"blow up" by Jonn Herschend

blow up from Jonn Herschend on Vimeo.

A short documentary about artist Tucker Nichols as he prepares for his May 2011 exhibition at Gallery 16 in San Francisco. Not everything goes entirely according to plan.

Tucker Nichols at Gallery 16, San Francisco, May 13 - June 30, 2011

Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam

Gallery 16 is thrilled to welcome artists Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam back for their fifth show with the gallery. "Collaborating With Michelle Grabner Isn't As Much Fun As You Might Think It Is."

Grabner and Killam are artists and founders of The Suburban, an important exhibition and project space operated from the couples home in Oak Park, Illinois. They recently celebrated The Suburban’s ten-year anniversary. Since January 1999 they have worked with over one hundred and twenty artists including Luc Tuymans, Joseph Grigely, Martin Parr and Tony Feher. Can I Come Over to Your House?, a book about its first decade has just been released and will be available at Gallery 16.

The exhibition will consist of new paintings and silverpoint drawings by Michelle Grabner with sculptures and mobiles by Brad Killam. Michelle Grabner’s paintings and silverpoints index the passage of time. Created with lines, marks, ticks, points, and dots, Grabner’s compositions are simply organized, accumulated, and sequenced, thus leaving virtually no space for the imagination. Killam’s installation of sculptures made from found objects focus on finding the aesthetic qualities of art in ordinary materials and studying the transformation of a functional object into something that causes viewers to regard it as artistically interesting.

Rex Ray at Sharks Ink

Rex Ray is spending the next two weeks working with master printer Bud Shark on a new print edition at Sharks Ink in Lyon's Colorado. This is the first edition Rex has done with the press, we are very excited to see
the results!

Here are some images of the
prints in progress.

Sonny Smith 100 Records Project

April 9-May 31, 2010

Opening reception April 9, 6-9 pm. Live music with Sonny and the Sunsets and The Sandwitches.

Gallery 16 is pleased to welcome San Francisco based artist, musician and playwright Sonny Smith to his first solo show with the gallery. 100 Records is a dauntingly ambitious project that bridges his interest in art, music and dramatic form. Smith invited 100 artists to produce artwork for the record covers of fictional bands. Smith concocted the personas of each 100 fictitious bands, then wrote and recorded two hundred songs (the A side and B side) for each. All of the original artwork will be on display as well as a jukebox that plays all two hundred songs recorded by Sonny Smith and other notable musicians. Artists include, William T. Wiley, Mingering Mike, Chris Johanson, Reed Anderson, Jo Jackson, Harrell Fletcher, Chris Duncan, Tucker Nichols, Paul Wackers and 91 others!

Sonny’s CDs include This Is My Story, This Is My Song, released in 2002, followed the next year by Sordid Tales of Love and Woe. His critically acclaimed album Fruitvale is a collaboration with Wilco’s Leroy Bach and other Chicago musicians that features songs Sonny wrote about his then neighborhood in Oakland. Watchword Literary Magazine commissioned Sonny to produce One Act Plays, a CD that includes Edith Frost, Neko Case, Miranda July, Jolie Holland, Andy Cabic, Virgil Shaw, Mark Eitzel, John Dwyer and Mekons’ Rico Bell, among other talented artists.

In 2000, he wrote and directed his first short movie “Kid Gus Man.” In 2005, he earned a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts to write and perform the play "The Dangerous Stranger," and received a residency in 2006 from the LAB in San Francisco to produce part two of the saga, “Stranger Danger!”

SOULFOOD no. 2, A Night of Live Music, Vintage Vinyl and Rare Films To Benefit Music in the San Francisco Schools.

Soulfood no.2 is the second event in a quarterly music series organized by Griff Williams, Tommy Guerrero and Marc Capelle. All the money raised through the music series goes directly to support local charities of our choosing. The beneficiary of the upcoming event is MuST (music in the schools today). In this time of peril for public education, music and arts programs are often the first victims of budget cuts.

MuST serves over 10,000 children and youth annually in schools and community centers, conducts research and development and advocates to restore music as an essential principle of K-12 education.


Live Music by MONEY MARK, Tommy Guerrero,
Marc and The Casuals.
Rare 16mm Films by Stephen Parr of Oddball films and and vintage soul sounds on original vinyl with DJ Chas Gaudi. all amidst the art at the spacious Gallery 16 in San Francisco's Soma District.

Date: Friday, March 26th at 7:00PM
Venue: Gallery 16, 501 3rd St., (At Bryant) San Francisco, CA 94107
Admission: $20.00 Donation

Very special thanks to all the incredible musicians and disc jockey Chas Gaudi; Stephen Parr of Oddball Film+Video for the rare film treasures; Owsley Brown + Josh Metz of the Magnanimus Wine Group and Bryan Whalen + Steve Nilsen of Pabst Blue Ribbon for their generous donations.

a clip from Soulfood no.1 can be viewed here

TUCKER NICHOLS AT GALLERY 16

November 6 - December 11, 2009

Opening reception on Friday November 6

from 6 - 9pm

We are really excited to present our second solo exhibition of artist Tucker Nichols. Tucker will be presenting new drawings, sculpture, text pieces, and his first line of experimental wallpaper.

"We each find our own strategies to cope with the growing deluge of information--I use drawing as a filter. This is the stuff that gets through, vague representations of items on display: buildings and found text and rocks and the like. It's therapeutic to picture a world where these are the things we leave behind."

San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker wrote, "Nichols has made himself into a necessary visual poet of our tension-ridden moment."

San Francisco Examiner writer Tiffany Maleshefski wrote, "Simple, childlike, Nichols’ brand of drawing is the kind that causes critics of modern art to loathe the genre even more."

His work has been featured at the Drawing Center and John Connelly Presents in New York, and Rocket Gallery in Tokyo. His drawings have been published in McSweeney's, J&L Books, The Thing, and the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. He was recently commissioned by the de Young Museum in San Francisco to be its first roving artist-in-residence.

Tucker is the creator of the Anonymous Postcard

SOUL/FOOD

Tommy Guerrero, Marc Capelle and Griff Williams started kicking around the idea of creating a new quarterly music series in San Francisco, that would raise money for some of our favorite local charities. The result of these beer/brainstorming sessions is SOUL/FOOD! The first will be a Soul/R&B Music Spectacular featuring live performances from Tommy Guerrero, Marc & The Casuals, Ron Silva & The Monarchs, and Special Guests. The proceeds going to the San Francisco Food Bank.

Disk Jockey Chas Gaudi spinning 45s. We've also enlisted the help of Stephen Parr of Oddball films who will screen a treasure trove of rare 16mm films of James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and many more. A special thank you to Mendocino Farms for helping making this event possible.

Friday, October 2, 2009 from 7-11pm. $10 donation at the door. Gallery 16, 501 Third St 415 626 7495. griff@gallery16.com

Bill by Bill Berkson and Colter Jacobsen

Review by
Jason Morris
for Bigbridge.org

BILL, a seemingly effortless collaboration between Bill Berkson and Colter Jacobsen, is profoundly strange each time you open it. Immediately it struck me as something that had resurfaced: its cover—a beaten-up manilla folder with the word "BILL" written casually and matter-of-factly in Sharpie, also bears a gorgeous and subtle drawing of an astronaut, or maybe a sailor. Some figure with a space helmet or a diving bell on, prepared to rediscover a lost place.

As both Berkson and Jacobsen explain in their afterwords, BILL was, in fact, lost for a long while. Sometime around 1980, Tom Veitch gave Berkson a young-adult detective novel called Bill, from which he then worked much of the dry, crackling language in the book Gallery 16 just released in a beautiful hardcover edition. For twenty some-odd years, the manuscript had just mellowed in a drawer. Colter writes, in his afterword, that Bill Berkson sent him the manuscript "out of the blue," after their mutual friend Mac McGinnes (to whom BILL is dedicated) suggested that Colter provide artwork to accompany the words.

Similarities between Jacobsen's artwork and Berkson's lines shift and resurface, too, as though the images had long ago accompanied the text; the pairings seem like they'd been lost, only now to be magically realigned. However the book coolly resists allowing the two elements—the verbal and the visual—to ever entirely cohere. The images float above the lines, inviting a correspondence that's consistently fresh with interference. Which is what makes the book so pleasantly weird each time you go through it. It's a mystery novel for kids that's been chopped up and lost, a book that's resurfaced bearing its erasures whole.

Jacobsen's artwork is taken, as he writes in his afterword, from a couple of collections of old postcards he then rendered, gorgeously, in graphite. The translation, from faded black and white photos to subtly realized pencil drawings, not only retains the old ghostliness of the originals, but also suggests that the earasures and blank spaces of the drawings are proper to the postcards themselves. Gorgeously detailed but mutely refusing to yield context, they're like elegant analog recordings of 78s, with all the tape hiss and ambient noise intact.

Initially, Jacobsen's work will amaze you with its sheer technical capacity. The drawings are assured and solid, somehow both meticulous and off-hand. When you look at them closely, a number of Colter's fascinations come through, too: symmetry and the pairing of twinned things, plus a casually sophisticated variation on composition (check out all the W's).

Bill Berkson's writing often takes its cues from artwork, so it's interesting to see the reverse, where drawings illuminate his words. In crisp, droll language unscrolling at the bottom of each page, we watch a hidden story take place. Doubly hidden, in a way, insofar as we're reading fragments of a detective story. It's sort of like a Hardy Boys installment guest-authored by Beckett. The good humor abides, clipped and terse, and the darker elements suggest a little nastiness to the Secret of the Old Mill or the Short-Wave Mystery. Pieces of language float up to the bottom of the page as if through a dream, buoyed by an outmoded familiarity: "Bill was feeling his biceps. 'Tomorrow we're going to have a life-and-death struggle!"' Below a drawing of trapeeze swingers extended out into the empty space of the page in a kind of V, the line, "Of course there were some risks involved, but a detective must take risks. If he didn't want to do that, he might just as well run a hot-dog stand." There's a musicality to a lot of the lines that's probably impossible for a poet as masterful as Bill Berkson to hide: "the door fell with a dull thud." Berkson's poetry fires its synapses just beneath the stock language of a kid's detective book, creating a disjointed narrative of surprise.

This is a gorgeous book—a beautiful, slim hardback replete with sophisticated graphite drawings and mysterious blips of otherworldly language. It emerges with its lost and found aura to take its place beside Ashbery and Brainard's Vermont Notebook and Brainard's collaboration with Kenward Elmslie, The Champ, among others. BILL is a nonchalant triumph, a fresh classic.

Rex Ray at MCA Denver

A new video prepared by the MCA Denver of his
current solo show! Watch out for the upcoming
PBS Documentary about Rex's work!

Darren Waterston + Silversun Pickups

The new Silversun Pickups album "Swoon" features the prints from
Darren Waterston/Gallery16 Editions portfolio "The Flowering".
The Silversun Pickups are currently on tour.

Gallery 16 | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

Gallery 16 | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

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Rex Ray: I'm Done!

On the evening of February 12th, we held an opening to congratulate Rex Ray on his upcoming solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Visitors to Gallery 16 were treated to a special treat as Rex used the opportunity to complete paintings for the MCA in the gallery! Folks were able to witness the process Rex has developed to compose his unrelenting abstractions. He layers hand painted papers and cuts the biomorphic shapes freehand with an xacto blade. Most artists would balk at the idea of producing work in such a public setting, not Rex. He was relaxed conversational and gave the crowd a lesson in the power of saying yes! A video of the evening is below.

Rex Ray at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver

Curated by Cydney Payton

For Rex Ray, the joy of making and viewing art is his continuing motivation. Drawing inspiration from his acknowledged influences—the Arts and Crafts Movement, Abstract Expressionism, organic and hard-edged abstraction, pattern and textile design, and Op Art—Ray playfully combines these formalist concepts with decorators’ tips gleaned from lowbrow publications and sources of popular culture in his pursuit to create beautiful things. Gracefully bridging the gap between fine and applied art, he distinguishes himself in each realm.

As a fine artist, Rex Ray works in a wide range of media, including painting, collage, print works, and photography. His collages grew out of the simple pleasure of cutting shapes from magazine pages, assembling and gluing them to paper to create visually pleasing works that have since developed into sophisticated resin-covered panels. In his large-scale canvas paintings, like the one on view at MCA DENVER, he conceives abstracted landscapes from biomorphic shapes and distinct color combinations as a fresh adaptation of an aesthetic that sympathizes with twentieth-century Modernism.

Ray’s work exudes beauty with a subversive edge that stems from an attitude grounded in alternative subculture. He was an early admirer of punk and new wave music. Music holds a special place in his life. A former record store employee and devoted collector, he has worked with leading contemporary musicians, contributing designs for many album covers and concert posters for artists such as Radiohead, Björk, Nine Inch Nails, Deee-Lite, and David Bowie.

Rex Ray was born in Germany in 1956. He lives and works in San Francisco’s Mission District. Before moving to California in 1981, he was a longtime resident of Colorado Springs and he still maintains his connection to Colorado. In 1988, he received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, CA. His paintings, collages, and designs have been widely exhibited at galleries and museums, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, San Jose Museum of Modern Art, CA, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. He is an accomplished graphic designer with a client list that includes Apple, Sony Music, and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY.

Darren Waterston's The Flowering

Gallery 16 is thrilled to present the culmination of a year's work. Since early 2007, Gallery 16 has worked with San Francisco artist Darren Waterston, to produce The Flowering (The Fourfold Sense), a portfolio of thirteen original prints by Waterston, with original texts by writer and literary critic Tyrus Miller. The beautiful compositions employ traditional and contemporary print forms including relief printing, letterpress and digital pigment printing, as well as hand coloring by the artist. The title of the portfolio, The Flowering, alludes to the Fioretti, (The Little Flowers), a medieval anthology of stories about Saint Francis of Assisi and his followers, which emphasizes the fantastic, the miraculous, and the sensational aspects of the saint's life. The portfolio of prints and letterpress broadsides by Tyrus Miller feature vividly sensuous descriptions of Franciscan ordeals and miraculous cures.

In addition to the portfolio, five new original prints are presented. Each print is 40.5" x 28.5" and published in a signed and numbered edition of 20.

Waterston's paintings, watercolors and murals have been exhibited internationally and are included in many permanent collections, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Berkeley Art Museum, as well as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The complete portfolio can be viewed at www.gallery16.com