Exhibition Title: Viewpoints: Angela Lim, Deidre Scherer, Anne Siems Dates: March 10 through April 17 Where: Memorial Union Art Gallery Second Floor, Memorial Union University of California, Davis Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday Closed Monday, March 29 Open Picnic Day, Saturday, April 17, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Artist's talk: 1 p.m. Sunday, March 14 Reception: 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, March 14 Artists: Angela Lim, Deidre Scherer, Anne Siems "Viewpoints" presents three artists who share the use of the stitched element as a means of exploring life, death and the human condition. Through their stitching and layering of diverse media, each artist has created a unique voice with which to express her views on a shared theme. Angela Lim's hand-embroidered fabric constructions combine text and image in their exploration of contradictions and double standards that characterize human experience. In the series "Cockaigne," an installation originally comprising 25 pieces resulting from Lim's longtime interest in domesticity, imagery is combined with corresponding poetic text as each piece acts as one stanza of a complete poem. The individual pieces also function as independent statements that investigate the struggle between duty and desire, abundance and famine, temptation and commitment. Lim's constructions are intricate and delicately sewn, yet the embroidered texts are powerful and subversive, adding contradiction also to the act of viewing. What is approached as a small and intimate visual experience becomes a bold verbal statement. Lim was born in Hong Kong in 1965, and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the Academy of Art College, San Francisco, in 1990. Since 1993, she has been showing at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, and in 1995 she was the recipient of the New Langton Arts' Bay Area Artist Award. "The Last Year," a series of nine fabric works by Vermont artist Deidre Scherer, portrays the final year in the life of an elderly woman. With immense compassion and respect, Scherer chronicles the woman's journey toward death, from the onset of her decline, through brief reprieves of renewed strength, and finally to acceptance and release. Combining the techniques of layering, piecing and machine-sewing, Scherer's unique approach to the fabric and thread medium and its three-dimensional potentials allows her to tell a narrative story. Each work depicts a visually compelling moment, while raising universal and social issues that surround the processes of aging, dying and grieving. Scherer says that "by disregarding death, our society disregards the intensity and preciousness of life." Scherer studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1960s, but since the late 1970s she has worked with fabric and thread as her primary medium, and she now regards this as her paint. For more than 17 years, she has addressed the issues of aging and mortality through images based on her sensitive studies of the elders in her Vermont community. Scherer's work is in numerous private and public collections, and has most recently been exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland. Anne Siems' recent body of work -- comprising layers of beeswax and pigment on paper that has been stitched together to create a canvas -- is a result of her interest in anthropomorphizing nature. Titled "Deep Within the Body," these works employ a dresslike figure, a surrogate body, comprised of "experience"; in this case, the artist's own body and experience. Siems' vision is of a seamlessness between nature and culture, or being and experience, which is expressed through her use of flower, bird and leaf images that come together to form the vacant dresses. The nature that Siems depicts in her paintings is one of growth, death and change, a circular pattern of constant transformations, and an acceptance of life's inevitable cycles. Siems, born in Berlin, Germany, in 1965, earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin in 1991. Siems began showing at the Catherine Clark Gallery in 1994, and in 1996 she received the Artists Trust GAP Award.