UPCOMING November 2011 March 2012 April 2012
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November 18th - December 18th, 2011 QUASAR ampersand is pleased to present the recent work of three emerging Bay Area artists: Jason Kalogiros, Maggie Preston and Jessica Skloven. *Quasars are among the most luminous, powerful, and energetic objects known in the universe. They tend to inhabit the very centers of active young galaxies and can emit up to a thousand times the energy output of the Milky Way. JASON KALOGIROS (b. 1975, New Brunswick, NJ) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. He received his BFA from Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2004, and his MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA in 2008. Jason has been featured in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including shows at The Popular Workshop, San Francisco, CA, Triple Base Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Civilian Art Projects, Washington DC, GASP, Boston, MA, The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago, IL, The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE , Boots, St. Louis, MO, 1/9 Unosunove, Rome, Italy, and Rodeo, Istanbul, Turkey among others. Jason has had solo exhibitions at The Chesapeake Gallery, Bel Air, MD and Unosolo, Milan, Italy. Writing on his work has been featured in the Boston Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the SF Chronicle, Big, Red and Shiny, the East Bay Express, Art Key Magazine, and Art Practical, among others. Jason Kalogiros Statement :
MAGGIE PRESTON (b. 1979, Healdsburg, CA) lives and works in San Francisco. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2001, and her MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA in 2008. Her photo-based works employ various techniques to explore & interfere with the systems with which we make meaning from images. Preston has exhibited at many galleries and non-profit institutions including SF Camerawork, Queen’s Nails Projects, Houston Center for Photography, and the SF Arts Commission Gallery. She currently teaches photography at Out of Site Youth Arts Center. Maggie Preston Statement: I am compelled by the psychological and mental processes with which we make meaning from photographs, and how this complex translation might be changing now that we primarily view and consume images virtually instead of physically. To explore this charged space I choose to limit my materials: camera, paper, light, & film are the medium as well as the subject of the works. These usually invisible elements are foregrounded in photographs that occupy a hazy ground between abstraction & representation. The images and installations force a perspective shift, generating dislocation in the viewer. This tension is intended to open up a liminal space where questions don’t need to be answered, and the kind of resolution that photographs have offered us in the past is neither offered nor expected.
JESSICA SKLOVEN (b. 1982, Atlanta, GA) lives in San Francisco, CA. Jessica Skloven Statement: An image is created in the act of its viewing.
Exhibition Essay by Maria Porges Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. -Thomas Merton Imagine a source of light so old that what we see (if only with a very powerful telescope) was emitted billions of years ago. This is just the beginning of the incomprehensibility of quasars. These brilliant clouds of gas form at the center of an ancient galaxy. Each envelops an immense black hole. My mind stretches towards these ideas, and, eventually, lacking the elasticity to wrap around them, snaps back hard, like a thick rubber band. In every age, there have been discoveries like this—phenomena that can’t be explained, or for which the explanation eludes many who approach it. Cameras and especially their magical products were once regarded in this way: as mysterious yet charismatic objects, sometimes revealing things the eye itself was unable to detect. But we’re over that now. Images are as common as dirt and if we didn’t read them in milliseconds we would be lost, digitally drowned in an unending flood. All three of these photographers-- Jason Kalogiros, Maggie Preston and Jessica Skloven—have found a way to elicit that original moment of unknowing inspired by cameras and pictures. This isn’t about a denial of technological advances; the conceptual sophistication in the work of all three artists places their images squarely in the present, even as the mysteries they evoke hold us in place, looking hard as we try to understand what has happened, and how, and why we don’t know where these moments begin or end. Kalogiros’ double sunsets, for instance, suggest a twisting of time and space that, like the existence of intergalactic radio waves, challenges our sense of the possible. A subject: the sun, approaching the horizon photogenically, creating a scene so familiar and banal that 99% of all contemporary artists wouldn’t touch it with a proverbial ten foot pole, becomes impossibly new-- even as it triggers memories in the most primitive parts of our over-stimulated brains. These pictures were made by transmitting light and image onto a sheet of film through two tiny pinholes pricked in the eyes of the Quaker pictured on an oatmeal box, creating a camera so simple it lacks even a lens. But when we see two suns, it can feel as if we have slipped through those pinholes into a different galaxy than the one in which we currently reside. Another of Kalogiros’ pictures is the result of a striped bed sheet making full body contact with a swath of color printing paper. As one real thing embraced another, each stripe created its opposite---red for green; purple for yellow, and so on. Maggie Preston’s focus is on the materiality of the medium of photography itself, and how we experience its almost-bygone physical relics-- stacks of negatives or discarded prints, exposed or out-of-date photo paper—all the things that once were necessary to the lengthy process of making captured images into a final form. How, she wonders, do we relate to photographs when they are no longer tangible, existing only as accumulations of pixels, an electronic file? In Black Heart, the camera’s flash against a sheet of photo paper becomes the deep black hole at the center of a quasar’s blinding brightness. The half-circle bite of white intruding into the lower edge of the image’s ‘black heart’ is the lens’s silhouette, pressed against the paper’s surface at the moment of exposure. Glitterhole, in contrast, started as an image of a sparkling wall Preston took in Rome, her camera’s flash captured in the center of its disco-esque surface. Adding more glitter on top of the print she made, Preston then re-photographed it on slide film before printing it again, The white ground suggests melting snow. Or nothing at all. We remain unsure of what we see. In a recent artist’s statement, Jessica Skloven describes her interest in “prolonging the moment of recognition.” Often taken from unexpected perspectives, her abstracted images of landscape or water hold us in a limbo of uncertainty so pleasurable that it seems enchanted. Unlike her friends (these three artists have known each other for years, though this is their first three-person show together), Skloven’s process of transformation takes place largely in the darkroom: the negative is only a point of departure. In three of the pictures included in this show, (all, from a body of work titled In Silence and in Sleep) fields of color and light suggest an experience of the natural world that is both quiet and ecstatic, like the writings of Thomas Merton, the 20th century Catholic mystic and writer. This is even more evident in Skloven’s other images, both from Chronicle of a Place Unknown, which were shot on a trip to the extreme landscapes of Iceland. In Mirror Mirror, the twinned reflection of light on water tilts both up and away from us at the same time, making it difficult to know where we stand. Or, for that matter, where we are. But it doesn’t matter, really, because we can stay there, in that state of uncertainty, for as long as we like. Maria Porges Maria Porges is a writer and artist who lives in Oakland and likes it there. www.mariaporges.com
October 14 - November 12, 2011
San Francisco Bay Area artist MIGUEL ARZABE holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University,an MS in Environmental Fluid Dynamics from Arizona State University and an MFA from University of California Berkeley. Arzabe's work was selected for Hors Piste 2011 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris,France and for The More Things Change at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Lightness and Dark at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. He was commissioned for a site-specific installation at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History for LAND/ART New Mexico. His video work will be presented in October of 2011,at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montréal. His work is also included in forthcoming show at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. He works and lives in Berkeley, California. Miguel Arzabe Statement: Miguel Arzabe: falling in Miguel Arzabe’s recent works comprise a peculiar sort of game. The most obvious player here is the artist himself, present through both indexical traces and through recordings of his body enacting physical tasks within the landscape. Using repetition as a device that points to a continuous process of testing, mastering, failing, and starting all over again, Arzabe examines the body’s endurance and limitations as it struggles to exert an impact, traverse a distance, access an exterior, and make its idiosyncratic mark within the territory of the picture. His solitary exercises seem to be performances conducted specifically for the fixed, static frame of the camera’s viewfinder, or the condensed space of the painting’s surface. Actions begin from somewhere just outside this frame, or just at its edge. The body peaks into the pristine pictorial view, enters, and initiates a more or less deliberate line of force– extending the trajectory of an intention and eliciting the feedback of a response. In these works, simple systems are emphasized through reiteration, and are executed until they exhaust themselves, culminating in some sort of breakdown or moment of uncertainty. The video Streaming, for example, features the seamless loop of an almost imperceptible repetition. Inserted into the flow of a stream and propelled by the force of its current, an orange ball travels continuously from point to point: between an ambiguous, off-frame sender and a similarly ambiguous receiver. Somewhere along the line of transmission, however, chance conspires to initiate a system error, a temporary lapse in processing. Unable to fulfill the protocol, the ball spins in place, impelling its user to take the time to wait, or to reboot the system and begin again. Paintings such as an indecisive yet primal moment or sabrás cuando ocurre (you'll know when it happens) similarly represent an archaeology of repeated efforts, failures, and restarts. Produced through a laborious process of building up layers of paint and texture and taking them away, they reveal bits and pieces of the physical labor and mental strategizing behind the production of each image. As repeated attempts to capture and comprehend a fleeting encounter, an emotion, or a momentary epiphany, they are simultaneously athletic and romantic; as much about operating within the limits of the medium as they are about longing or memory. In these images, the masked paths of straight lines encounter misregistrations and wobbly, gestural marks; clear, hard-edged forms butt up against diffused, atmospheric light; representation wavers on the edge of abstraction, and vice versa. Both modes exist in the simultaneous space and time enabled by painting’s specific constraints and conditions. pushover<-->(Thwarted by Winning) foregrounds the solitary figure of the artist in pursuit of a seemingly absurd goal. In this video, Arzabe’s silhouette traverses the sharp edge of a small mountain, slowly progressing towards its pinnacle. The orange ball reappears in almost whimsical scale-shift, comparable to the size of Arzabe’s body as he pushes it up the mountain’s steep incline and lets it fall back, pushes it up and lets it fall, in a constant struggle with the pull of gravitational force. Unlike Sisyphus, who is doomed to repeat this same arbitrary action in an endless loop of futility, Arzabe offers an alternative, definitive conclusion. In a sleight-of-hand moment that transcends rationality, the system set up within the first half of the work suddenly stops making sense. Weight is exchanged for lightness as the work takes a different sort of trajectory: one that strays from the viewer's expectation drifting out of its bounds. As activities governed by explicit rules and regulations, games seem to represent an ideal formal structure: the pure space of intelligible boundaries, a set of available strategies, a winner, a loser, and a clear, common goal. Subscribing to the confines of this structure would seem to promise a steady progression from the obscure towards the conclusive, from the unknown to the known. Arzabe’s works court the clarity of the system, the rules of the game, yet complicate the idea of a sure and certain outcome. They celebrate both the formal procedure, and the value of falling in, letting go. Fixed contours, lines, measures, and rules mingle with intuition, emotion, error, and formlessness, implying an arena in which forces both visible and invisible, both intentional and aleatory, are at play. October 14 - November 12, 2011
Bay Area artist LEIGH WELLS holds a BFA from University of San Francisco, with further study at the San Francisco Art Institute, Crown Point Press and Parsons/New School in New York. Most recently, her work was included in "Tensile Strength" at New York's ZieherSmith Gallery and in "Building Context" at Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco. Gallery 16 in San Francisco held a solo show of Wells' drawings. Her collages and drawings are part of the Viewing Programs at The Drawing Center and White Columns in New York, and the flat files at Pierogi in Brooklyn. Wells' work is held in private collections in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. Leigh Wells Statement: Combining collage and mixed-media with an emphasis on drawing, my work attempts to challenge, in its way, simplistic world views that contrast with the mysterious nature of reality. In works that interact with found historical, cultural or religious materials I use my own personal systems to question the presumed points of view contained in these objects. Leigh Wells: Deception For the past several years Leigh Wells has been making art to understand. Driven by a profound desire to know what can and what can’t be known, Wells scavenges the past and present, equally curious about the person in the reproduction of a painting as she is about the provenance of a water stain on a found scrap of paper. By incising, excising and resizing and then adding the tension of a highly sophisticated hand and eye, Wells has developed a visual vocabulary that serves her particularly well in her latest body of work, Deception. For Wells the question remains the same – what can you know and what can you not know? But with Deception the quest she is on is no longer about the impossibility of knowing a long dead person but instead about the impossibility of knowing ourselves. More specifically, the profound distance that a mind can drive between itself and the body tasked with housing it; and the sometimes terrible acts of corporeal obsession the body will demand as an attempt to reunite the two. Wells’ large works on paper immediately force the viewer to question the difference between flesh and stone, agency and confinement evoking a struggle that seems to pit muscle against muscle under the same flesh. The grey backgrounds of the four Incarnate panels provide a stage of sorts probing the performative aspects of obsession. Meanwhile the sculptures sit slightly apart; looking on with a sense of detachment, though whether it is ironic, amused or shell-shocked is impossible to say. The power of Wells’ latest work is that even as she attempts to evoke darkness the art itself presents an alternative. By staying true to her highly personal and particular aesthetic, she offers a countervailing concept of what it is to be human and to believe that however incomplete, some degree of reconciliation between the known and the unknown is indeed possible.
September 9th - October 9th, 2011 THREE FORMS
Three Forms explores these artists’ systematic adherence to a form or gesture and the visual cadences they produce in allowing color to be the variable within their equations. Repetition does not lead to stasis or inertia; rather, it expands the work rhythmically so that pattern and shape amplify across the space of a room. The abstracted individual forms or lines combine into sequences that operate both linguistically and structurally; meaning evolves from recognizing the syntax the artists employ. San Luis Obispo–based artist Jeff Jamieson produces small-scale painted wood sculptures that punctuate space. These sculptures take on almost lexical attributes, in which the angles of folded strips of plywood or assembled blocks of wood seem to be signaling in code. Their small scale invites close inspection of the individual compositions and the evident brushwork in the objects' enamel-painted surfaces. But viewed all at once, they seem to mimic both the formal meter of poetry and the natural modulation in pitch and tone of voices in conversation, so the end result is a rhythmic, composed, and intimate framing of the space they occupy. Sol LeWitt’s 1972 set of eight silkscreens, Arcs from Sides or Corners, Grids & Circles (S-11), suggest a similar tension between the structural and the poetic. Each of the eight color variations demonstrates the systematic execution of an idea, incorporating all the possible variations within the parameters of that idea. The lines and sequences LeWitt employed were in service to that process, and while the appearance may be of secondary importance, the visual results are undeniably powerful. The lines of these prints reverberate and pulse as shapes and patterns come in and out of focus. Grammar gives way to the hum of meaning. Conversely, Evelyn Reyes, who works through the Creativity Explored studio in San Francisco, produces solid, block-like shapes in oil pastels. She describes her serial and individual drawings in terms of food items and containers——cakes, carrots, coffee cups, and garbage cans——but they also closely resemble architectural and ornamental forms. The garbage cans suggest ionic columns whose capitals have slipped midway down their shafts, while cakes might be schematic drawings of tents or pavilions. Reyes’ work possesses a ritualistic, almost ceremonial, aspect that is evident both in the dense rubbing of the pastel on paper and in her most-repeated form, the carrot, whose angularity resemble pennants heralding a parade. The drawings operate in march-step, each carrot taking up and continuing a joyful cadence. Collectively, these artists have deliberately or instinctively taken on the principles of architecture while also operating in the reductive visual language of shape, sequence, volume, and line. As a result, adherence to a single form becomes an expansive experience in which color and rhythm push back the boundaries of seeing.
June 10th to July 8th 2011 Young Ampersand presents: NUMBER THREE Young Ampersand’s third exhibition, NUMBER THREE, brings together six artists whose work is united by their attention to craft, materiality, and texture. Zoe Fisher’s sculpture “The Drifter,” assembled from driftwood from San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, embodies a dialogue about the relationship of the body to space, its constant negotiation and manipulation. Informed by his own hybrid identity, Isaac Vazquez’s collages take up the relationship between past and present. Vazquez reappropriates and recontextualizes images to navigate this rupture in time. The precision with which Vazquez does so is mirrored in Amos Goldbaum’s detailed ink drawings, which are created by layering found images from the internet and similarly represent an interest in challenging traditional perspectives of society. Meryl Pataky’s floating “Paper Kaddish,” a physical embodiment of the Hebrew Kaddish prayer said during the mourning of a loved one and the sabbath, also testifies to the melting of time. Clark Mizono’s photographs function dually as preservations of a dying medium--analog photography--and evidence of the texture of everyday human activity. Similarly, Monica Lundy’s ethereal portraits and site-specific clay painting are tangible representations of dissolved and collective histories, the traces of time.
April 8th to May 13th 2011 ALEX CLAUSEN : FLOOD : site-specific mixed media installation
model of site-specific installation at ampersand international arts (2011) balsa, nylons, glue Alex Clausen is an artist that lives and works in San Francisco. He uses temporary sculptures and altered photographs to investigate visual or personal relationships that exist within domestic spaces. Clausen earned a bachelors’ degree in Art and Physics from University of California, Davis, and a graduate degree from the California College of the Arts. He was awarded a Graduate Fellowship at the Headlands Center the Arts for the 2006-2007 year. ESSAY by Susan O'Malley
Tara Foley is originally from New York City’s Lower East Side; Tara is the only child of two artistic hippies and grew up enamored with subway car graffiti in the 80’s. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College where she spent a semester abroad in Ghana. After graduation Tara explored Asia for four years, living mainly in Japan as an English teacher and India where she learned traditional metalsmithing. Not expecting to reside in the US again, Tara visited San Francisco and has been seduced by the place into calling it home for the past nine years. My work is informed by an interest in psychology and architecture. A particular source of inspiration is the Anti-Design movement of the 1960’s and 70’s, especially the work of the British group Archigram and the Italian studios Archizoom. Their work has an interdisciplinary approach, addressing the fields of architecture, urban planning, design, human ecology and phenomenology, all of which are interests in my practice. Reflecting on their work, I have begun a new series called Pairings, The Dripstone Sings to the Choir pieces being the first of this series that I have exhibited. Pairings is a collaborative project that explores professions centered around the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. I have met with an urban designer, an architect, a regional planner, and a transportation planner. After a conversation about a project that they have worked on, I make a conglomerate artwork based on that project, creating a mutation, a fragmentation of their ideas in a realm that I have internalized. In this collaborative learning process, I incorporate a visual vernacular of landscape; transferring and transforming shared ideas into another context, giving them another life. This project is not limited to a particular medium, I am interested in exploring sculpture, installation, 2D work and working on larger projects involving the urban environment." ESSAY by Aimee Le Duc Tara Foley is all too aware of the concepts of mapping and although her drawings, installation and sculpture play with these concepts initially, her work peels away any and all distances between where we are and how we are mapping place; between how we move our bodies and the signs and symbols that direct us one way or another. Foley is revealing what lies beneath the mapping and the representations. She is assembling an architecture of shifting thoughts. Foley’s use of architecture can be seen as a metaphor for her entire practice, as a fitting model to use as a point of entry into her drawings, sculpture and installation. Often times, architecture can be seen as a model imposed on others to dictate how they live, how they move. But architecture can also be exquisitely sensitive, a form that follows the body and the way we interact with others. Tara’s work straddles both of these possibilities. Her work takes existing models and transforms them into places never seen or imagined; creating landscapes that are both familiar and unexpected; both strange and inviting. The details suggest deeply thought out systems of signs and symbols that expose our subconscious intentions but also reveal ways in which we ought to coexist with others. This current body of work comes out of long conversations Tara has had with experts in fields having to do with the built environment. She spoke with an architect, a regional planner and an urban planner. Foley wanted to talk to people who dedicate themselves to systems of public order. She chose people working in fields outside of her own to break open new ways of thinking, to create for herself access into new worlds of thought, and ultimately, to expand her artistic practice. Her painstakingly intricate work reveals buildings that stand on arms and legs, bound together with hair and memories. Body parts seemingly function as legend in her work for fantastical yet deeply grounded maps and dream states, for exhaustive patterns and seductive organic shapes all pointing to a false binary between all of these concepts. Foley’s work doesn’t merge them all together – it shows the viewer that they were never truly divided. Through her conversations, her research, her work as both an educator and an artist she searches in all aspects of her life for unity rather than division – hoping to suggest that there are no divisions after all. Playing with scale, Foley creates landscapes and buildings with such detail and sharpness that entire universes can be found in the smallest of shapes. The color paints visceral and passionate narratives as much as it points to the grand abstractions of nature and our own limbs and hair. Foley’s images are influenced by her curiosity of spiritual symbols, the enraging stories of sweeping political movements and the physical labor that made the divine scale of Renaissance churches possible. All of this is apparent even in the minutia of intimate moments she includes within her vast and deep work. What makes The Dripstone Sings to the Choir so compelling is that it a collection searching for deep grounding but is also rooted in that very same deep ground. It is a product from open-ended dialogs between an artist and other thinkers in the most sincere manner. This multidisciplinary approach from the outset is bridging the gap between art making and other practices. The resulting visual objects created are haunting in their honesty and the vibrancy of composition but they also embody a type of loneliness. The images depict body parts but no people, massive buildings and environments but few clear destinations. This is by no means a criticism of Tara Foley’s work. On the contrary, the cavernous areas she creates might very well be the very architecture we are seeking to shift our thoughts as well as our acts."
March 4th to April 1st 2011 LISA GOLDSCHMID : LIMINAL : sculpture, painting
Artist Statement ESSAY by Sarah Sutro
Charlene Tan ESSAY by David Buuck Tan’s black and white copies of product boxes hang from pegboards or rest on display shelves, beguiling us with their over-excited claims of “new and improved” or “max size”. For each object, Tan has undone and flattened the cheap packaging, run them through the Xerox machine, often changing their size in the process, and then literally repackaged the results in three dimensions. This play between the (literal and conceptual) flatness of banal consumer goods and the resulting lightweight boxes, emptied of their contents but with new emphasis on form, draws heightened attention to the disposable containers and their (literally) empty promises, destined for the dustbins of our personal histories. However, this is not a case of simply taking the drugstore into the gallery, or defamiliarization through mere re-contextualization. Tan’s inflated sculptures, ‘larger than life’ even as they sit inertly in their cheap paper packaging, torque our own relationship with each item, as our sense of our bodies is no longer in proportion to the products—flu meds, chapstick, tampons, etc.—our bodies use everyday. Just as the miniature draws out a sense of playful mastery over the world of things (the dollhouse, the architectural model), the gigantic threatens to dwarf our sense of power in relation to those things that we’ve materially produced for ourselves. Additionally, the draining of all the bold colors that saturate our experience of shopping lends a kind of funereal cast to Tan’s sculptures, as if her installation were an archeology of our present, scanned and reprinted for the archives of some future museum dedicated to the pre-collapse era of landfill aesthetics. At the same time, the presentation of what the father of mass production and replication Henry Ford called “one goddamn thing after another” takes on an additional charge in the gallery context, where we ‘know’ that the work in front of us is for sale (or at least can rarely escape the economic value-systems of the artworld), even as we wish to pretend otherwise. This is not to say that Tan’s work can be reduced to some ironic fire-sale of discounted artworks, or a commentary on the art-commodity-money nexus, for the work at hand does not rest on its conceptual frames as much as push them into tactile and palpable presence, the materials of materialism folded back in upon themselves, their shelf-life expanded outward, to where “everything must go…” January 21 to February 18, 2011 WALKING ON THIN ICE
The premise of Walking on Thin Ice is the acknowledgement and celebration, in the face of crisis or great vulnerability, of the transformative and redemptive powers of art making as well as art viewing. Whether through their art processes or sources of inspiration, these artists embrace life in all its fragility, precariousness and transience and all find success through the hope, humor and intimate healing rituals alive in their practices. Their work honors quixotic quests, absurd gestures and quiet contemplation, all aiming at negotiating fragility and revisiting the ordinary through the miraculous moments that their creativity alerts us to. The symbiotic energy of the busy salon style presentation of WoTI intends to trigger and reveal meanings, symbology, and vitality from one discreet piece to the other. Reverberating and echoing, from one to the other, and on to the viewer.
The work of all these artists stand as memento for the way art helps us revive and thrive one step at a time, moving forward.
October 22nd to December 10th, 2010 RANDY COLOSKY collage, drawing, painting, sculpture, video The show is curated by Tracy Wheeler. Please find an additional essay by artist/curator Sarah Smith below. “The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the
average tendency.” Tracy Wheeler (ampersand associate curator) is an emerging curator, secret artist, keen art collector and a creative writer. Ms Wheeler attended Douglass College, Rutgers University where she acquired a BA in Political Science. As the president of the Board of Directors of Southern Exposure from 2004 to 2010, Ms Wheeler was instrumental in stewarding the organization toward its present gallery space. Tracy Wheeler is now dedicating herself to her writing, studio and curation work and living artfully. ESSAY In his solo show at ampersand, Secret Handshake, the new sculptures are
made from familiar materials: bricks, lawn gazing balls, metal
bracketing straps, cinderblocks and expansion foam. The array of low
brow, off-the-shelf items that make up the raw materials of his
sculptures are not exactly 'objects of desire.' Combining his In other pieces, Randy offers an old school challenge to contemporary
versions of the readymade. A trip to Home Depot got him the elements
for Still Life: Cinder Block with Great Stuff ™ Expansion Foam, 2010
and a trip to the foundry sealed the deal. Cinder Block is a bronze
sculpture, but the paint job fools the eye so well, most people aren’t
going to get it. Any credibility this humble cinderblock gained during
its trip to the foundry, any elevation to high art through its material
transformation from cast concrete to cast bronze has been subjugated
with a wink of the eye and a wicked sense of humor. Randy negates any
high-brow adoration for this bronze found object with a thin veil of
faux calling it out for what it is: a double entendre of a sculpture Process and concept overlap. By daring to tread on that slippery slope
between artwork and craftwork Randy opens himself up to constant
challenges. Continually seeking out different ways to best reflect a
concept he turns to unconventional mediums. The idea of using a
20-gauge shotgun as an art-making instrument in and of itself is Transformation and transcendence are themes that weave through his art.
His new series of ink drawings are meditations on these ideas. While
reading a book about physics and string theory, Randy was inspired by
scientific discussions about multiple dimensions of space-time (at
least 11) interacting on an elemental level to give us forces, matter Observing, teasing out perceived realities, breaking things down to
elemental pieces, and exploring through process the complexity of where
we are—this is what continues to inspire Randy. Guided by intuition,
experimentation and playfulness, with a myriad of tools at his
fingertips, I like to think of Randy as a construction worker by day
September 10th to October 10th, 2010
Jeff Morris is a Bay Area artist whose work has been exhibited locally at Ampersand International Arts, MM Galleries, Limn Gallery, Southern Exposure and the Luggage Store. He has participated nationally in group exhibitions at Margaret Thatcher Projects in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. His artwork is in private collections in Paris, San Francisco, New York and London. Westerns are about place. They’re not called outlaw films. They’re not even called cowboys-and-Indians films. They’re called westerns. They’re about geography. [i] Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie: Thoughts on Jeff Morris’ Tall Trees In that respect, Morris shares the approach taken by multi-player video games, which feature immersive environments that not only provide motivations and obstacles for their characters, but also need to be absolutely convincing in their details. In fact, the title for this exhibition, “Tall Trees” refers to the name of a hunting territory in Red Dead Redemption, a critically acclaimed, Western-themed interactive game, in which players roam across canyons and deserts fighting outliers and bandits. Tall Trees apparently resembles a hybrid between the redwood forests of Northern California and the American Rocky Mountains, and despite the threat from mauling animals or other hunters, Morris notes that it can be an idyllic place to linger.[ii] Regarding the game in its entirety, critic Seth Schiesel notes that “Red Dead Redemption… submerges you, grabbing you by the neck and forcing you down, down, down until you simply have no interest in coming up for air.”[iii] The distinction between playing in and experiencing this world dissolves. This is a place as much as any other. Unburdened by affinity to scale and geological forces, Morris creates place, employing a parsed-down visual language that foregrounds color and texture to an exacting degree. Copse consists of fifteen folded pieces of cardstock, hung in tight formation on the wall. Lap is a shallow, rectangular metal platform whose painted aquamarine surface is scuffed and oxidized, except for the hard-edged section that Morris has waxed to a gloss. The seven metal road signs that comprise Outlook (2010) have been similarly buffed; again, only half of each. Morris props them standing in tight formation against the wall, alternating the reflective yellow surface between top and bottom so that they blink out a code, signaling attention to both the age-worn, grime encrusted paint and the promise of unblemished perfection. Vein (2010) is the most mimetic sculpture, the jewel-like, translucent scraps of headlights found along the side of the road here become a vein of precious gems extracted from ore and suspended in midair. The individual sculptures coalesce into a landscape that one encounters not as an open expanse but in close proximity. They are precise objects, each constructed to the same purpose—building a phenomenological subjectivity through an encounter with light. Their appearances change subtly and continuously with our movements. We have to walk through this landscape to understand it; we can’t take it in from afar. Ultimately, Morris’ sculptures point to the way we encounter nature. He manufactures substitutes for natural forms that we can apply logic to. We seek balance from them and distill the massive forces that grind down the world over eons into encapsulated, concrete terms: a tree, a rock, a wave. In Morris’ landscapes, we don’t have to deal with the loneliness of the open prairie; we can keep the world close at hand. [i] Dan Houser is one of the founders of Rockstar, the company that created Red Dead Redemption. (Link) Deletions
'Deletions' is inspired by and dedicated to James Sansing's daughter Tallulah. Singing Sansings
June 11th - July 9th, 2010
Ampersand is happy to present "private pARTs".
Following a very successful "Home" show in June 2009, Ampersand has re-invited the four local art aficionados/curators "Young Ampersand", Jesse Brown, Rachel Hooper, Saskia Mauro and Theodora Mauro.
Shashana Chittle: Mind (You) Shashana Chittle (Bay Area artist) methodically draws attention to the mysterious relationship between matter and consciousness. In her studio practice, sensory investigations are always paired with exercises in spiritual rituals, eventually incarnated in her mystical, delicate and sublime drawings, paintings and installations. "My work is born of mystical necessity. Lauren Davies: Looking After
Lauren Davies is a San Francisco-based artist working in a range of mixed media projects that explore our often-troubled relationship with the natural world. Much of her work is based on the childhood experience of attending painting classes in a natural history museum. Davies' installations explore the ironic artifice found in many museum dioramas coupled with the folksy presentations of small town historical interpretive centers. Labor-intensive "do it yourself" replicas of wildlife and geological elements are carefully constructed from wildly inappropriate materials. Other recent projects have ranged from recreated scenes of destructive fires and debris, to the absurdity of correspondence course taxidermy studies and pedigreed dog breeding. Curatorial oversight of a vast collection of lint has been an ongoing project for over ten years. The unifying element found in these eclectic projects is an interest in exploring obscure subject matter and imagery, coupled with an obsessive use of sad sack materials and an underlying dark humor. “Looking After presents a series of abstract, mixed media objects that visually suggest the lumpy remains of scorched specimens. These odd objects are paired with brightly colored architectural elements such as wall panels, carved molding, shelves and display pedestals. The work weaves together a variety of personal interests: taxidermy, dioramas and natural history displays; curating and presentation of collections; issues of preservation, ownership and control over the natural world. The title Looking After refers to the function of curators from a previous era when the job required “looking after” collections of everything from religious paintings and rare stamps to gem stones and antique farm tools. Looking After presents carefully crafted scenes of destruction and debris, to create a visual commentary on the possibility of real world chaos inflicted on the orderly environment of the natural history museum. The 2008 fire that virtually destroyed Deyrolle, the greatly beloved taxidermy emporium located in the heart of Paris, was the inspiration for this project.”
Kevin P Clarke (Oakland, CA) works in a broad range of media: painting, sculpture, and drawings. Clarke is a founding member of Million Fishes Arts Collective. Clarke recently opened the MacArthur b arthur gallery, and is creator and curator of "The Small Gallery” David Fought (San Francisco, CA) works with bent wires installations and plaster sculptures. With lines, masses, surfaces, light and shadows, Fought offers a subtle look at the engagement objects have within space.
Fought is a current Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA
"From the moment I first experienced Lori Gordon’s work I was in awe of it. I was struck by the contradiction of its stark purity and silly magic, magnetized by its seeming fragility, unner ved by its immediate intimacy, embraced by the possibilities of its absurdity. Gordon’s work embraced me. It hums in your ears, offers you mirages and mirrors. Whether it is her watercolor quotes from ‘films that made me cry’, aura portrait paintings, hug performances or collaborative curatorial projects, all of Gordon’s various practices envelop the viewer, the sitter, the collaborator. Her endeavors cheer together with the sardonic smile of desperate human hope. She finds balance – allowing you the space to examine your own fragility, awkwardness, isolation – all in order to get strength from it.
September 4 – October 3, 2009 Dusseldorf Paintings: Emi Winter Alan B. Callander received his BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from American University in 1996 and his MFA from the Maryland Institute, College o f Art in 2009. Screenings of his work have been shown at Conner Contemporary/Rubell Family Collection, Washington DC; Plateaux Festival, Torun, Poland; the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Laptopia #4 Festival, Tel Aviv, Israel; the Decibel International Festival of Electronic Music, Art, and New Media, The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, among others. Callander lives and works in Washington DC.
Emi Winter was a 2001 Artist in Residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. She has had numerous international exhibitions, including solo shows at Hebel 121, Basel; Ateliers Hoherweg, Düsseldorf; Compact Gallery, San Luis Obispo, CA; Galería Quetzalli, Oaxaca; Patricia Faure Gallery, Project Room, Los Angeles; and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City, among others. Selected group exhibitions include Instituto Cultural de México, Miami; Casa de las Américas, La Habana, Cuba; Centro Cultural de la República El Cabildo, Asunción, Paraguay; Instituto Cervantes, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Museo Emilio Caraffa de Córdoba, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá, Colombia; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico; Texas Gallery, Houston; and James Kelly Contempor ary, Santa Fe, NM. She lives and works in Oaxaca. Ampersand is happy to present HOME. Ampersand has invited four local art aficionados to curate the first Young Ampersand exhibition: Jesse Brown, Rachel Hooper, Saskia Mauro and Theodora Mauro are childhood friends; they all studied art history and art making and have grown up in homes where art criticism, art collecting and art making are an everyday reality. Choosing a subject familiar to all, the HOME curators explore individual interpretations of the idea of Home by recent Art School graduates, all visual artists linked to the San Francisco Bay Area. Curators’statement: With HOME we aim to address how art can reflect broader understandings of the places we live in: how they are not only defined by the roof over our heads, but may also be the people, places and events that impact our lives." text inspired by HOME:
PETRIFIED FOREST May 8th - June 5th, 2009 Christina La Sala is an installation artist who lives in San Francisco. She received her BFA from The Tyler School of Art, Temple University Phila delphia, PA and her MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute. Ms. La Sala has shown work nationally and abroad. She was an Artist in Residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts, an Artist in Residence at The Hermit Foundation in The Czech Republic and an artist in Residence at Elsewhere in Greensboro, N.C. Ms. La Sala divides her exhibition time between gallery work, film and theatre design. She has designed sets, millinery and specialty props for Big Mess Theatre in Philadelphia, Specialty props for Leah Stein Dance Co. Philadelphia, specialty props for Smart Mouth Theatre, S.F. and Set Design and Specialty Props for Theatre First Oakland CA. about her work in “Petrified Forest “, Christina La Sala says: The hash marks are counting pieces that reference the exquisite tedium of boredom and waiting. Waiting for the right moment, waiting for something to happen, letting the moment pass. Inaction becomes dynamic when it is documented in detail; each stroke is unique and treated as the last."
ALWAYS CLOSE BUT NEVER TOUCHING Vanessa Marsh was born in Seattle WA and lives and works in San Francisco, CA. She received her BA from Western Washington University and her MFA from the C alifornia College of the Arts. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and Southern Exposure Gallery in San Francisco. Marsh was the 2004 CCA MFA awardee at the Headlands Center for the Arts and a 2007 recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in Peterborough, New Hampshire. about her work in “Always Close But Never Touching”, Vanessa Marsh says: The idea of spaces between meanings became a fascination for me whether regarding the physical landscape, in considering memory or in making art. I think about ways that my art can tell a truth and yet be rooted in imagination simultaneously. My practice of model building began as a means to create a certain kind of photograph, an image that was at once real and surreal. As I worked more with miniatures I realized that the experience of looking into a model was similar to the feeling of being in abandoned places: of being an unintended visitor i n a place that is at once somewhere and nowhere. The models are built referencing snap shots and many details are filled in from my own imagination. When I build the models I am thinking of the places I've explored on the outskirts of Seattle, places on the brink of evolution and extinction - between meanings. Building the models is an attempt to fully embrace my own sentimentality of where I grew up; the home where I no longer live. The environment where I feel the most comfortable yet choose not to be. The models are about recreating something important again that has been deemed unusable and outdated. In building them I am creating on a miniature scale a part of my own history, exploring the ways in which memory and identity are tied not only to location but also to one’s own imagination. ” Ray Davis of pseudopodium.org , and Matthew Boyko and Sarah Stone contribute texts inspired by La Sala and Marsh’s work:
Curators: Amplifying the Twilight investigates the gray area between the rationality of hard science and the speculative intuition of culture. Works by Shashana Chittle, David Coyle, Ryan Fenchel, Sayre Gomez, and Alison Ruttan bridge the horizons between the futurism of technology and exploratory alchemical practices. Responding to Arthur C. Clarke's maxim that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - the works examine the role of science in human life, inquiring how science shapes our understanding of the world, from metaphysics and spirituality to politics and ethics. The drawing practice of Shashana Chittle methodically archives her experience awakening each morning, capturing her fleeting visual perceptions. David Coyle's video triptych reinterprets the speculations of science fiction as a form of personal horror. The intuition-driven collages of Ryan Fenchel draw from the subjects of freemasonry, Egyptology, and other esoteric studies. Sayre Gomez records how the alchemical transformation of energy has become a pedestrian, invisible part of our visual lives. The photographic clusters of Alison Ruttan parallel the behavior of primates and humans in humorous and embarrassing dialogs. Brian Andrews is an artist and critic in San Francisco. more AMPLIFYING THE TWILIGHT :
SEMAPHORES January 16 - February 28, 2009 Jordan Essoe is a San Francisco-based artist whose interdisciplinary exhibition projects focus on sociopolitical and psychological issues surrounding property, identity, exile, and war. His work has been exhibited at TART, San Francisco; The Palm Springs Desert Museum, CA; Scope Miami; 21 Grand, Oakland, CA; Intersection for the Arts and PLAySPACE Gallery (both San Francisco); Swarm, Oakland, CA; Red House Gallery, Venice,=2 0CA; Meneer de Wit Gallery, Amsterdam; Ha'Kibbutz Gallery, Tel Aviv; and The Zebra Poetry Film Award, Berlin. His poetry and critical writing have been published nationally and internationally. Essoe is co-founder of the Humane Slaughter Acts Performance Festival. Through Semaphores, Essoe explores the [re]ordering of the world, the [dis]placement of people, and the global distribution of force, wealth, and empathy. He characterizes the age of globalism in part by a latent sense of universal exile, both in the Global South and Global North. In this body of work, Essoe juxtaposes psychological exile against forcible expulsion, bridging the two by evoking a profound sense of responsibility. Semaphores is a multimedia installation that encompasses photography, video projections, collage, and materials ranging from mirrors or brown paper bags to sugar cubes. Essoe appropriates an array of media and art histori cal images to invoke complex and ambiguous relationships amongst the installation's constituent parts. A collage series depicting aerial photographs of a northwestern region of Colombia where agrarian communities are being massacred and displaced preludes a rendition of Edward Hopper's 1955 painting Hotel Window, its central figure becoming an inert and distant observer to these horrific but obscured events. Similarly, Essoe utilizes Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, as a conceptual lens for addressing the problematic of remaking the world by grand design. Inspired by the fictional society of intellectuals within Borges's narrative, Essoe initiated his own collective of thinkers to contribute to an installation of 72 images envisioning their idea of “economic democracy”. Contributors include philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, author Derrick Jensen, economist Michael Greenstone, ecologist David Wilcove, anthropologist Laura Rival, artist Ken Friedman, poet Bill Berkson, activist Sarah Anderson, and many others. more SEMAPHORES:
SCRAP October 24 th - December 7th, 2008 JEFF MORRIS About Jeff Morris work , James Nestor says: Lines are the subjects of Jeff Morris’ work. But not just lines. It’s the spaces outside and in between the lines, around the lines, their shapes and colors, where they start and stop – these are the real players in these pieces. Because as each line is magnified and manipulated and abstracted (...) so are the spaces that surround it, so is the meaning and our perception also changed. Light turns to dark, day to night, unmoving earth becomes ephemeral air – definition is redefined"
AFTERMATH ANDY VOGT Vogt's work has been exhibited in the San Francisco Bay Area at Swarm Gallery, Ampersand International Arts, The Luggage Store, Headlands Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, The Lab, Mission17, 301 Bocana, 111 Minna and New Langton Arts. In Los Angeles, his work has been shown at Upspace, and the LH Horton Gallery in Stockton, and the UC Davis Memorial Union Gallery in Davis, California. Additionally, Vogt has exhibited at the Samson Projects in Boston, and The Skinny Building and Pittsburgh Filmmakers in Pittsburgh, PA. Andy Vogt presently lives and works in San Francisco. About his own artwork, Andy Vogt says: "Looking back, moments appear suspended between intersections of time and place, certain details crisply defined, the rest ragged and hazy. Interlocked, they become a mental landscape that extends in all directions but is seen from a consistent vantage point; the present. The things and spaces we build have the same fate. Created for one purpose, they endure for a time acquiring new meanings shedding old ones. They are adrift until their demise when they become a marker of time’s inescapable pull downward (...)I see these works as re-crystallized skeletal incarnations of an obsoleted system that has been frozen in suspended animation. Their shapes have a hazy connection to literal structures but subscribe to alternate formal hierarchies."
Essayists DeWitt Cheng and Patricia Maloney contribute texts inspired by the artists' work:
PASSAGE September 19 - October 17, 2008 Ellen Babcock completed her M.F.A. at the California College of the Arts in 2002. She was awarded the Cadogan Fellowship, the Dennis Leon faculty award, and the Headlands Center for the Arts studio award. She was a Headlands Affiliate Artist from 2002-2004. Ellen has exhibited at numerous gallerie s, including the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Southern Exposure, and the Exploratorium. She lives in San Francisco, and teaches at California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute. Artist Statement
HOW FAST YOUR WORLD IS CHANGING March 21-April 25, 2008 ARTexts, including critical essay by Jim Servin found here: ampersandsfwords.blogspot.com Harrell Fletcher is finding it hard to make art amidst all the troubling events happening in the world. He feels it would be better to offer viewers the chance to witness current events through the syndicated show Democracy Now. He makes an effort to watch this every day, and would like to offer the same alternative to gallery visitors. Christine Hill presents a selection of catchphrase posters, pulled from the Volksboutique library of positive reinforcement quotations. Hope Hilton wants to share the silence with you. By creating a journey through movement without sound, she trusts that her silent walks will provide an experience that is both contemplative and insightful. It is a journey that strangers and friends will take, following Hilton as she walks an uncharted path, ending the route where she begins. Jessica James Lansdon is also working through some guilt. She is questioning why it is that artists still make objects today. Is anything worth saving, worth giving away? The glitz and clutter of a trashy collection lure us in and we see that Jessica has attached each object to a piece of string on the wall: she wants the viewer to sever these ties, to cut the threads, to set these things free, thereby freeing her as well. Jennifer Delos Reyes is honoring those she loves and admires through song and music. Inspired by a funeral she attended, where the pastor led the service singing the deceased's favorite song, Jennifer doesn't want to wait that long. She doesn't want to wait until anyone is gone. By creating an impromptu choir on site, the gallery will be filled with the voices of those who have come together for a brief moment, to share a song. Markuz Wernli-Saito wants to return the photographs others took for him in an art residency project in Vietnam. He invites the viewer to choose a roll of negatives and mail them back on his behalf to the residents of Bao Loc, hoping to make amends by returning something that was never his to begin with. As an artist and independent curator Lori Gordon investigates the structure and power of belief, creating projects that attempt to decipher both humanity's and her own connection with the universe. Through collaborative endeavors, she explores the distance between coincidence and intention, with an emphasis on setting up moments that deviate from the expected. In some cases, she is more interested in providing the organized framework around which potential interactions may occur. With all her work, she is more interested in the journey than the destination. Born 1975 Johannesburg, South Africa. Gordon received her MFA at the California College of the Arts. She is a recipient of the SECA Award nomination and the Murphy Cadogan Fellowship from the San Francisco Foundation. Exhibition venues include Richmond Arts Center, San Jose Museum of Art, Mission17, Southern Exposure, Temescal Amity Works, RockPaperScissors and The Kitchen (NYC). Gordon is the co-founder of Little Red Hen Collective and You Can Have It All. She recently chaired a panel at the University of Regina conference, "Open Engagement", on emerging Social Practices. This year she will be co-curating the Infinite Exchange Gallery for the Zero1 Biennial, and she will participate in the Talking Arts series at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, where she will provide portfolio reviews to artists.
2007 Nick Graham / American Ironic
Jennifer Starkweather and Lauren Davies
2006 December
October / November
April 7 - May 5, 2006 Larry Bamburg Curated by Patricia Maloney March 3 - March 26, 2006
January 13 - February 17, 2006
2005 November 4 - December 16 Dharma Strasser Maccoll James Sansing Jen Pack
2004 09. 10. - 10. 24 Marion Jannot Candace Plummer Gaudiani Tanya Hastings 01.10. - 02.07 Indigo Som Jennifer Starkweather 01. 18. - 02.08 Jeff Morris 09. 20 - 10.18 Jeff King Arngunnur Yr
2001 01.05. - 02.09 Enigmatized
10.12. - 11. 09 Tanya Hastings Mary Lamboley
2000 02.03. - 03.03
11.10. - 11. 08 Haruko Sasaki 04.16. - 05. 28
06.03. - 07.1
10.15. - 11.19 |
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