I happened to be blabbing on my cell phone after leaving Mama Buzz in Oakland the other day and as I was jawing away aimlessly, my eye caught on something in the windows of the neighboring space called Keys That Fit. Meticulously painted branches with bands of bright colors leaned precariously against a wall of mirrors. The limbs seemed to be bleeding out intense pools of color all over the floor of the window box and the mirrors were overlapped on each other with intricate drawings inscribed all across them. As one tends to do when they are in mid-phone concentration, I spaced out for minutes on them before I noticed that there was someone else standing behind me looking as well.

Me -"These are pretty damn cool."
Stranger- "Thank you."
M- "Oh! They are....[yours?]"
S - "Yes, they are."

And so it was that I met Tia Factor and was invited into the realm of maps, mirrors, twigs, and modern Rorschach fantasy.

Keys That Fit opens into a studio for several artists, one of whom happens to be Tia Factor (although she made clear that the window display is not usually filled with her own works.) She led me to the back studio and cleared a space for me to sit as I took stock of the extremely organized painter and her works in progress. Small glass jars of enamel paint were lined up below a wall of nature scenes and abstract images. Each thing had its place in the studio and scrupulous ruler lines on the paintings correspond to a clear cut work and house keeping-ethic that is obiviously taken years to come to fruition. In other words, this lady has her shit together.

Zefrey- "What does the title of your show 'Spaceball Ricochet' mean?"
Tia- "It's the title of a T-Rex song."

If a gun were pressed to my temple in a dark alley and I were on my knees and asked to sum up Tia's work in a single word or my brains would become one with the human feces on the sidewalk, I would have to say, "Magical" or "Mystical" or ...(too late.) One of her pieces is titled, "From Here to Oregon". In this piece Tia drew out each and every road in NE Portland (which is quite a large area) and then used this grid as a framework for large organic shapes of green and flourescent colors to wander on. Straight edges meet with the morphic and organic flow of colors. Another piece in this vein has all the roads of California drawn out in bright pencil on a mirror. With just the artery structure of California before me, it is an eiry skeleton of the land that human beings stick to, our safe passage through the wild. Some of the smaller pieces tend to be a bit cluttered with images, but when she expands these out into the larger pieces, the full intensity of her vision strikes you.

She says her influences run the gamut, but the people that she has been looking at recently are Julie Mehretu, Franz Ackermann, Jim Lambie, and (one of my personal favorites) Neo Rauch. She claims her favoirte color (of the day) is lavender and that her immediate influence has been her friend's pancho which has Atari-like alien shapes on it. You'll have to catch this show or be out of luck for awhile because she is off to Argentina for 2 months.

As I walked my way back to the BART I thought, it's gems like this that make me wish I got off my ass and went to Oakland more, because it's cerainly worth it.

http://www.xaul.com/go_live_pages/KEYS/KEYS.home.html
Gallery address: 2312 Telegraph Avenue Oakland
Runs through June 1st
also see: www.tiafactor.com