UPCOMING

November 2011
Group Show

March 2012
Kenneth Lo
curated by Lori Gordon

April 2012
Venn Diagram Show
curated by Lori Gordon

Artist roster:
Max Auffhammer
Gala Bent    
Melissa Chevalier
Jennifer Delos Reyes
Martin Firrell 
Robin Lambert
Kyle Lindholm 
Wendy MacNaughton
Matthew Hoffman
Ashley Neese
Cody Trepte  

November 18th - December 18th, 2011
Opening Reception: Friday, November 18th, 2011 6:00 - 8:30 pm

QUASAR
Jason Kalogiros, Maggie Preston, Jessica Skloven 
photography
co-curated by Lori Gordon

ampersand is pleased to present the recent work of three emerging Bay Area artists: Jason Kalogiros, Maggie Preston and Jessica Skloven.

For Quasar* these 3 photographers embrace the art of photography with a simultaneously precise and balancing act between chance and control. With an austere, stark beauty and a deceptive simplicity, each image stands here on the brink of abstraction. Each image is a simple documentation that  is also  a revelation of the material reality which eludes our seeing eyes. As the work in Quasar celebrates chroma, light, time and space, it corrals their energies and explores the natural order and the human situation in it. These three photographers are sacred mediators, quixotic heroes in charge of unlocking the alchemical secrets of the hidden world, of the mysterious forces that surround us. And the three of them are here victorious.  

*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 :
My work is rooted in a curiosity about photography- not only its history and its functionality, but the physical and visual aspects of the medium itself, highlighting my interest in the subjective nature of representation, memory, vision and history.

Jason Kalogiros
Double Sunset no. 11, c-print 16 x 20 inches, edition of 5 with 2 proofs, 2010

Jason Kalogiros
Sheet, unique color photogram, 40 x 78 inches, 2008

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.

Maggie Preston
Flatlands no. 3, C-print, 23.5” x 17”, 2008 (printed 2011)

Maggie Preston
Black Heart, Gelatin silver print, 19.5” x 15.5”, 2010

JESSICA SKLOVEN (b. 1982, Atlanta, GA) lives in San Francisco, CA.
She graduated from Cornell University with her BFA in Photography and concentration in French Studies in 2005. She received her MFA at the California College of the Arts in 2008, and has taught Photography in both the Undergraduate and Pre-College programs. Influenced by the distinct landscape of the Bay Area, Jessica’s abstract-based work explores the limits of photographic representation. Recent exhibitions include Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Aldea Home, San Francisco, CA; Incline Gallery, San Francisco, CA; New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery, New Orleans, LA; Phantom Galleries, Los Angeles, CA; and solo shows at Newspace Center for Photography, Portland, OR and Togonon Gallery, San Francisco, CA.  Her work has been written about in Conde Nast Traveler, ArtNews, and ArtSlant, and has been featured in other publications.

Jessica Skloven Statement: An image is created in the act of its viewing.
Photography has the perceived ability to stop time—to capture it. In my photographs, however, I am more concerned with prolonging the moment before recognition.
I rely on the believability of film projected onto paper to construct illusion. The elemental nature of photography—its play with surface and depth, filtered light producing color, and the slow mechanics of the analog—are inherent to my image-making process. Ultimately, I am interested in destabilizing the sense of reality and space that photographs often inhabit. My interest in photographing landscape is outside of the traditional practice of “capturing” what is real, permanent, or sublime. I use landscape—just as I employ analog methods—precisely because the illusion of reality is so strong.

I am fascinated by the material relationship between the illusions that occur in the natural world and those that are produced—both in the act of photographing and in the re-constitution of those images when they are transferred to paper. Using a camera, I imagine the simultaneous impossibility of the abstract and the familiarity of the real, precariously combining to counter photography’s often-presumed objectivity.

Jessica Skloven
Untitled (August 7, 2007) C-Print, 40”x50”, from In Silence and in Sleep, 1/5, 2008

Jessica Skloven
Untitled (January 11, 2008), C-Print, 50”x40”,  from In Silence and in Sleep, 1/5, 2008

Exhibition Essay by Maria Porges
The idea of light

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
2011

Maria Porges is a writer and artist who lives in Oakland and likes it there. www.mariaporges.com

October 14 - November 12, 2011
Opening reception: Friday, October 14th, 2011 6:00 - 8:30 pm

Miguel Arzabe
falling in
paintings, video

Miguel Arzabe
court, 2011
oil on panel
16” in x 12’

Miguel Arzabe
Streaming<--->(Tautological Transmissions), 2011
HD video and sound
4 min 16 sec
edition of 3.

Miguel Arzabe
an indecisive yet primal moment (un momento indeciso aunque arquetípico), 2010
oil on panel
72x72 inches

Miguel Arzabe
Pushover<--->(Thwarted by Winning), 2011
HD video and sound
5 min 57 sec
edition of 3

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:
Memory and imagination duel and conspire, skirting between representation and abstraction. A conversation with the dark recesses of the mind creates an interference feedback loop where judgment is held aloft and perception is tested. A psychic terrain is mapped and erased through its mapping, leaving a trace of a fleeting feeling of unity flattened in the infinite void.

Miguel Arzabe: falling in
by Bonnie Begusch

The football game was invented to ensure the cyclical return of the sun. With the dawn of modernity, this return was generally suspected to be "known" only through the force of habit. Since then, the game seems to have replaced all necessity with the affirmation of chance.

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.
B.G., 2011

October 14 - November 12, 2011
Opening reception: Friday, October 14th, 2011 6:00 - 8:30 pm
Leigh Wells
Deception
works on paper, sculpture
curated by Tracy Wheeler

Leigh Wells
Deception (11-10-05), 2011
Collage and mixed media on paper
22” x 30”

Leigh Wells
Incarnate (11-10-11), 2011
Mixed media on panel
14” x 18”

Leigh Wells
Cluster B: BPD (11-10-15), 2011
Mixed media
13.5” W x 16” H x 6” D

Leigh Wells
Deception (11-10-08), 2011
Collage and mixed media on paper
22” x 30”

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:
I am engaged in an ongoing dialogue with complexity and the unknowable, with an interest in attempts by science, religion and history to address these themes. While abstract in nature, the works reference social phenomenon, extreme religious beliefs, scientific theories, and other accepted bodies of knowledge.

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
by Tracy Wheeler

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
Opening reception: Friday, September 9th, 2011 6:00 - 8:30 pm

THREE FORMS
Jeff Jamieson, Sol LeWitt, Evelyn Reyes
curated by Patricia Maloney

Evelyn Reyes
Cakes, (c. 2003)
oil pastel on paper, 11 7/8 x 24 inches
Courtesy of the Artist and Creativity Explored, San Francisco.

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
Opening reception: Friday, June 10 : 6pm-8:30pm

Young Ampersand presents: NUMBER THREE

Zoe Fisher, Amos Goldbaum, Monica Lundy, Clark Mizono, Meryl Pataky, Isaac Vazquez

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.

Monica Lundy
terra cotta clay on wall
dimensions variable Chapel at San Quentin (2011)

April 8th to May 13th 2011
Opening Reception : Friday, April 8th : 6:00pm - 8:30pm

ALEX CLAUSEN : FLOOD : site-specific mixed media installation
TARA FOLEY : THE DRISPTONE SINGS TO THE CHOIR : drawings and sculpture
Curated by Tracy Wheeler

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.

Clausen has exhibited work at Rena Bransten Gallery, the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Kala Art Institute, the Exploratorium and is part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco collection. Clausen is currently collaborating on Earthbound Moon, an international sculpture park whose focus is community engagement and the conversion of private land to public art space.

Artist Statement:
"I grew up a private eye. Observation was the family business: my father was the private investigator and surveillances involved everyone. I grew up learning that careful, patient observation leads to transformation. Through surveillance, the vastness of ambiguity and confusion loom, creating spaces that are almost unrecognizable. These liminal spaces reveal clues to how we construct ourselves and our environments, and finding them is the goal of my work."

ESSAY by Susan O'Malley
ALEX CLAUSEN
"What we call places are stable locations with unstable converging forces that cannot be determined either by fences on the ground or by boundaries in the imagination – or by the perimeter of the map. Something is always coming from elsewhere, whether it is wind, water, immigrants, trade goods or ideas."
- Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

"Growing up in Martinez, California, artist Alex Clausen would sometimes accompany his Dad, a private investigator, on stakeouts. This wasn’t exactly a Veronica Marsversion of father/son investigating, he never liked the long stretches camped out in a van waiting for something to happen, “it was actually really boring” he tells me. But maybe it was during these slow days when he started to wonder about all the things that went unnoticed in a place, the hidden layers that were overlooked because no one bothered to pay attention. Even though Clausen may not have appreciated surveillance as a youngster, it is fascinating that his art practice is not a far stretch from those slow and methodical stakeouts that nudged him to look at the world around him a bit differently.
--
Like a private investigator, an artist carefully observes his surroundings to solve problems, ask questions and shift one’s perspective. At Ampersand, Clausen has closely examined and recorded the patterns and movement of sunlight in the space. The gallery windows face westward so that the bright San Francisco sunlight pours inside during the afternoon hours. Over the course of a day, Clausen carefully marked the moving sunlight of the southernmost window using string and blue tape. He then used his measurements to create a three-dimensional sculpture, giving volume to an otherwise ephemeral force of nature. Comprised of a wooden framework covered in a semi-transparent textile, the geometric abstract form glows gem-like as light passes through, casting a cool glow throughout the space. Just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, the work physically describes the range of sunlight in the gallery for one day of the year. With each passing day of the exhibition, the sunlight slightly shifts in relationship to the work, one moment contained within the blue-tinted fabric, other times bleeding just outside of it.

With his careful measurements and labor-intensive process, the completed sculptural object dominates the gallery, creating an architectural barrier to fully navigate around. During “off” hours when Ampersand is a living space, the awkward structure interrupts the daily routines of its inhabitants. Clausen is interested in the aesthetic and conceptual limitations of what he calls his “obtuse methodology.” He admits that while there are certainly tools, equations and websites that can calculate the exact position of the sunlight in a particular place at a particular time, he is most interested in the first-hand experience of discovering the intricacies of this phenomenon. Not unlike the work of the California Light and Space artists of the 1960’s and 1970’s Insert Title Here shifts the viewer’s attention to his or her own perception and movement through space. The work disrupts the architecture of the gallery/living room while drawing attention to how the outside force of the sunlight moves through the space.

It is no surprise that, like many artists, Clausen started out as a scientist. As an undergraduate at University of California, Davis, he majored in both art and physics. At one point he thought of pursuing aeronautical engineering and spent a summer interning at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where the big abstract questions about the nature of the universe and how things work in the smallest level captured his imagination. It didn’t take long however, for his scientific inclinations and questions to shift towards artistic pursuits. While the laboratory presented an enticing environment, making art opened a looser and more open-ended way of engaging with the world around him.

On one hand, observing and methodically mapping the sunlight at Ampersand is an elegant constraint to build an architectural and site-specific installation. But the work also points to our relative scale in relation to a dynamic and powerful force – the sun. It is the center of our solar system, providing light and warmth during the daytime hours and is the key factor in photosynthesis. Everyday it rises and sets (by the way, it takes 8.3 minutes for sunlight to reach earth), and its light creates patterns in our homes, bodies and out in the world. Here on the West Coast, the fierce sunlight famously casts high-contrast shadows that are as sharp as black cutout silhouettes and powerfully illuminates the smallest details on leaves and shrubs. In paying close attention to a phenomenon we may easily take for granted, Clausen has built a space for introspection.

Part private investigator, part scientist and part architect with an eye for the strange and beautiful, Clausen’s work encourages the viewer to slow down, look, and consider the multiple converging forces that comprise a site."

-Susan O’Malley, March 2011
Artist, curator & Print Center Director
San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art

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Tara Foley
Detail from a work in progress, March 2011
ballpoint pen, watercolor, paper

Tara Foley
Detail from a work in progress, March 2011
ballpoint pen, watercolor, paper

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.

Tara exhibits regularly in local galleries and non-profits. She considers herself an artist and an advocate of youth involvement in the arts. She is currently the Artists In Education Program Manager at Southern Exposure. Tara has worked extensively with diverse populations in the social work field, mental health, women’s shelters, group homes, hospitals and as a teacher.

Artist Statement:
"In my practice I am sifting through a repertoire of contemporary and historical images, generating 2D, sculptural and installation works. I imagine my process as analogous to what happens in both urban and environmental spaces: environments are changed by a combination of human and natural forces. I draw from varied but recognizable iconography – French gothic and baroque architecture, Mudejar tracery, Alexandrian geometry, the monumental, the infinitesimal, the natural, and the scientific. I create abstract narratives that explore the tension between the natural and the manufactured, examining new spaces and realms, oscillating between the public and the private, the micro and the macro.

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
"When we look at maps, it is to visualize place in a specific way. Our minds can shift back and forth between scale, easily comprehending that one inch equals one mile or that colors represent depth, that lines divide countries and in turn, cultures. We need these kinds of symbols in our lives. They help us create systems of movement, ways to come to new places and to reorient ourselves to our most familiar spots. Maps also reveal imagined states and ways of thinking that do not exist in the lived world or give us a direction toward a better way to comprehend the spaces in which we do live. Mapping is also a metaphor, a way of cataloging the symbols we use to navigate not just physically but also mentally and emotionally. We can map our histories, our relationships, our memories and movements.

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."

-Aimee Le Duc, March 2011
curator, critic, gallery director
San Francisco Arts Commission

March 4th to April 1st 2011
opening reception: Friday, March 4th : 6:00pm - 8:30pm

LISA GOLDSCHMID : LIMINAL : sculpture, painting
CHARLENE TAN: 400% : mixed media installation, sculpture

Lisa Goldschmid
"Tetrad" (2010)
paper, wood
31"H x 9" W x 5" D

Lisa Goldschmid
Lisa Goldschmid has a BA in Painting from Reed and and MFA in Painting from San Francisco State University. After spending her early years in a small town on the Puget Sound, Lisa Goldschmid has lived in San Francisco. All of those years Goldschmid has worked form her studio on Potrero Hill, where she has witnessed the many changes to this neighborhood first hand. Her work has been informed by this visual terrain.
While her practice has focused on painting she has often balanced that with forays into other realms. A large photo-collage was shown in the SFMOMA Bus Shelter Gallery and later at the Hecksher Museum of Art. "Liminal" is a recent painting and new sculpture exhibit; this is Goldschmid's third solo show at Ampersand.

Artist Statement
“ 'Liminal' is composed of light and fragile towers and vessels, which suggest to me flight and escape, as well as lightness on the planet. These are “wish” houses with small footprints sometimes high on stilts to thwart the impending rise in sea level, made of limited materials that could be reabsorbed by the earth without damage. In part this cycle of sculptures is a flight from my own painting practice: a respite from the cumbersome canvases, the heavy metal of oil pigments, and of course the weighty history. I am happily ignorant of sculpture’s canon, only a very inquisitive visitor. I have always sawed, glued, built, and sewn things. I love repairing and mending.

Living near the bay I am always intrigued by the various dockside shipping and boat-repair paraphernalia. A particular tower with a small house on top with concertina wire here and there, had a death camp watchtower aura about it, but it made a wonderful 'found drawing' in the sky. Another structure near Islais Creek still remains. It is a rusty remnant of a rig perhaps for loading but whose only purpose now seems to be its visual offering. Random building cranes have long provided cues for me outside my studio window.

The boat shape emerges from a particular Puget Sound boat, now a mere skeleton. The sphere relates to a favorite little antique sundial that my mother found long ago. Flight itself was a real life action for my father: he escaped occupied Vienna in the fall of 1938.

The looping shapes cames easily at first as I found a supply of old rattan darkened and crimped from the way it was stored. It was among my mother’s things, a long-abandoned basketry project. Newer rattan, I learned, could be coaxed and bent with water and time. In the end, fragility is at the core of the pieces in “Liminal”: ghost memories of loss,very personal yet perhaps also universal."LG

ESSAY by Sarah Sutro
Lisa Goldschmid : Liminal
Structures, houses on stilts, cranes, oil rigs, boats, spheres, vessels……
"In 2003 Lisa Goldschmid included sculptures in her first Ampersand show, along with oil paintings. She constructed fragile frameworks whose shadows stretched the edifices into a ghost shape on white walls. Now she uses stronger materials than in those first pieces, pliant reeds and wood covered with pale yellow tracing paper, filling her current show with three dimensional work whose nature suggests uncertainty, conceptualization, change.

In her studio just above Dogpatch, a San Francisco neighborhood whose skyline has undergone rampant transformation in the last 20 years, she uses the shapes and iconography of the construction that fill her once expansive view of the bay, sky and space. It’s as if her paintings have given way to a lexicon of physical shapes that were only hinted at before in two dimensions. In her painting, ladders, watchtowers, bridge parts, grids float in an indeterminate space, against soft bay colors, blue and grey. In sculpture, Goldschmid owns and identifies that space, placing house shapes and support structures on raw poplar boards held up by delicate sawhorses, vestigial traces of a real repair shop in real time. Her time and place have something to do with personal history and a dimly remembered past. ‘Fragility is what they are about,’ she tells me as we shift the lights in her studio to get a glimpse of that other world of shadow, created by a trick of light, a simple shift of mind.

Her materials are delicate and ephemeral, as she chooses pieces of rattan that are curved already, and, moistening them, directs them into shapes that at times are straight lines, but more often lean and wiggle into semblances of geometric configurations…a geometry taken back by the organic.

Her first pieces in this series were from a stash of rattan she found among her mother’s things. Her mother loved baskets and had made furniture, greatly influenced by the beauty and simplicity of the joinery used in Japanese construction and architecture. Blimps, boats, spheres, pods, organs, fruit, are the other forms that make up Goldschmid’s collection of objects. Each of these is a maquette for imagined drawings and floorplans for human or other dwellings that may never come into existence. One significant memory: a favorite rowboat, improperly stored and thus dried out, abandoned in the grass with its structure intact, an inspiration for a large boat shape that is central to the show: an open structure completed by its cast shadow.
The studio she works in is a surprising small cottage crouched in the back garden of her Portero Hill house, looking over the city and the Bay Bridge. As Mission Bay developed, the area was covered with cranes; now the view is filled with new buildings, squares and roofs. The city before her eyes constantly re-invents itself. Calder-like, whimsical, like the Tunisian landscape drawings and paintings of Paul Klee, her magic structures create a similar kind of edge, becoming an alternative architecture. The irony of the ‘myth’ of global warming is perhaps addressed here too, with imaginative images including an archetypal house, childhood icon of stability and security, which 20th century history and the history of her family belie.

In one piece a sphere is caged, an open lattice of rattan creating symbolic restriction, hinting at confinement and danger in a body of work that mostly projects a delicate, reflective, benign vision. A concentric series of bands of rattan reed forms a primitive version of an atomic energy symbol, held up by outmoded scaffolding. Wood and light; white glue; minimal color; the crisp and delicate tracing paper; all amount to a kind of line and scrim architecture, outlining form, in which contradictory elements eternally coexist. The shadow of a house shape becomes a solid shape in shadow; a sturdy oil-well like rig supports paper and light wood; a boat’s wandering ribs are open to the water. Lisa’s bent towards architecture and the two dimensionality of painting, here create a simulacrum of urban forms, drawings in air by a quizzical architect defending, justifying an idea of order she can only hint at – tamed by the expanding metropolis outside her windows."

Charlene Tan
"Aleve" study 400%-100% (2011)
paper, ink
35"x 21", 8.5"x 11", , 2011

Charlene Tan
Charlene Tan was born in Houston, Texas and spent most of her childhood in Manila, Philippines before settling in San Francisco. Tan has a 2010 BA in Contemporary Art History from San Francisco Art Institute. Currently living in Oakland, California with a studio practice in San Francisco Tan has been active in the local arts community; volunteering, interning, working at local museums and galleries, while participating in exhibitions at The Intersection for the Arts, Southern Exposure, [2nd Floor Projects], also participating in social sculptures; for example Stephanie Syjuco’s Shadow Shop for SFMOMA’s The More Things Change exhibition. Tan has an upcoming exhibition at Intersection for the Arts.

Artist Statement
" '400%' is a sculpture series based on the novelty of individualized everyday commodities that remedy certain needs; sex, fatigue, illness, pain, and other bodily functions. These small objects that provide instant gratification and/or resolution which leave residual material artifacts; giving context to a secret narrative of a stranger’s life discarded into our communal detritus; on the street, on car floors, under the crush of the contents of our personal carry alls,and in our pockets. We discover our desires, our pain, and needs by these seemingly insignificant disposal commodities by accidental or intentional investigations of the environments we occupy. Some products have a worldwide household identity: for example Hershey is synonymous with chocolate, if not a low quality chocolate. Carried by American troops in World War II and given to indigenous populations while liberating cities, the brand lore has been a powerful impression in the collective consciousness of diverse consumer culture. All these products carry the weight of branding, sometimes even international branding; a lifestyle sold to us in our everyday lives so much so that we internalize and spread its message.

There is one memory that I have while being in the Philippines as a child, we received a box of gifts, called a Balakbayan box, overflowing with American candy, clothes, and American toys sent over by parents we loosely remembered.This emotional attachment to material goods to fill the voids in our lives is what I indeed investigate. Through photographic imaging technology used nonchalantly in commerce I destroy the intended glamour of brand logos and packaging; robbing the packaging of color and clarity, and scale is of no concern. All is hollow and shallow. My hybridity is a constant negotiation of brand loyalty regulated by my desires and needs, and I dare you to remember the brands that you’ve grown up with." -CT

ESSAY by David Buuck
Charlene Tan : 400%
"In Charlene Tan’s '400%' her ongoing investigations into the scale of consumerism literally expand, putting the mundane goods of our everyday urban environment on display in uncanny replications and proportions. Poised somewhere between sculpture and installation, handicrafts and the ready made, ‘high art’ and cheap goods, her new work unsettles even as we recognize our everyday consumer world reflected back to us.

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
opening reception: Friday, January 21st: 6:00pm-8:30pm

WALKING ON THIN ICE
group show: drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, video work and work on paper

Dee Hibbert-Jones & Nomi Talisman
I-140 (Not Extraordinary Enough), 2010
digital print , 24x16 inches

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.

Walking on Thin Ice (WoTI) is a collection of recent drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, video work and work on paper, by Miguel Arzabe, Leo Bersamina, Kristina Bell DiTullo, Lori Gordon, Dee Hibbert-Jones & Nomi Talisman, Carrie Leeb, Kristina Lewis, Kirk Maxson, Abner Nolan, Sarah Smith, Jennifer Starkweather, and Marie Van Elder; all emerging and established San Francisco Bay Area artists.

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.

Interdisciplinary artist Miguel Arzabe, with his new video piece as well as with his landscape night paintings, is involved in a dance between the vulnerable and the beautiful, the absurd and the idealized, fear and strength. The darkness and sardonic power inherent to his work always slowly reveals itself to be benevolent.

With his new series of works on paper, Leo Bersamina keenly observes and captures fleeting moments, evoked here through exquiste drawings of dry seaweed, driftwood, empty shells, all found on local California beaches. He embraces these simple objects' perfection and pays homage to their fragility, giving them life, yet again. They are honored.

With her Bandages series, Kristina Bell DiTullo creates collages about chaotic psychological states with a veil of beauty and order. Using (these culturally ubiquitous) materials that are most associated with accidents in a very controlled
manner, she reflects on our shared human experience, transformation and isolation,
healing and torment, joy and pain.


Lori Gordon's work investigates the structure and power of belief, creating works that attempt to decipher both humanity's and her own connection with the universe. The piece in this exhibition - a simple instruction she is passing along - invites the viewer to self-heal. Much of Gordon's work takes place outside of galleries where she delights in hijacking moments in a normal day by making the ineffable visible and the journey more important than the destination.

The Photos of the "I-140" are empowering mementos of the collaborating artists, Nomi Talisman and Dee Hibbert-Jones, a committed couple's fight to keep Talisman legally in the US. These subversive and poetic photos, from their video piece "I-140", show the two women on the side of Californian highways, holding hand-made signs describing each step in their long struggle with the US immigration services.

Painter, sculptor and photographer, Carrie Leeb draws her inspiration from the rhythms and patterns found in nature and science. Through her work she offers how to find calmness beyond movement and above all, when faced with chaos or uncertainty, she open doors to the peaceful relief of contemplation.

Kristina Lewis' work brings grace and power to fragility; she uncovers for us the beauty in broken down and abandoned utilitarian objects; here black umbrellas. By doing so Lewis offers through elegant and disturbing sculptures, a more open pattern to the over structured human experience, guiding us to a more attentive thinking process.

The installation by Kirk Maxson is created of butterfly shaped cutouts from US magazines of photos depicting past and recent American wars. This fluttery, seemingly soft, appeal stands as a soothing and maybe even amourous embrace to the hardship of the soldiers, as well as a reminder of the hypocritical and coded messages
that the media offer us in regard to love and war.

Abner Nolan’s photographs are produced from found negatives made throughout the United States during the middle part of the 20th century. Nolan explores the hidden or
forgotten narratives and how the photograph itself serves to archive and incite memory.

Sarah Smith's drawings and cut wood assemblages are hazy portals to moments of instant nostalgia. Her mythical landscapes and her sick, dying or dead animals allude to our era of loss and and the toll that humans have put on the natural world. A natural world that within her work becomes indeed as it should be, our most treasured of treasures.

With her detailed atmospheric work on paper Jennifer Starkweather crosses the tenuous boundaries between the real and the imagined. Her mark-making follows an internal shift from the external and concrete to a more intuitive realm, where she is able to act out peacefully her own diversions, dreams and memories.

Marie Van Elder applies a romantic and painterly touch to her delicate series of works on canvas of ominous, potentially catastrophic moments. Initially captured and disseminated by the media Van Elder recaptures these images so as to be tamed and offered as peaceful instances of contemplation and rêverie.

October 22nd to December 10th, 2010
opening reception:
Friday, October 22nd: 6:00pm-8:30pm

RANDY COLOSKY
"Secret Handshake"

collage, drawing, painting, sculpture, video
curated by TRACY WHEELER

ampersand is very pleased to present a survey of work by Bay Area artist and unsung hero, Randy Colosky. "Secret Handshake" features artwork arching back from 2000 to a collection of new work completed for this exhibition. Spanning both gallery spaces, the show includes assemblage, collage, drawing, painting, sculpture and video and highlights the common threads of Colosky's varied media practice: a love and respect of
precise craft, a vibrant interest in art history and sciences and a sardonic sense of humor.

The show is curated by Tracy Wheeler.
please scroll down for : " Randy Colosky: Secret Handshake "

Please find an additional essay by artist/curator Sarah Smith below.

RANDY COLOSKY
Oakland-based conceptual artist Randy Colosky draws inspiration from life’s contradictions. A BFA in Ceramics from Kansas City Art Institute in 1987 coupled with a keen interest in science and art history has led him down several exploratory paths to his art making. Humor and irony play a vital role in his deconstructions.Recent exhibitions include Sysygy at The Lab, a solo show at Adobe Books Back Room Gallery and
Vaguely Paperly at Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, curated by Chris Johanson.

“My art practice revolves around working with objects, materials and ideas that have mostly been utilized for utilitarian functions.I then transform them with processes or procedures that they would not typically be associated with. The goal of this is to stretch the identified knowledge of these objects through continued process and
focus of attention until the image or objects begin to generate unique visual language. Through continued self-education in history, the sciences, current events and my occupation as a builder, I am able to give myself agency to transform objects and concepts beyond their stated functions. Ultimately I strive to express through this invented language how there is humor, insight and beauty in the vulnerabilities,
tragedies and weathering that comes with the territory of a personal transformation.”
- Randy Colosky, September 2010
RJCARTS.com

“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.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Randy Colosky: Secret Handshake
At once retrospective and premiere, Secret Handshake celebrates artist Randy Colosky’s lifelong decision to work free from the scaffolding of a signature style or a specific medium. The self-described “offspring of a long line of makers genetically disposed to create,” Colosky found his calling in junior high when he took up ceramics. Through building guerilla kilns constructed and fueled by the materials he could scavenge, Colosky’s ability to master any process was born.

Colosky’s path is not direct nor is it easy but it is definitely a chosen path. Fluent in art history as well as deeply embedded in street art, Colosky knows exactly what he’s doing when he selects from his mental and physical toolbox. His confidence with materials would almost be taken as a swagger if it was not for the deeply romantic, darkly humorous and ultimately generous art he creates.

Often referred to as “an artist’s artist” for his range and skill, Colosky relies not on stylistic consistency but on honesty of craft to reveal his serious intentions.
While the original objective of the show was to explicate an art practice that defies easy categorization, something bigger happened along the way. The process of revisiting old work uncovered themes, opportunities and issues that propelled Colosky to create a significant body of new work that, in and of itself, reveals the multivalent nature
of his practice.

As to the title of the show, Colosky confesses, “the ‘secret handshake’is your truth. That handshake is basically saying in the face of anything, if you follow this truth, you are going to survive.”
- Tracy Wheeler, September 2010

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
Sarah Smith, 2010
" Randy Colosky’s diverse range of work speaks of his openness to consistent change. The drawings, sculptures, paintings and videos making up his most recent body of work are sometimes simple, oftentimes complex, mercurial and full of contradiction. It can really be all over the map, but that goes with the terrain. It’s Randyland. He coined it himself years ago and it still applies. Randy has never been one to stick to a particular style, theme or genre, not to mention stick to any particular tool or medium. He is a skilled carpenter and continually finds inspiration from the tools of the trade.

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
sensibility as an artist and his skill as a carpenter, he takes these found objects to task. He interrogates them. He won’t let them be just decoration. In On the Shoulders of Giants, 2010, he distills a brick down to its fundamental characteristics, its height, length and depth laid out before us in a grid, then cuts into it, divides the given dimensions and multiplies it across a blanket of bricks like a virus. He takes something rigid and uniform and gives it organic life.

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
with two ambiguous meanings. One of which feels safe and firmly embedded in the fact that it’s a bronze. But his perfect trompe l’oeil paint job adds such the indecorous connotation.

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
replete with contradiction and complexity. Surprisingly, the gun was used to create some of his most subtle pieces. A series of delicate paper snowflakes titled On Becoming Is (2009-2010) was made at the Jackson Arms shooting range in South San Francisco. Inspired by fractals, the hexagonal symmetry of ice crystals and the idea that no two snowflakes are exactly alike, Randy chose a tool least associated
with subtlety and one most likely to inflict chaos. The folded paper targets were fired upon, torn apart and fractured in an instant in one grand gesture. Unfolding the bullet-ridden papers back at his studio revealed sublime patterns that transcended the very nature of how they were created.

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
and form. The template he uses to make a Nondeterministic Algorithm drawing is a tactile symbol of a moment of space-time. It’s colored and moved, colored and moved across the paper until a larger form emerges. This simple repetition grounds Randy in the idea that things are larger, more complex constructs of a far more basic system. “This is an area of great fascination for me because it dovetails with a lot of the
spiritual principals I subscribe to, like the meditation I do. In meditation, the more I am able to discipline and calm my mind down and become more aware in the present moment, from moment to moment, the more I inhabit a space of simpler and greater awareness of what I am. Things feel more universal. There is no history or future to constantly have to navigate just being.”

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
and a deconstructionist by night in his studio using materials poetically and symbolically with a desire to spark revelations. "

sarahasmith.com

Randy Colosky
nondeterministic algorithm no. 6, 2010 (detail)
pen and ink on paper , 23"x23"


Randy Colosky
Still Life, Cinder block with Great Stuff ™ Expansion Foam, 2010
bronze and paint
15"L x 5 1/2" W x 12" H


Randy Colosky
On the Shoulders of Giants, 2010
diamond sawn bricks
37"L x 31" W x 2 1/2"

September 10th to October 10th, 2010
opening reception : Friday,September 10th  6-8:30pm

Tall Trees
Jeff Morris
drawing, sculpture

Jeff Morris
010410, 2010
graphite on paper
19”x19”

Jeff Morris, Installation View, Tall Trees, 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. 
Jeff Morris Studio 

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]
- Dan Houser

Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie: Thoughts on Jeff Morris’ Tall Trees
Morris manufactures sculptures from the refuse he finds along roadsides, at reclamation centers, and in scrap heaps. He transforms his found objects either by simple methods of assembly— stacking broken bits of headlights on top of each other and hanging cut and folded file folders in a tight row—or by polishing a portion of the surface to create subtle dichotomies between lustrous and scarred appearances. He gives the resulting sculptures titles such as Lap (2010) and Copse (2010), but his goal is not to invite one to envision lapping waves at the edge of the beach or dappled green light filtering through a grove of trees. Instead, he wants us to recognize the consistency with which he constructs these approximations. We could live in this world; we would know what to expect and how to situate ourselves.

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.

Patricia Maloney
August 2010

[i] Dan Houser is one of the founders of Rockstar, the company that created Red Dead Redemption. (Link)
[ii] From a conversation with the artist, August 2, 2010.
[iii] New York Times Article

Deletions
James Sansing
paiting, sculpture

James Sansing 
SHANK 3, 2010 (detail)
cement, graphite, charcoal, rubber
3'x5'

Installation View, Deletions, 2010

'Deletions' is inspired by and dedicated to James Sansing's daughter Tallulah.  
Tallulah has a rare genetic deletion, syndrome,the Phelan McDermid Syndrome; only 589 people are diagnosed world wide with this syndrome. A percentage of the exhibit's proceeds to be donated to the Phelan McDermid Syndrome Foundation.  
please do check here. 
 
James Sansing is a Bay Area based artist ; he has exhibited at The Lab, Southern Exposure , Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Michael Rosenthal Contemporary gallery, Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art, and ampersand , San Francisco, CA; the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Falkirk Arts and Cultural Center, San Rafael, CA; the Oakland Art Gallery, Oakland, CA; the Claremont Museum of Art, Claremont, CA, the Seattle Art Museum Gallery, Seattle Washington; the Joseph Workman Theater and Art Center, Toronto, Canada and the Milania Basarab Gallery, London. 

Sansing has received the Marin Arts Council Visual Arts Studio Award at the Headlands Center for the Arts; the Marin Arts Council Grant: the Princess Grace Foundation North America Honorarium for Experimental Film ; the Eastman Kodak Motion Picture Film Grant, a San  Francisco Dump Artist Residency, the Bay Area Fund for Artists /Marin Arts Council; the Kala Fellowship, Kala Art Institute, Berkley, CA. He received his MFA in 2004 from the San Francisco Art Institute. 
James Sansing

Singing Sansings
"On top of a hill, close to the Pacific Ocean, you can find James Sansing’s studio.
There the artist works. In a mysterious and dark space, an alchemical den, he works to save himself and make sense of the world. And there he welcomes us, opening the door, an air of fragility about him but also the stoic determination of a mine worker.

Far away from mercantile needs and networking cliques, Sansing works hard at a precise and reflective practice that has spanned many years and several bodies of work.
Melancholic films,delicately handcrafted models, subterranean constructions, monumental structures, atmospheric photos and now his new series, "Deletions." 47 abstract pieces born of cement, glass, paint, graphite, and rubber, all wrapped in Sansing’s precise attention and embraced by his deep reflection.

Lucio Fontana, Antoni Tapies, Jay de Feo, this venerable, elder lineage perhaps can be felt; yet his true contemporary muse is an extraordinary child, one of boundless energy .Her name is Talullah Sansing, his daughter, born into this world with a rare genetic syndrome, a deletion of 47 genes that created a luminous child with angelic curls and the inflexible exuberance of a faun.

“Deletions" is indeed inspired by, and dedicated to, Tallulah whose urgent force is simmering at the very surface of each painting, deeply black but with the quiet elegance of molten glass or lava flow. 47 pieces of raw elegance and muted intensity that seduce you to dive into them, warm and cool, spirit and flesh, slowly teasing with
tactile temptation.

Through the transformative powers of art and inspiration, Tallulah, an extraordinary child, invites her father, and all of us, to challenge preconceived notions of joy, struggle, darkness and light.

Life is a banquet and Tallulah is dancing on the table, fearlessly; she is present in her father's studio, too."

Bruno Mauro
August 2010

co-curated by Patricia Maloney

(image from the ampersand vault)

June 11th - July 9th, 2010
opening reception : Friday June 11th, 2010. 6:00 - 8:30pm

private pARTs
group show:
Danielle Benson, Ryan Whittier Hale, Alan Miknis, Alexa Natanson, Sonja Smith

Ryan Whittier Hale
Untitled (Bookshelf), 2009
Digital C-Print mounted on Plexiglas
30" x 36" ed. 1/5

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.

Unsettled by the blurred fine line between the private and public arenas brought in by new technologies and contemporary social mores, Y.A. has chosen to investigate how illusions of intimacy and privacy, voyeurism, social networking, public persona building, exhibitionism, surveillance, alienation, globalization and loss of authenticity have all somehow informed the practices of 5 recent Art School graduates, all visual artists (mixed media, photography) linked to the San Francisco Bay Area:
Danielle Benson, Ryan Whittier Hale, Alan Miknis, Alexa Natanson, Sonja Smith.

CURATORS' STATEMENT:
"The relationship between public/private has long been negotiated, and perhaps the boundaries between the two have never been so blurred as in today’s age of constant Internet use and pervasive media. Using the dual existence of ampersand, a live/work space, as a jumping off point, we are interested in work that explores the conflicts, tensions, unions and coexistence of public/private, in all its forms. The 5 emerging artists in "private pARTs" are looking to analyze and question the ideas of public/private. The artists here curated all consider the intricacies of these relationships. Danielle Benson's piece, presents a collection of found photographs, re-appropriates intimate personal moments; it embraces discarded memories and brings them back to life.

In his digital photographs, using himself as the primary subject/object, Ryan Whittier Hale explores the complexity of the individual, of exposed intimacy, and the fallacy of stereotypes. Alan Miknis' delicate paintings reflect on the complex relationship between the individual and the collective. Through the use of light and shadows Alexa Natanson's photographs play with the illusion of representation. Sonja Smith's mixed media piece exposes the hidden narratives buried within a deconstructed private object.

The playful title "private pARTs" may also be a sly commentary on the art business marketing practices. "
Young Ampersand June 2010

February 26th - March 26th, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, February 26th 6-8:30pm

Shashana Chittle: Mind (You)

Lauren Davies: Looking After
sculptures, wall installation

Shashana Chittle: Mind (You)
Stone/Bone [detail] (2010)
bone, geode, glass
9"x10"x8"

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.

One popularly circulated starting place for meditation is to deeply consider the question ‘Who am I?’

I started examining this very question in 2004, and found that an impatient and pressing part of me wanted to outsmart the question . This examination lead to a contentious and endlessly circling argument within me which lasted over five years.

The work in this exhibition functions as arrows pointing toward the experiences I've had outside of this vicious circle, experiences of moving through layers of charade and projection that occlude the immaterial but nonetheless empirically real nature of pure awareness.”
- Shashana Chittle 2010

Lauren Davies: Looking After

Remains of the Day [detail] (2010)
mixed media model, digital images, ash
28"x48'X11"

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.”
-Lauren Davies 2010

January 15th to February 19th, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday,January 15th 6-8:30pm

Kevin P. Clarke : Against Parallel
drawings, paintings, sculptures

David Fought : Back At The Beginning
sculptures, wall installation

Co-curated by Lori Gordon

Wooden Paradigm (2009)
Cypress and Walnut
48" x 48" x 48"

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”
kevinpclarke.com


“Untitled” 5 (5)sides (2009)
burnt wire, plaster, (incidental sunlight)
14” x 43” x 6”

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
davidfought.com

October 16-November 13, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, October 23, 6-8:30pm
Snippets: Lori Gordon
vinyl prints, wall painting, take-away newspaper

Curated by Bruno Mauro

Opening reception includes
Live performance: Jen Delos Reyes presents ‘See How They Shine' Choir

Lori Gordon is a San Francisco-based cross-disciplinary artist and independent curator.
Gordon received her MFA at the California College of the Arts. She is the recipient of a SECA Award nomination and the Murphy Cadogan Fellowship from the San Francisco Foundation. Exhibition venues include Richmond Arts Center, San Jose Mus eum of Art, Mission17, Southern Exposure, Temescal Amity Works, RockPaperScissors, The Kitchen (NYC) and Gavin Brown's Enterprise at Passerby (NYC).

Gordon’s work investigates the structure and power of belief. Through collaborative endeavors, she explores the distance between coincidence and intention, with an emphasis on setting up moments that deviate from the expected. With all her work, she is more interested in the journey than the destination; attempting to make the ineffable visible.

SNIPPETS:
These textual declarations are derived from snippets of things Gordon has heard or had said to her, provided out of context for others to read. By sharing these messages, she is able to impart ambiguous moments for others to consider and appreciate. Inevitably some are interpreted as advertising; poetry; or an insider's joke, but she is interested in that ambiguity as well. Participants are always invited to send photographs of snippets installed in locations of their choosing. For this exhibition, Gordon will feature one large snippet painted on the gallery wall, vinyl prints and photographic images, and a newspaper of Snippets. Gallery visitors are invited to put these signs up in their windows and send documentation to the artist for addition to her online archive.

"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.

Gordon is a healer. The artistry that inhabits herself, her gifts, talent, her ver y artwork appear shamanistic. I accepted this from the beginning. She may not save us, but she will always empower us. In the end her vision is always pointing at beauty and salvation, even in the absurd.

With Snippets she succeeds all over again. Gordon does not assemble the art as much as she captures it from all of us: words overheard on a busy street, in the train, on the plane; she offers it all back to us from the dreamlike transport of decontextualization. The text pieces provide us with the floating feeling of displacement, the joys of collaboration and finally contemplation.

In her own words: “Items of value lose their significance; resources that seemed useless become precious. Ideas continue to form, and the artists stay the course to create. Their tenacity alerts us, it moves us; it leaves us thinking, questioning our own reality as we all carry on. This is their gift to us.”

I thank her for that."

Bruno Mauro

September 4 – October 3, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday September 18, 6:00-8:30pm
CF01: Alan B. Callander
Single-channel video

Dusseldorf Paintings: Emi Winter
Paintings and works on paper

Curated by Patricia Maloney

Ampersand International Arts is pleased to present solo exhibitions of recent work by Washington DC-based artist Alan Callander and Oaxaca-based artist Emi Winter. Each artist utilizes formal strategies around color and shape to foreground the inherent nature of the media in which they work. In Düsseldorf Paintings, Winter’s playful and buoyant abstra ct watercolors, gouaches, and oils on canvas revel in the flexibility and sensuousness of painting. They convey an unfettered, masterful handling of gesture and line. Meanwhile, Callander’s single-channel video CF01 is an alluring and meditative animation that combines cinematic narrative structure with painterly abstraction. Translucent, colored quadrangles vibrate, shift, layer, and meld into a compositional crescendo. At times, both bodies of work suggest landscapes, the forms occupying and resembling the tangible world. At other moments, an actual and visual lyricism prevails. Collectively, Düsseldorf Paintings and CF01 inundate the senses, and remind one of the potential for surprise that art possesses.

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.

Patricia Maloney is an Associate Curator for Ampersand International Arts, where she has previously curated Open Network: Brooklyn (2006) and Firmament (2008). Additionally, she is Managing Editor for shotgun-review.com, a commentator for the podcast Bad At Sports, and a contributing writer to artforum.com. Maloney, who lives and works in Berkeley, received her MA in Theory and History of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008



HOME
photography, drawing, painting
June 12th -July 10th , 2009
OPENING reception :Friday, June 12th : 6:00 - 8:30pm

Artists: Gideon Chase, Hannah Hooper, Andrew Watson Kirk, Max Schoening, Ethan Scott
Curated by Young Ampersand: Jesse Brown, Rachel Hooper, Saskia Mauro, Theodora Mauro

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 rising foreclosure rates and the current uncertain state of the economy in the United States, homes have become not only symbols of refuge, but thwarted symbols of the 'American Dream'.

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."
Obviously the irony of Ampersand gallery being a live/work space is not lost on any of the participants.

text inspired by HOME:
ampersandsfwords.blogspot.com

Max Schoening // Untitled (soccer,boys,Kenya) // c-print // 2008

PETRIFIED FOREST
Christina La Sala
mixed media installation

May 8th - June 5th, 2009
OPENING reception :Friday, May 8th, 6-8:30pm

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:
“ I have been trying to create work that measures time. I thought I was going to build clocks and instead have made fossils. Petrified Forest is a collection of artifacts that attempt to measure the passage of time by concentrating on the inconsequential and the ephemeral. There are two bodies of work in this project. One is concerned with measuring time through artifacts of events; specifically patterns from gift-wrap, stripped of their color and softness to become exoskeletons in geological samples. Experiences change over time and through the filter of memory become shadows of themselves.

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."

Christina La Sala // Counting, [Petrified Forest series] mixed media // installation // (glass, wood) // dimensions variable // 2009

ALWAYS CLOSE BUT NEVER TOUCHING
Vanessa Marsh
photography, sculpture

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.

vanessamarshphotography.com

about her work in “Always Close But Never Touching”, Vanessa Marsh says:
“ It was in high school that I began to find my true artistic vision. It started with a basic photography class and my mom’s old Nikon E series camera. The next year I had my first car and would take long drives out onto th e edges of the Seattle suburbs. Wandering through the damp richness of Washington State, I rediscovered a landscape I had grown up with; flooded fields and medians overgrown with blackberry bushes, evergreens dripping with water and rivers alw ays at capacity. I found myself fearless with my camera,20exploring defunct industrial sites, climbing past "no trespassing" signs, keeping my eye out for security guards and taking as many shots as I could. I'd let myself into abandoned houses decaying with mold and half heartedly boarded up, looking for the perfect pile of detritus to photograph; an open fridge in the backyard or a ba by carriage overgrown with blackberry vines. These buildings were all on the edges of fields that within a few years would become Wal-Marts or a sea of cookie cutter houses, not yet torn down, but no longer functioning as they were originally intended. They were places where I shouldn't have been but where there was no one left to tell me to get out.

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:
ampersandsfwords.blogspot.com

Vanessa Marsh // Building in Aberdeen // Mixed media and found materials // 6x12x20 // 2009

AMPLIFYING THE TWILIGHT
March 06 - April 18, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday March 06, 6:00-8:30pm

Curators:
Brian Andrews and Marc LeBlanc
Group Show:
Shashi Chittle, David Coyle, Ryan Fenchel, Sayre Gomez, Alison Ruttan

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.
Marc LeBlanc is a curator and writer in Berlin.
In the past the two have worked together on writing reviews for San Francisco's Shotgun-review.com and conducting interviews for the Chicago-based contemporary art podcast, Bad at Sports; this is their first collaboratively curated exhibition.

more AMPLIFYING THE TWILIGHT :
ampersandsfwords.blogspot.com

David Coyle // Special Agent Dana Scully // 2009 // Oil on Canvas // 22” x 26”

SEMAPHORES
Jordan Essoe
installation

January 16 - February 28, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday January 16, 6:00-8:30pm

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.

www.essoe.com

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:
ampersandsfwords.blogspot.com

Jordan Essoe // Error // 2008 // Peg Board, Dimensions variable

SCRAP
Jeff Morris
drawings / mixed media sculptures

October 24 th - December 7th, 2008
OPENING reception:Friday, October 24, 6:00 - 8:30 pm

JEFF MORRIS
Jeff Morris is a San Francisco Bay Area artist who has successfully exhibited his mixed media sculptures, installations and drawing projects at Ampersand International Arts in San Francisco and Paris, MM Galleries, Limn Gallery, Southern Exposure and the Luggage Store gallery in San Francisco as well as the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA. Jeff Morris artwork is in private collections in Paris, San Francisco, New York and London.

www.jeffmorris-studio.com

About Jeff Morris work , James Nestor says:
"Straight lines. Crooked lines. Horizon lines. Cracks and fissures. Lines that separate the mountains and sky and sea.

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"

Jeff Morris // 071308 // 2008 // graphite on paper // 24”x14”

AFTERMATH
Andy Vogt
drawings / wood sculptures

ANDY VOGT
Andy Vogt completed a BFA in Intermedia at Carnegie Mellon University. Vogt is a founding member of Operation Re-Information (O.R.I.),a science+information / art performance collective that champions "the repurposing of existing information and the resultant product: reinformation." Andy Vogt's current artwork explores again "repurposing", not only through the reinterpretation of wooden structural remnants salvaged from dumpsters around San Francisco, but the drawings they inspire.

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.

www.andyvogt.com

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."

Andy Vogt // untitled // 2008 // salvaged wood, paint // 41"x28"x14"

Essayists DeWitt Cheng and Patricia Maloney contribute texts inspired by the artists' work:
ampersandsfwords.blogspot.com

PASSAGE
Ellen Babcock
mixed media sculpture / installation

September 19 - October 17, 2008
OPENING reception : Friday, September 19, 6-8:30pm

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
"I often try to wrestle from scavenged, mundane materials, such as Styrofoam, some kind of surprising connection to landscape as a way to examine my desire for redemptive symbiosis. Like many of my comrades, searching for an appropriate scale for human activity in the landscape has increasingly become a preoccupation of my artmaking. With this work I take as a measure a landscape painting from nearly 150 years ago, Frederick Church’s The Icebergs ." EB

HOW FAST YOUR WORLD IS CHANGING
Harrell Fletcher
Christine Hill
Hope Hilton
Jessica James Lansdon
Jennifer Delos Reyes
Markuz Wernli-Saito

curated by Lori Gordon
critical essay by James Servin

March 21-April 25, 2008
OPENING reception : March 21, 6-8:30pm

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.

Markuz Wernli-Saito // Shadow Followers, Returning the Negatives // Photograph by K'Li Ang Va // 2007

2007

Nick Graham / American Ironic
Albert Reyes / something wicked

Jennifer Starkweather and Lauren Davies

2006

December
INTERIOR LIFE
Artists: Tommy Becker, David Fought, Lori Gordon, Amanda Hughen, Christine Lando, Jeff Morris, James Sansing, Sarah Smith, Jennifer Starkweather, Andy Vogt.

October / November
FIRMAMENT : Arngunnur Yr and Amanda Hughen

April 7 - May 5, 2006
OPEN NETWORK: Brooklyn

Larry Bamburg
Mai Braun
Dana Frankfort
Kate Gilmore
Olen Hsu
Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Paul Lee

Curated by Patricia Maloney

March 3 - March 26, 2006
Jennifer Kaufman: No Way Of Knowing When This Song Began
Andy Vogt: Redensified

January 13 - February 17, 2006
Albert Reyes: Wonderland
Megan Wilson: Spring

2005

November 4 - December 16
Rebecca Szeto
Creature Comfort



September 9 - October 4
Michael Campbell + Kevin King
Assisted Living


05. 20. - 06. 17
Maiko Sugano
(Art) in Everyday Life

Dharma Strasser Maccoll
Migration


03. 18. - 04. 15
Victor Cartagena
Anatomy of la Mentira : Red Noses


02. 11. - 03. 11
Lisa Goldschmid
Apparent Boundary

James Sansing
Recent Work



01. 07. - 02. 04
Philippe Jestin
Expressing Relief

Jen Pack
Threadworks

2004

09. 10. - 10. 24
Uli Gassmann
Uli Universum



06.11. - 07.09
Jeff Morris
“I 'm just happy to be here.”

Marion Jannot
Next to Nothing



05. 07 - 06. 04
Nilus de Matran
Life

Candace Plummer Gaudiani
Conversation



02. 13 - 03. 05
Sarah Smith
The Sustained Illusion

Tanya Hastings
Tenuous



01.09. - 02.06
Nuit Blanche (Lost in Translation)
Franco-American Group Show: artists co-curated
Leo Bersamina & Jesse Simon
Michael Campbell & Coby Ellison
César Cofone-Dadamo & René Lanié
Nilus de Matran & Jeff King
Amanda Hughen & Maria Park
Marion Jannot & Valérie Blin-Kaddour
Philippe Jestin & Albert Reyes
Mary Lamboley & Amy Tomson
Jeff Morris & Steven Elliott
Jennifer Starkweather & Kate Randall
Rebecca Szeto & Melora Kuhn
Megan Wilson & Kevin Chen



2003

01.10. - 02.07
Henrik Kam
Spaces/Traces



02. 14. - 03. 14
Lisa Goldschmid
Topographic Sense

Indigo Som
Pastel Diaspora



05.30 - 06. 26
Paula J. Clark
Intangible: 30 X 30

Jennifer Starkweather
Meander: an Exploration of Space



09.05. - 10. 03
Christine Lando
That Day: a retrospective, 1973-2003



11.14 - 12. 12
“ i miss you ”
International Group Show
Sylvie Belanger Canada
Michael Campbell Usa
Yoshinori Hosoki Japan
Kan Xuan China
Philippe Laleu France
Christine Monceau France



2002

01. 18. - 02.08
Robert Gutierrez
Will Nature Make a Man of Me Yet?

Jeff Morris
Closer



04.05 - 04.26
Al Reyes
Limited Attention

09. 20 - 10.18
Nilus de Matran
Low

Jeff King
Enso



10.25. - 11.16
Amanda Hughen
Synthetic

Arngunnur Yr
All and None



11. 22. - 12.20
Lynn Marie Kirby
En Passant

2001

01.05. - 02.09

Enigmatized
Michael Campbell
Philippe Jestin



02.16. - 03.16
Trace
John Ferdico, Heather Johnson, Laurie Long, Abner Nolan



03.23. - 04. 20
Miranda Lloyd
The Hybrid Zoo

Rebecca Szeto
Disposable Opulence



06.01 - 07.29
Cesar Cofone-Dadamo
Body. Ending. Line

10.12. - 11. 09
Megan Wilson
Filly

Tanya Hastings
Fluttering Fairy Tales, or the Seduction of Illusion



11.15. - 12.14
Kara Maria
Fabricator

Mary Lamboley
Overlapping Territories

2000

02.03. - 03.03
Multiplicity in time & space: intangible/imminent/virtual
International Group Show (21 artists)



05.04 - 06.02
Jeff King
Japan Works



10.06. - 11.03
Peripheral Stretch
Robert Gutierrez
Jeff Morris
R.E. Sanchez

11.10. - 11. 08
Yasuhiro Esaki
Barbed wire series

Haruko Sasaki
The rabit and the moon, endlessly,
playfully, having joyful conversation


1999

04.16. - 05. 28
Victor Cartagena
Anatomical memories-Memorias Anatomicas

06.03. - 07.1
Muriel Goodwin
Moon/reflection

10.15. - 11.19
Yeahee Um
China