Opening Reception – Rainey Straus: re(COMPOSING)

Rainey Straus, re(Composing), fragment, 2026, Cast Paper, 13 H x 35 W x 26 D in, Photo Courtesy of the Artist
Rainey Straus’s work begins with walking, listening, and close attention to the living world. Created for Mercury 20, re(Composing) turns that attention toward fungi, following the ways matter breaks down, gathers, and becomes something else. The installation takes decomposers as a starting point: organisms that are also composers, transforming one kind of matter into another. Straus’s materials follow this logic. Paper is shredded, pulped, and cast over found, downed wood, echoing the way paper wasps chew wood fiber into shelter. Lacing through these casts are bioplastic forms, spun like spider silk until gesture becomes structure. By working with already fallen wood, Straus treats the tree not as an ending but as part of an ongoing cycle of transformation. The work invites attention to other intelligences: the pathfinding of slime molds, mycelial networks, and forms of sensing beyond human perception. Rather than representing ecological change, re(Composing) takes part in it: paper returns to pulp, pulp takes the impression of wood, and matter reorganizes itself into temporary form: fragile, provisional, and alive to what comes next.
Bio:
Rainey Straus is the award winner from Mercury 20’s 2026 exhibition, Mapping Time, awarded by juror Minoosh Zomorodinia. Straus is a Bay Area interdisciplinary artist whose work grows from fieldwork into sculpture, installation, painting, and cyanotype. After working as a Bay Area tech designer, she returned to artmaking in response to ecological urgency. Solo exhibitions include Spinning Time into Form, Gallery Route One, Point Reyes Station, CA and The Old Growth Project at MarinMOCA. Her work has appeared in Bodies and Borders: Ecologies of Consent with Women Eco Artists Dialog, Forest Unseen at Petaluma Arts Center, The New Geologic Epoch with Ecoartspace, and exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Straus has held residencies at BigCi Residence in Australia, Lucid Art Foundation, and Morris Graves Foundation. Her work has been featured in Dark Mountain Journal, Sculpture Magazine, Rhizome, San Francisco Chronicle, and Point Reyes National Seashore Association. She holds a BFA from State University of New York (SUNY) Purchase and an MFA from California College of the Arts.
Gallery Hours: Friday and Saturday, 12 – 5 pm (and by appointment)
Artist Talk: Saturday, August 29, 3 – 5 pm
Oakland Art Murmur / First Friday: Friday, August 7, September 4, 5 – 9 pm