The Triton Museum in Santa Clara begins its 60th anniversary with a triumvirate of talent. The black-tie gala will come later, but for now, paintings, portals and sculptures fill the galleries.
In one case, artist Marc D’Estout probably bends more metal than any creative practitioner currently lumbering through Santa Clara, San Jose or even Los Gatos. He’s been around. “A Singular Evolution: A 20-Year Survey of Marc D’Estout” features a whole gallery filled with his minimalist sculptures.
As D’Estout dropped off carloads of his work a few weeks ago, the titles of his pieces were scribbled on the exteriors of the boxes: Myopic Isolator. Dark Menace. The Seeker. Once outside the boxes, his sculptures fused the conceptual with the wasteful in dark, uncanny fashion. Found objects appeared right next to others he fabricated from scratch. The difference in approach, D’Estout once told me, could be understood as the difference between improvisational free jazz and big band swing charts—between John Zorn and Count Basie.
“This is the pivot piece,” D’Estout said, pointing at a large piece he’d already unpacked on the Triton floor. “The previous 20 years, I was doing experimental furniture. And this pivots to the last 20 years of work.”
D’Estout has deep local roots, following an initial MFA from San Jose State. His extensive career includes exhibiting at numerous galleries throughout California and the United States, being featured in several art and design publications, and keeping an active art and teaching career. He is currently represented by the Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco.
Laurus Myth, on the other hand, creates luminous and colorful paintings, but also interactive environments and sculptural forms with extensive text-panel accompaniment. Cosmic and alchemical characteristics often come into play in her work, which tends to blend soul, stillness and vivid stories. “Portals and Passages: An Evolution of Paintings, Sculptures, and Social Magic” is her first solo museum show, set to transform the Triton’s Warburton Gallery into a spatial story with codes and keys, leading participants to previously unseen spaces, fusing sacred architecture with mental landscapes. There will even be sensors triggering various lighting changes in the gallery.
“Her work is all about introspection, the sacred spaces inside of you, and thinking of yourself as this sacred space,” said Vanessa Callanta, one of the Triton Museum’s curators, in a Zoom call. “A lot of her work, what it says to me, is just about self-care. Other people may have their views, but that’s why I’ve always been attracted to it. And there’s just kind of this really cool mysticism about it.”
While D’Estout has shown and exhibited extensively for decades, Laurus Myth is filling a museum gallery for the very first time.
“We have a veteran and we have a newbie,” Callanta said. “They’re both amazing and they’re different kinds of artists, and I think they’ll really complement each other, even though they’re different in content.”
As a curator, Callanta often makes the rounds to various galleries and street markets, always on the hunt for potential shows. The artist-curator-collector nexus is alive and well.
“I always saw Laurus’ work, I saw it at Kaleid, I saw it in these smaller gallery spaces,” Callanta said. “And yeah, I’d see her at Subzero, selling in her booth. But I visited her studio and I saw her bigger pieces, and I’m like, ‘I want to see your works in a gallery.’”
The third show opening this weekend, “Nathan Oliveira: Variations on Form,” came about thanks to a collaboration with Pacific Art League in Palo Alto, a venue that was already planning an Oliveira show when the pandemic hit. Oliveira, who passed away in 2010 after a decades-long career at Stanford, left many larger paintings that the Pacific Art League just couldn’t accommodate. Enter Triton, with its main rotunda, pyramidal skylights and natural light.
“Collectively, I think it’s a really wonderful group of shows,” Callanta said. “There’s small things in common, but they’re so vastly different.”
The black ties will come on May 3, when Triton celebrates 60 years since the museum’s conceptual founding in 1965. For all of those years, dating back to its inception in downtown San Jose, the Triton has always been a free museum. May the freedom continue.
