limbs, sea life held in anthropomorphic vise grips, an ambulatory kelp forest. Drawing on her background studies in genetics, Goodfriend’s work explores human interdependence with our oceans and seas, even as warming waters threaten this fragile ecosystem.

With a background in bacteriology and medicine, Ruth Tabancay’s work combines textile techniques that she taught herself as a child — crochet and knitting — with an interest in environmental issues such as the bleaching of the coral reefs, the ability of some micro-organisms to digest plastic, and ecological systems such as mycorrhizal networks and bee colonies. Using materials as varied as tea bags, thread, yarn, beeswax, and sugar, Tabancay weaves and stitches micro-organisms digesting plastic, coral reefs constructed around plastic medical waste, and macro colonies of the bacteria that is on us and in us.

Esther Traugot grew up in an idealistic farming community during the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970’s, an experience which influences the relationship between herself and the natural world on view in her work. Stitching with her own hand-dyed golden yarns, she crochets wrappings in and around found natural objects — bees, trees, sea urchin shells — nurturing, protecting, and making them whole again.

Organized by Annette Goodfriend, a version of this exhibition was previously mounted at Marin Art and Garden Center in 2024.