Young Bay Mud, San Jose Museum of Art | 7/11/24-2/22/26
Art Program at the Governor’s Mansion, California Governor’s Mansion | 4/10/25–3/31/26
Art | www.tanjageis.com
Design | www.geistprojects.com
Instagram | @geis.t
Statement
I create immersive, site-responsive drawings, installations, and sculptures that emerge from deep research and intimate encounters with edge ecosystems and species disrupted by human activity. My work explores how queering, drawing close to, and engaging with the often overlooked or intentionally hidden impacts of humans on the liveliness of non-human entities might foster empathy and transform our perception of our place in, and responsibility toward, the ecological web. The unseen ocean and the coast as threshold consistently recur as potent spaces for this inquiry. My practice employs the repetitive accumulation of marks and/or objects and the bold, and selective use of color to draw the viewer into a curious, unsettled, intimate seeing. Through dense detail, color vibration, and kinetics, patterns emerge and retreat, seemingly in a state of continual transformation. I incorporate objects and materials foraged from specific ecosystems and spaces, leveraging the resonance of their material histories as tactile, analog indices of place. My process is guided by the question: What new ways of seeing might help us live with grace in these mongrel ruins of our own creation?
Bio
Tanja Geis holds an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley, an MA in Marine Management from the University of Akureyri, Iceland, and a BA in Fine Art from Yale University. Geis has exhibited with FOR-SITE Foundation, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Francisco and San Jose, the San Jose Museum of Art, and venues in Iceland, Scotland, England, Hong Kong, and Japan. She has participated in artist residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Kala Art Institute. Geis is from Hong Kong and is based in Oakland.
Artwork
Mud Will Remember Us
2023
San Francisco Bay mud, fishing line, driftwood, oil paint, acrylic paint, metal
110″ x 96″ x 180″Commissioned by FOR-SITE Foundation and installed at Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA, USA
