Chandler Gallery is pleased to present The Whole in Part, a solo exhibition by Bay Area artist Mari Andrews, presenting sculpture and prints spanning decades, alongside oil stick drawings from the 1980s and 1990s. This exhibition will be on view from March 28 through May 16, 2026. An artist reception will be held on March 28 at Chandler Gallery in downtown Mill Valley from 4 to 6 pm. Andrews will be in attendance, and all are welcome to join.
The Whole in Part draws on the hermetic axiom “as above, so below,” the ancient idea that the macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm, and that the universe, in all its vastness, is legible in the smallest of its parts. It follows that the small does not merely resemble the large, but contains it; that a single form can be a model, an echo, a container, and an entire world.
This logic of correspondence is at the core of Mari Andrews’ multi-faceted practice. Working across decades, she has built a body of work rooted in the intuitive and the elemental. Her sculptures, which she calls “three-dimensional drawings,” are constructed from seeds, leaves, moss, stones, metal wire, lead sheets, gampi paper, and mica, many gathered on walks through the San Francisco Bay Area and the Sierras. The act of collecting is itself part of the work: a way of reading the landscape closely, and of mapping the world in miniature. In these handfuls of materials, Andrews finds the broader natural orders from which those elements come. A seed carries within it the logic of a forest; a stone holds the memory of being shaped by a river. Andrews’ sculptures honor this compression, presenting small forms that function as models, intimate in scale and expansive in implication. In her hands, they become both objects and propositions.
Alongside these organic materials, Andrews incorporates the visual language, and at times the physical presence, of tools and instruments of measurement: compasses, gauges, rulers, and devices for reckoning time, distance, and direction. These are our human attempts to orient ourselves within systems far larger than we can fully perceive: to locate the self within space, within time, within nature. Set against mica and moss and wire, her work speaks to the same impulse that animates the exhibition’s title: the desire to find correspondence between what is immediate and what is vast, and to hold the macro within the micro. A small gesture, Andrews suggests, can reflect a larger pattern; the act of arranging a few gathered objects is not so different, in kind, from the forces that shape a hillside, or a constellation. In Andrews’ hands, the small and the vast are always, quietly, in conversation.
The Whole in Part traces these concerns across time. The oil stick drawings from the 1980s and 1990s offer a window into the deep roots of Andrews’ visual thinking, evidence that her pared-down sensibility and her attunement to material, line, and space have long been central to her practice. In these works, looping forms, layered gestures, and translucent surfaces suggest structures that are both fixed and in flux, mapping space while resisting stable orientation. Set alongside her more recent sculpture and prints, they illuminate a sustained inquiry into what is essential, and what the essential has to say.
Andrews’ practice consistently invites the viewer to slow down and look more closely. In encountering one of her works, one finds something self-contained and whole, a world with its own gravity, coherence, and internal logic. There is a particular pleasure of recognition: the feeling of encountering something familiar made newly strange, or something strange made suddenly legible. The elemental forms Andrews works with can be so basic as to seem pre-verbal, belonging to a shared visual grammar we carry without quite knowing it. She draws on this grammar fluently, and her titles deepen the effect. Playful, spare, and intuitively resonant, they do not so much name the works as rhyme with them, nudging the viewer toward their own associative leaps. A title arrives like a small recognition: of course!
Mari Andrews earned her BFA from the University of Dayton, Ohio, where she studied art and sociology. Traveling west, she completed her MFA at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. She has been awarded an NEA Fellowship and several residencies including Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside CA, the Cold Press north of London, the Lucid Art Foundation, and most recently the James Castle House Residency. Her work can be found in the collections of the de Young Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara, CA, and the Eli Broad Foundation, and in private and corporate collections in the US and abroad. Andrews has exhibited extensively throughout California and the US, including the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, The Bolinas Museum, The Los Gatos Museum, the De Saisset Museum, The Monterey Museum of Art, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and the Tucson Museum of Art and the Sun Valley Museum of Art. Internationally, she has exhibited in Japan, Israel, and England. Andrews lives and works in the Bay Area.
