I typically don't spend much time promoting my own work, but I've just sent off ten new paintings to the Missoula Museum of Art in Missoula, Montana for a solo show that opens February 20th. The show title is lifted from a line written by Herman Melville in Moby Dick, "Its not down in any map, true places never are". Here are a few images of the work.
Monday, February 8, 2010
The last many Californians may have heard of conceptual artist Lowell Darling was in 1978, when he ran against sitting Gov. Jerry Brown on a platform that called for "urban acupuncture" to fight drought pollution and replacing parking meters with slot machines to discourage driving.
"I used to try and look like Jerry Brown from the neck down - now I look like him from the forehead up," joked the balding artist, now 67, as he looked at a wall-size photo of himself from an old news clipping.
"Back then I dressed up like a politician, and Jerry Brown was in on it. I was out of politics for a while, and I've been trying to figure out what was the real problem. I've decided it's the two-thirds majority required to pass a budget. Until they change that, it doesn't matter who's governor because they can't do anything anyway."
Darling kicked off his admittedly longshot campaign with an art gallery opening Friday night in San Francisco. Entitled "Full Disclosure," the exhibit features all of Darling's personal possessions that he has in this country.
Included in the exhibit at Gallery 16 on the corner of Third and Brannan streets: a tracing of Henry Longfellow done when he was 4 years old, a letter to Darling from Norman Rockwell (who was answering an inquiry from the then-teenager as to why Rockwell's art was featured in a liquor ad), and a February 1969 letter from the Internal Revenue Service telling Darling he had not made enough money to be considered an artist under the tax code (that's how he became a conceptual artist, he says).
Gallery owner Griff Williams said Darling, as always, is playing with meanings in his show, which will run through the end of March. It's funny, Williams said, but it's also poignant.
"The notion of the scrutiny of running for public office - he's using it as an opportunity to present everything he has. It's full disclosure. He's saying, if you want to find the skeletons in my closet, you will have to dig through everything I own, literally," he said. "He pulled up with a van and started unloading boxes."
Darling has been busy since his last gubernatorial bid - he's been married several times, had two daughters and, of course, done a lot of conceptual art. He's been living in Europe for the past several years, and when he came back to California last year, he discovered he's lost nearly all his investments and savings in the financial crisis.
If he gets through the primary, he'd love to face Meg Whitman, one of the Republican hopefuls, "who doesn't even vote most of the time," he said.
But most importantly, he wants to focus on the rule he said is hurting the state more than anything else.
"A vote for me is a vote to get rid of the two-thirds majority, and I won't do anything until the Legislature figures out how to do that, which means I will be impeached," he said. "California is like the world - you can't get two-thirds of people to agree on something. Do you agree with yourself two-thirds of the time?"
Wake Up and See the Coffeepot
A view of the 'Emigre' exhibition at Gallery 16 is flanked by Rudy VanderLans's design work for Emigre magazine, now defunct.
But over the years, frictions between the forces of art and commerce have hindered Emigre’s cause. In today’s environment, where fonts can be created and replicated by anyone with a personal computer (United States copyright law does not extend protection to typeface design), the idea that a font can be an objet d’art in its own right seems like a utopian reverie.
“Emigre was born out of a ‘digital dream,’ ” the graphic designer Erik Adigard, based in Sausalito, wrote in an e-mail message. “But it was short-lived. Emigre is history, even if still somewhat of a cult.”
Yet the marriage between a font’s beauty of form and the context in which it is employed is what makes the written word jump off the page. In striving to demonstrate this truth, Emigre deserves our attention.
Founded in 1984 by the husband-and-wife team of Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, Emigre was influential on the graphic design scene in the ’80s and ’90s. This was partly because of the company’s magazine, also called Emigre. First a quarterly and later a seminannual, it featured innovative typefaces and posters; eye-catching photography; offbeat profiles of writers and artists; and wide-ranging critical essays on subjects like the Bauhaus movement and the legibility of fonts. Although the magazine no longer exists, Emigre still operates as a font foundry; its library houses more than 300 typefaces.
From 1984 to 2005, Emigre magazine achieved cult status. With their unconventional and striking use of fonts, publications like Wired and McSweeney’s, both based in San Francisco, owe it a debt. In 2006 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the entire Emigre magazine canon for its permanent design collection, and put the magazines on display for a year.
“For me, like many others galvanized by graphic design during Emigre’s heyday, the magazine was the most consistently interesting design publication produced anywhere by anyone,” the design journalist Rick Poynor wrote in 2005.
Emigre chronicled a revolution in typography that went hand in hand with the birth of the personal computer, which brought new methods for creating type. (It’s perhaps no accident that Emigre and the Macintosh computer made their debuts in the same year.) The transformation also ran in tandem with the rise of postmodern theories then popular in art schools concerning the aesthetics of utilitarian design.
Such ideas helped to free font design from the constraints of functionality. Possibly for the first time since the elaborate but often illegible opening capital letters of medieval illuminated manuscripts, font designers didn’t have to worry about readability and reproducibility.
Going beyond the no-nonsense look of archetypal typeface families like Times and Helvetica, designers in Emigre’s orbit, like John Hersey, Joachim Müller-Lancé and Ms. Licko, saw font design as a form of creative expression. With its thick-contoured, cartoonish forms, Mr. Hersey’s Blockhead typeface won’t be used for street signs anytime soon, but the fonts are eye-catching. The same could be said of Ms. Licko’s aggressive and angular Oblong typeface.
For all the theoretical debate and creative output inspired by Emigre, the font-as-art movement seems to be over. The commercial interests in the fast-paced digital age have reduced typeface design to cookie-cutter templates and formulas. Unbridled innovation has largely been supplanted by nostalgic exhibitions and commemorative books.
Emigre magazine’s demise may be symptomatic of the fact that it was primarily a showcase for the company’s fonts. Its journalistic endeavors often supported the founders’ business goals, as is evidenced by its numerous articles denouncing designer-unfriendly typeface copyright laws. But Griff Williams, owner and director of Gallery 16, wrote in an e-mail message: “For me, the lesson learned from Emigre is that business and art can coexist. The typeface business was a guise to deliver content in profoundly interesting ways. Not the other way around.”
Mr. VanderLans was grappling with the tension between art and commerce while publishing his magazine. “The entrepreneurial element, which is crucial to the existence of any subculture, avant-garde or underground work, is largely overlooked when assessing the work, because to most people, whenever the commercial aspects become prominent, it somehow taints the work and renders it less pure or authentic,” he wrote in Emigre in 1995. “Yet it’s difficult to imagine how any movement can operate without a concentrated effort to make money.”
Don't miss: 'Emigre at Gallery 16'
Mary Eisenhart for SF Chronicle
Thursday, December 17, 2009
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When Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko launched Emigre, it was one of the first independent type foundries to take advantage of the Macintosh. Catching the creativity wave that ensued, the Berkeley house became a global leader in the design field, particularly with its self-titled magazine. This exhibition celebrates Emigre's 25th anniversary and the publication of a retrospective collection from the magazine.
Can art be as easy as Tucker Nichols makes it look?
Maybe, in his hands. But bear in mind when you see his enjoyable show at Gallery 16 how much he benefits by historical circumstances not made by him and not evident in the exhibition.
When he uses found stones and a salvaged wooden stool to produce a counterpart to Constantin Brancusi's "The Kiss," of which Brancusi (1876-1957) made many versions, Nichols banks on an audience well informed enough to get the joke and the quotients of homage and apology in it. He could not anticipate such reception had not reproductions of Brancusi's work flooded the world long before.
Perhaps Nichols had the 2000 Sol LeWitt retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in mind when he devised the very limited edition wallpaper showing at Gallery 16 for the first time.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) famously produced wallpaper blazoned with life-size fuchsia cows' heads on a mustard yellow ground. But Nichols' wallpaper - immensely magnified hand-brushed blue verticals, with drips, on a white ground - responds more directly to LeWitt's wall drawings.
LeWitt (1928-2007) took abstract drawing up to the scale of Jackson Pollock's paintings by doing it directly on the wall. But LeWitt deliberately downplayed touch and delegated to others the execution of most of his drawings.
Nichols' wallpaper magnifies his touch, which does not make it expressionistic, yet somehow produces an elevated feeling in the viewer. It is almost as if Nichols had unconsciously recollected Matisse's art at its most consoling through the screen of LeWitt's wall drawings.
The wallpaper offers the feeling of moving impossibly close to the relaxed caprices of the hand that Nichols' small paintings, drawings and inscriptions display.
November 6 - December 11, 2009
Opening reception on Friday November 6
from 6 - 9pm
Please join us Friday evening, October 23rd, 6:30-9PM for a very special screening of the new PBS Documentary "How To Make A Rex Ray." The first screening will be at 7PM, and the second at 8PM.
No other contemporary artist has mastered the handcrafted aesthetic of fine art while pushing the limits of graphic design as Rex Ray. This celebrated artist takes us on a tour, from his hometown in Colorado Springs to his glorious live/work studio space in San Francisco, showing us the magic of his artistic process and everyday practice.
Whether he’s creating a painting or donating a graphic design for a Smart Car, Rex Ray is continually reinventing a language that speaks in both worlds of art and computer graphics. Cutting, pasting, gluing, painting, collaging, installing—not since The Mystery of Picasso has a documentary captured the grace and handiwork of an artist as casual and sophisticated as Rex Ray.
Raised in Colorado Springs, Rex Ray moved to San Francisco in 1981. He established himself as a premier graphic designer in the US with groundbreaking work on book covers, CD packages, and rock and roll posters. His work has been featured at SF MoMA, Gotham in London, University Art Museum at Berkeley, The Crocker Museum in Sacramento, Gallery 16 in San Francisco. His first major solo museum exhibition opened in 2009 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.
Colorado Public Television - KBDI PBS presents "REX RAY: How To Make a Rex Ray." Producer/Director Joshua V. Hassel with Videographer/Editor Adam Reynolds /Acentric Video; Music Matmos, courtesy of Matador Records.
On behalf of Tommy Guerrero, Marc Capelle, Griff Williams and the SF Food Bank, we would like to THANK EVERYONE for helping us realize the first quarterly music series inSan Francisco, designed to support some of our favorite local non-profits and their amazing work. Your attendance, energy and enthusiasm made for a very special and fun evening! Thanks to your very generous support and donations, the SOUL/FOOD! Music Spectacular, featuring live performances from Tommy Guerrero, Marc & The Casuals, Ron Silva & The Monarchs, and Special Guests, successfully raised 3K for the San Francisco Food Bank. 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, and to all the Volunteers who helped make this event possible. We are looking forward to round two, so stay tuned |
"When I say I "fucked up," what I mean is that I'm sitting here watching the NBA All-Star Game on TV and I'm watching guys I used to seriously abuse on the court scoring in double figures now against the best in the game. Ergo, I fucked it up. I should have stayed an athlete, body well-tuned, cruising around with my accountant in a Porsche, maroon and chrome. More important, with basketball there's always only one direction: to the cylinder on the fiberglass rectangle. And you don't have to aim. If you do, you're off.
Poetry has too many variations. Mr. Frost was right about one thing: there are always promises to keep, and variations on that theme. With basketball you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.
Please join Gallery 16 to celebrate the release of three new editions
by Deborah Oropallo as well as the release of Deborah's new book entitled POMP, published by Gallery 16 Editions. We will host a special release party and book signing with the artist on Thursday evening, September 24th from 6-8PM.
Rex Ray at Gallery 16
September 11-October 31, 2009
Opening reception for the artist September 11 from 6-9 pm.
Gallery 16 is pleased to present its sixth solo exhibition with San Francisco luminary Rex Ray. As a fine artist, Rex Ray works in a wide range of media, including painting, collage, print and photography. His dynamic and immediately recognizable collages grew out of the simple pleasure of cutting shapes from magazine pages. His work has grown into an increasingly complex process involving printmaking, painting and collage in an inspired adaptation of twentieth-century Modernism.
Cydney Payton, former director of Denver's MCA, describes Ray’s work: "It 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. 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 and David Bowie. Drawing inspiration from his acknowledged influences— organic and hard-edged abstraction, pattern and textile design, and Op Art—Ray playfully combines these formalist concepts, gracefully bridging the gap between fine and applied art..."
A new PBS documentary about the artist "How To Make A Rex Ray" will be premiered at Gallery 16 during the exhibition.
Rex Ray was born in Germany in 1956. He lives and works in San Francisco’s Mission District. His paintings, collages, and designs have been widely exhibited at galleries and museums internationally.
For additional information, please contact Vanessa at Gallery 16, 415.626.7495 or email vanessa@gallery16.com.
Review byArtist-curated exhibitions are a particularly interesting site of information and disinformation about the artist. Alice Shaw creates a prescribed path of viewing around the gallery in a trajectory that begins with what at first may appear to be a very self-indulgent series of work. It begins with a self-portrait, shot in a style similar to her previous identity-based work, and moves on to non-photographic work and documents created by others. Auto Portrait (2003) is followed by an exhibition statement, handwritten by the artist, hung in a diptych with a graphological (handwriting) analysis telling Shaw about her character and personality based on the lines, dots, and space in her writing. Consequently, these documents are followed by a handmade worksheet, Cursive Practice (2009), complete with dotted blue guidelines in which Shaw doesn’t quite fit the entire alphabet on one page.
The rest of the show follows in a humorous, associative manner, relying on wordplay and relating visual cues, making for a brief but fun exploration of Shaw’s conceived “autobiography.” A mysterious psychic reading appears to have been created on a typewriter and then redacted with black marker. This is followed by an astro-location reading, assessing the location of planets passing over the earth on the day of the Shaw’s birth and complete with suggestions by the astro-locationer of where Shaw would be most happy living. Following a list of disparate locations such as Hawaii, Sante Fe, Israel, and the western coasts of India and Australia, a diptych of Sea (2009) and Desert (2009) ties together the bisecting horizons of a blue ocean and brown desert in cyanotype and van dyke brown prints, respectively. Similarly, a block print palm reading filled with scrawled notes is followed by another diptych of “palm prints” of palm tree fronds in cyanotype and van dyke brown. To complete her series of call and response works, Shaw asked a synesthete to tell her what color he/she saw when hearing her name, “Alice.” The response to which is displayed in Colorfield #1 (2009), an 18 x 14 inch canvas painted over in dark gumball pink. Logically, or so thought in the artist’s mind, Colorfield #1 meets the Guessing Game (2009), a corner in which a gumball machine on a pedestal invites viewers to insert a penny and try to guess the color of their gumball before turning the knob. Although this author’s penny got stuck, one might hope that any or all the gumballs would come out pink – despite the rainbow variety seemingly possible inside the glass globe.
The next sequence of works appears to be a jocular pondering by the artist on her role as feminist or maybe just a female. Again, drawing upon puns and associations with femininity, Shaw shows us Colorfield #2 (a candid photo of the artist in a bright pink dress), Face Print of My Colors (2008) in makeup on paper, almost monochrome polaroids of the four seasons, a $10,000 envelope sealed with a kiss, Lacquer Painting (2009) made entirely with fingernail polish, and a photo of grocery store aisle sign listing off “Hosiery, Feminine Needs, Facial Tissue, Shampoo, Hair Care, Stationary, Magazines” in Feminine Needs (1997/2009).
The exploratory journey takes an interesting leap from here, though relating back to the colorfields, gumball machine, and monochrome prints. In A Portrait of the Artist at Work – 18% Grey, Shaw reminds us that she is a photographer. As only the third self-portrait in this autobiographical show, the artist is seen standing in a corner. In the photo, Shaw points at the intersection of two walls, one painted white and the other in 18% grey – a standard reference value against which photo light meters are calibrated. This is then followed by a sequence of “rainbows,” spray painted in black and white, depicted in as a water color palette, and then in makeup palettes staged along with q-tips and brushes on a wooden chair.
After rounding this second corner, (Auto)Biography leans again in the direction of the occult and mysticism. Premonition (2009) appears to be a rubbing of a headstone for “Alice Shaw,” which is then followed by an interesting group of works on three mini-shelves. The remnants of a tea leaf reading and a cigarette butt in a ceramic teacup on one shelf are flanked by two “daguerrotypes.” The Artist as Medium is an actual daguerrotype self-portrait, and Daguerrotype is an archival pigment print self-portrait. In both photos, Shaw wears a costume, of a gypsy and 19th century gentlewoman respectively, and both photos are presented preciously in book frames. One could spend several minutes creating multiple narratives about these two women and a tea leaf reading.
What follows thereafter seems to trail off and away from the artist as subject. Another series of diptychs play on words, media, and the word “medium.” Viewers who expected a truly autobiographical exhibition or deep insight into the artist may feel disappointed. Nevertheless, Shaw allays such concerns and wins us over with her light-hearted humor in a final sequence of works that seem to say “to be continued…” In What My Show Probably Should Have Looked Like (2009), Shaw depicts in graphite and collage the exact same corner of gallery space hung with two large “commercial fine art photographs.” Shaw then predicts the future in a crystal ball showing herself standing next to a shiny white truck parked in front of a stately white mansion in Prediction (2009). Her methods are never the stuff of magic tricks, as the crystal ball is simply just a photograph resting in between a glass ball and a red velveteen beanbag. Fittingly, (Auto)Biography concludes with six drawings from the Magic Tricks series, each of which reference Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.” See Alice cut into three parts. See Alice in a mirror floating in midair. See Alice watch Mr. Rabbit disappear with a poof. See Mr. Rabbit reappear from the magic hat.
There is not any real conclusion when it comes to Alice Shaw’s (Auto)biography. Nor does the viewer come away with any better understanding of Shaw as a person. However, as an artist, Shaw has revealed a thought process, meandering through personal and universal associations, visual symbols, and the use of verbal puns, in a playful and interesting way. Shaw may have yet more to reveal through a post-medium practice, yet still as a photographer.
- Michelle Y. Hyun
IMAGE CREDITS:
Installation View
Show Statement, 2009, 8.5 x 11 inches
Handwriting Analysis, 2009, 8.5 x 11 inches
Installation View
Palm Reading, 2009, block printing ink on paper, 8.5 x 7
Palm Print – Cyanotype / Palm Print-Van Dyke, 2009, Spray paint on paper, 22 x 15 inches
Installation View
Color Field #1, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 14 inches
Guessing Game, 2009, gumball machine and gumballs, 12 x 7 x 7 inches
Color Field #2, 2009, 1 of 3, archival pigment print in plexi, 4.5 x 7 inches
Alice Shaw, Prediction, 2009, archival pigment print, bean bag, and glass ball, 9 x 9 x 5 inches.
All images courtesy of Gallery 16, San Francisco
Posted by Michelle Y. Hyun on 5/31 | tags: figurative abstract lan
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Palm readers and makeup artists, style-hopping dilettantes and spiritual mediums - San Francisco artist Alice Shaw is interested in constructing an identity from the information these know-it-all strangers have to offer in her new show at Gallery 16, "(Auto)Biography."
She's hired a handwriting analyst to dissect her show statement and then commented on that analysis with a work of her own. She's gotten a makeover and then made an imprint of this painted face. And she's had her name taken apart by a synesthete before photographing herself in her moniker's hot pink hues. In the process, last week, the Mission District denizen appeared to be putting together the perfectly imperfect portrait of an artist as a skeptic - unwilling to settle on a medium or any one medium's intuitive/off-the-cuff interpretation.
"This is something I've had in my head for a long time," Shaw, 43, said. She was still putting together the pieces for the upcoming show. Works-in-progress were gathered on a small card table and settees around her Victorian parlor, which was also strewn with antiques and stuffed animals. "Showing with (gallery owner) Griff (Williams) at Gallery 16 is great because he gives you complete freedom - he doesn't know what I'm going to be doing at all! That's the best way."
Shaw appreciates this creative freedom. Coming from a family of artists - her father and mother are ceramicist Richard Shaw and painter-printmaker Martha Shaw, her grandfather was a Disney cartoonist, and her brother is singer-songwriter Virgil Shaw - she's a maker who has "dabbled in a lot of different things."
Wordplay and teasing out the real from the unreal are factors she's toying with, as well as ideas revolving around doubled or mirrored selves - notions that popped up in her book, "People Who Look Like Me," and her 2007 solo exhibit, "Alice Shaw: A Group Show," also at Gallery 16.
The San Francisco Art Institute instructor was also provoked by those complicated yet all-too-easy fabrications facilitated by digital media. "I think a lot about how digital photography has created this society of skeptics," Shaw observed, "because you look at things and think, 'Well, I don't know if that's been changed or not.' " But rather than bemoaning the switch, the artist is taking notes from digital media's fake-book, making, say, faux salt prints and punning on the form visually by depicting "positive" and "negative" salt shaker images. "Sometimes," she said with a chortle, "I take things way too literally."
Reception today. Through July 3. Gallery 16, 501 Third St., S.F. (415) 626-7495. www.gallery16.com. - Kimberly Chun, 96hours@sfchronicle.com
This article appeared on page F - 12 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Kenneth Baker (courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle),
Fazzolari at 16: Bruno Fazzolari's paintings and drawings at Gallery 16 present connected problems that I do not encounter often. His work leaves me equally unsure of how seriously to take it and of how to take it seriously.
Consider the painting "Griefly Thurible" (2009). Should we regard it as unfinished or as effectively unbegun? The forms and gestures in it seem both rehearsed and relaxed to the point of abandonment from lassitude. What might count as allusions - to Philip Guston's late manner, for instance - never quite congeal.
Yet nearly every piece on view evokes volleys of inner disputation that conclude with manifest decisions unintelligible to anyone else. Only a symptomatic trail of ambivalence remains.
To learn that Fazzolari has adapted certain forms and marks from comics and other vernacular illustration only makes us wonder whether we have mistaken his report of a cultural condition for peculiarities of his own temperament.
Fazzolari has given his ongoing series of ink drawings the title "Six Realms." It echoes the Buddhist notion of the six realms of being into which karma may cause a soul to be reborn, but even the Buddhist spiritual vision takes on a comic-book bizarreness from the perspective of contemporary pop culture's cynical materialism.
Fazzolari's work exemplifies the surprising and not necessarily likable forms that sophistication takes in contemporary art.
