Gallery 16 | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

Gallery 16 | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

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Bruno Fazzolari Cold Turkey at Gallery 16

Gallery 16 is pleased to announce Cold Turkey, an exhibition of new work by Bruno Fazzolari.

Bruno Fazzolari's work reflects a keen interest in the uncanny, humorous and awkward features of vernacular and popular expression. His cross disciplinary practice has included sculpture, sound, performance and painting. Between 2004 and 2008 he produced Six Realms, a very large and diverse body of brush and ink drawings. The project explores and explodes the formal intersection of mark-making, gesture, abstraction and illusion through the conceits and tropes of comics, horror movies and graphic art. A selection of these drawings appeared in a book published by Feature, Inc. in 2007.

Cold Turkey will present a selection from Six Realms as well as several recent paintings.

He has shown with Feature, Inc., Gallery Paule Anglim, and Michael Kohn Gallery, and has been included in shows at the M.H. De Young Museum and the Katonah Museum of Art. His work has received attention in Artforum, Art in America, the New Yorker, Art Papers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. In 2001 he received a grant from the Art Council (now Artadia) in support of his studio practice.

He earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996 after graduating from U.C. Berkeley's Comparative Literature department with a focus on critical studies, French and Ancient Greek.

For additional information please contact Vanessa Blaikie at 415.626.7495 or vanessa@gallery16.com.

Futurefarmers Victory Garden 2008+ in the news!

Marcia Tanner has written a synopsis of Futurefarmers Victory Garden project in the March issue of Art Ltd. The article can be viewed here:
http://www.artltdmag.com/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1236297661&archive=&start_from=&ucat=28&

The article about the project in TIME magazine can be viewed here:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1826271,00.html




Amy Franceschini's book Victory Gardens 2007+ published by
Gallery 16 Editions can be purchased here:
http://www.gallery16.com/index.php?page=books

Amy Franceschini's Futurefarmers at Contemporary Museum Baltimore!

Gallery 16 is pleased to announce Amy Franceschini's Futurefarmers solo show at the Contemporary Museum Baltimore March 26- August 2009. Congrats Amy!!

This Spring, the Contemporary Museum is proud to present Futurefarmers’ new project, The Reverse Ark: In the Wake, an exhibition that is part art installation, part community project, part learning platform developed around the concept of an “ark” as a site for preserving, exploring, and learning.

For the occasion of The Reverse Ark, the Contemporary will become stage for thought and action–a learning journey. An inventory of recycled materials will inhabit the gallery. Taken out of the waste stream, these limited resources will be the material from which a living laboratory will emerge – a vessel for inquiry and improvisation including workshops, lectures, video screenings and frameworks for reflection. Together we will build The Reverse Ark.

In the tradition of free schools, The Reverse Ark will invite us all to be students and teachers alike within a place of shared inquiry. Individuals must generate their own most vital questions and program their own education – an education that aims at generality rather than specialization.

With limited resources we will build together
We are all pupils
Let's dialate our senses and calibrate our knowledge
to be cast widely
awakening the tools of a public
The search and journey from peer to pier,
in the wake of history and the currents of future
discoveries we will ignite a learning curve
out to sea
come see!

Elliot Anderson "Equivalents"

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

Oscar Wilde

March will find a new body of work by Elliot Anderson at Gallery 16. “Equivalents.” is a new series of images that follows the direction set by Anderson’s “Averaged Landscapes,” shown at the deYoung Museum in 2007.

In this new work, Anderson questions the modernist notions set forth by Alfred Stieglitz in his seminal 1921 “Equivalents” series. By emphasizing abstract fields of light and clouds, Stieglitz evoked equivalents of subjective thoughts and emotions. Andy Grundberg said “The Equivalents" remain photography's most radical demonstration of faith in the existence of a reality behind and beyond that offered by the world of appearances.”

Anderson uses the Internet, the current repository for all digital snapshots, as his source material. “Inspired by Stieglitz’ work I began collecting snapshots of clouds and skies gathered from the web-searches on the Internet. Using software I designed I averaged together a selection of these images." Averaging is an algorithmic process that merges a series of images into one, creating a final image that is a composite of all those submitted to the software. Elliot's version of the Equivalents recast the meaning from the lone artists search for reality beyond appearances, to everyones search for it. His web searches use each anonymous photographers images to merge with the next creating a singular work from hundreds of sources. Anderson uses the formal subject of the sky, as Stieglitz did, but upsets the modernist vocabulary to grapple with the nature of Stieglitz's presumptions. By exploiting the increasingly communal aspects of technology, Anderson uses a modernist form to a conceptual end.

Another influence on this work is the aesthetic of the sky from Hudson River School paintings. The Hudson River School was a loosely affiliated group of 19th century painters who lived and worked in the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York. These artists were the first to truly represent the American Landscape. The vocabulary of their work included luminous and at time ominous skies through which they sought to evoke an emotional response to an idealized American wilderness.”

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.

Rex Ray: It's finished when I'm done!

For anyone who has followed Rex Ray's career and has been curious as to how these inspired abstractions are created, come watch him do it!

Rex is preparing for a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which opens in March. He is currently in the studio finishing the artwork to be presented in the MCA show, including the largest painting of his career, an epic 9 x 25 foot canvas.

Gallery 16 has always been a place were artwork is not only exhibited, but created. Equal parts studio and gallery. So, in this spirit we asked Rex to finish the work for the MCA show at Gallery 16. We will host a very special event Thursday, February 12, 6-9 pm where guests will be able to enjoy music and cocktails and watch Rex work on the final stages of the 9x25 foot painting throughout the evening. Please RSVP to be part of this unique opportunity. vanessa@gallery16.com.

Presidential Inauguration

Griff and his oldest son Keelan (13) traveled to Washington D.C. to be part of the inauguration of President Obama. It was one of the first times Griff has been back in D.C. since his father, Pat Williams, retired from Congress. Despite the massive crowds, the mood was exhilarating, supportive and thankful to be witness to a historic moment.

The security lines began queuing up at 5 am in 27 degree temperature. Keelan is pictured outside the Rayburn House Office Building preparing for the 5 hour wait.

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