Material Dialogues

Featuring Artists: Danny Rosales/Jules Campbell

Dates: October 30, 2025 – December 6, 2025
Reception: Saturday, November 1, 1-4pm
Artists’ Talk: Saturday, December 6, 2pm

770 West Grand Ave, Oakland, CA 94612
Contact: [email protected]

Homepage

(510) 271-0822
Gallery Hours: Thursdays – Saturdays, 12 – 5pm

In Material Dialogues the works of Jules Campbell and Danny Rosales converge in a conversation
around structure, surface, and the materiality of the urban environment.
Jules Campbell’s mixed-media panels emerge from direct observation of the terrain around her
West Oakland studio, a neighborhood marked by cycles of industrial activity, neglect, and renewal.
Her works are not representations but tactile documents: layered, scraped, abraded, and
embedded with texture. Grit, muted pigments, and gestural marks combine to evoke concrete
walls, scorched pavement, and traces of graffiti long worn away. These surfaces speak of history
not through narrative, but through material—each mark and texture holding the residue of time, use,
and erosion. Campbell’s work positions the city as archive, where every surface has a story to tell.
In contrast, Danny Rosales approaches his sculptural practice from the perspective of balance,
immediacy, and spatial relationship. Using steel, concrete, and glass, Rosales fabricates intricate
forms that engage the language of architecture and industrial design while resisting the rigidity of
either. His constructions are dynamic—full of lines that intersect, planes that oppose, and tensions
that seem just on the verge of collapse or flight. There is a precision to his compositions, but also a
freedom: rods bend into gesture, concrete slumps with organic imperfection, and glass hovers
delicately within engineered frames. His work lives in the present, responding to material properties
and spatial logic. It asks: how do forms hold together? Where do we find the balance between
stability and uncertainty?
While their visual languages differ, both artists treat materials as agents—active, expressive, and
responsive. Campbell’s panels pull us into surfaces worn by time, drawing attention to the quiet
weight of place. Rosales’s sculptures stretch outward, creating a dialogue of form and force in real
time. One looks at what endures; the other at what emerges. Together, they offer a compelling
meditation on the physical, social, and spatial dynamics of the urban environment—a space where
memory and movement, structure and erosion, coexist in constant negotiation.
Press Images: Jules Campbell, Ghost Town 3, installation 4×4 each pc, 2025. Danny Rosales, Bent
#2, concrete, steel and glass, 14x13x12, 2025