by Divya Shankar

Snake ribs, deer bones, dragonfly wings, praying mantis remains — at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery, what you expect to be crushed underneath your shoe can be found arranged elaborately on canvas.
 

Installation view of Mayme Kratz: To Know the Dark

Snake ribs, deer bones, dragonfly wings, praying mantis remains — at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery, what you expect to be crushed underneath your shoe can be found arranged elaborately on canvas.

Situated on San Francisco’s lavish Post Street, artist Mayme Kratz opened her newest exhibition “To Know the Dark” on Thursday, Oct. 1 and was welcomed by a curated crowd of art enthusiasts.

The name of the collection is borrowed from a poem by Wendell Berry, in which the poet prompts the reader to view darkness not as a state of unseeing misery, but as a world that bears its own light. Kratz is no stranger to experimenting with such contrasting thematic extremes, honing in on the minutiae of massive panels to emphasize moments of invisible suspension in nature. Whether that be between the cosmic and the microscopic in her 2015 exhibition “Lost Light,” or existence and unconsciousness in her 1998 exhibition “Fever,” Kratz creates emblematic juxtaposition that is both extraordinary and completely natural.

Kratz’s career was never a perfectly paved route. As a child, she aimed to become a doctor, often viewing the environment surrounding her as a patient-in-waiting. The artist has spoken often of how her predilection for nature began as a young girl, when she buried and dug up muddy matter on rural farmland, inspecting its contents with surgical precision. It seems as if, with this view of the earth as a living, breathing body, the artist gradually developed her unbounded vision, governed by her understanding of what she consumes rather than universal artistic principles.

In her newest exhibition, the artist initially misleads viewers with a facade of uniformity. Despite the canvases rife with circular patterns and unbroken geometric puzzles, attendees at the gallery were drawn to all of the various angles of each piece, pressing their faces against walls and bobbing from side-to-side to observe how light caught or how different material protruded. Taking multiple days to place, Kratz arranges objects in discrete layers separated by coats of resin to create multidimensional views from overtly uncomplicated shapes.

The varying perspectives come from found material, detritus in deserts and ecosystems off the beaten path. The creative process behind her work serves as an exacting meditation of her past, as she intertwines fragments of literature she has consumed during her probing search for meaning tucked into the barren, desert home that surrounds her. The meticulous preservation of natural history brings to the gallery what acrylic paint cannot, sculpting new roles for the lives of creatures that we cannot — or choose not — to see.

Across the exhibition, Kratz seems to exercise a reverence for the tension between invisible movement and visible static, pulling the viewer in with visual inconsistencies rather than by providing elaborate contexts. In “Circle Dream 96” (2024), Kratz creates an overarching and uninterrupted circle with snake vertebrae against pitch-black canvas, resembling an alignment of celestial bodies that honors the dead material used to form it. Rooted underneath meticulously stacked layers of resin, shell dust and shards of bone stab outward, dotting the piece like stars.

In “Dark Garden 22” (2026), insect wings are hidden within branching gradients of weeds, creating small tombs for the forgotten within a galaxy of excess. In her “Summer Bloom Study” series (2026), puzzles of striped poppy pods create a visual arrangement of telescopes, calling forth the color localized to the background. With nature at her disposal, Kratz plays with the infinite possibilities of organization, guided by the forms of bones and withered leaves she has hunted for over time.

Through keeping found objects at the foreground of her work, the natural world becomes Kratz’s playground for experimentation with optical intricacy. As the exhibit’s opening night climbed into full swing, chatter and the smell of red wine intermingled in the air while the works tacked on the walls — contemporary meditations on both natural harmony as well as the inner workings of the creator — mirrored the ever-searching eyes that the artist turns toward the world.