Home Invasion, Gone Global and Historical 

In her exhibition Gimme Shelter, at the Architectural Foundation gallery, mixed-media artist Marcia Rickard deals with destruction, displacement, natural disaster, and wartime upheaval, a thematic constant being the fragility of a sense of home and shelter. Rickard, a retired art historian and artist, confers a global and cross-historical perspective on her range of subjects. This series was first inspired in 2014 by the tragedy of Aleppo, Syria, and she has directed her attentions laterally from the troubled terrains of Ukraine, Gaza, and, from a timely local angle, scenes of the cityscape-altering Santa Barbara earthquake of 1925.

And yet the most memorable single piece in the show basks in relative calm, for the moment. Painted in a realist mode, but with surreal overtones, “The Fragility of Home” is a peaceful home by night, lit by a streetlamp and the warm glow of living room light. Alas, danger and vulnerability lurk in the form of a black cat slinking on the sidewalk and, most prominently, a massive boulder hovering over the house, consuming the upper half of the composition. 

In this unabashed nod to René Magritte’s famed levitating boulder paintings, the threat to the domestic structure and the very life of its inhabitants is more literal than Magritte’s poetic or existential buzz. Rickard’s diverse worldly examples of uprooted shelters in the gallery serve to detail real-world calamities, worthy of our sympathy and indignation.

Following on the idea of an imminent threat to safety and well-being, a major veritable “boulder” abruptly crashed into our town a century ago. Propitiously timed images of the 1925 earthquake — the 100th anniversary of which just passed — are logically depicted in states of funk-art-y and collaged roughness, in imagery and materials. 

“Fault Lines: Hotel California” is a mixed photo transfer and pastel on handmade paper, with gashes in the overall picture. “State Street 1925” appears, in seemingly burned and water-stained form on unstretched canvas, while “Mission Santa Barbara, 1925” suggests an unstable colorized treatment, with an image of a priest flown into the visual mix against the damaged Old Mission.

Elsewhere in the show, Rickard blends images of barbed wire, as symbol and confining reality, and organizes formal designs with pattern-based matrices, as in “Blue Tarp City” and “No Future, No Past.” She packs a lot of info and angst into deceptively orderly pictorial schemes. 

By contrast with these smaller and tidier pieces, the most physically and literally ragged-edged work in the show is “Aleppo Souk” (a souk is an Arab market). The mixed-media ingredients here, strewn together with a willfully roughshod approach, include unstretched canvas — and crumpled canvas pieces — black fabric shards and rubble-like fragments. The sense of post-destruction angst is palpable.

Zooming up to the present day, Rickard addresses the fresh and ongoing wound of “Gaza 2025,” with a distorted aerial view of the chaos wrought by Israel with a material admix of solar plate and Dura-Lar and acrylic. 

Breaking from her predominant mixed-media mode, Rickard shows another “straight” oil painting, across the room from her boulder icon canvas. In “Ukraine 2024,” the “boulder” has arrived in the form of the Russian bombing of an apartment building. A woman stands on the precipice of a bombed-out upper floor, wearing a bright-yellow jacket — yellow signifying alarm. 

With her show, Rickard embodies the notion and sense of responsibility for an artist unflinchingly processing a fragile and explosive world, applying a personal artistic voice to the task and hoping to promote beholders’ awareness. To quote philosophers Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, of “Gimme Shelter” fame, “A  storm is threatening / my very life today. / If I don’t get some shelter, / ooh yeah, I’m gonna fade away.”

Gimme Shelter, by Marcia Rickard, is on view at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara gallery (229 E. Victoria St.) through August 9. See afsb.org/programs/art-gallery.