Überblick: A Conversation with Photographer THOMAS HEINSER
Thursday MAY 13, 6-9PM
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.
