Pictures from NaturalSynthetics

Big thanks to everyone who came out to the NaturalSynthetics opening weeks back. Especially Rachel, Ryan, Henning. and Jamie, it wouldn't have been possible without you four. I had a rad time and am looking forward to the next show at Adaptive Path.

Mark Ryden & Marion Peck

Calendar by Camilla Engman

It's getting to be holiday gifting time. Camilla's calendar is an excellent gift for an arty/quasi-arty friend.



You can buy it on her site.

Guillermina Baiguera at Triple Base

Dream With Everything That Fades Away

Artists: Guillermina Baiguera, Chris Duncan, Linda Geary & Scott Oliver
Curated by: Dina Pugh
Gallery: Triple Base
Opening Reception: November 21, 7-10pm
Exhibition Dates: November 21 - December 20, 2008
Address: 3041 24th Street

“I move along in the tender intent of finding myself. It’s where I discover well-being in simplicity and can dream with everything that fades away while taking my time to observe the beauty of things.” - Guillermina Baiguera

Triple Base is pleased to present Dream With Everything That Fades Away, a group exhibition featuring the San Francisco premiere of Buenos Aires-based artist Guillermina Baiguera, alongside established Bay Area-based artists Chris Duncan, Linda Geary and Scott Oliver, from November 21 – December 20, 2008.

Erik Foss at Gallery Three Tonight

"An intrepid scavenger of visual artifacts in which memory, melancholia and madness invoke a visionary topography where the mortality of dreams engender germinal quotients of relativist understanding, Erik Foss locates the fearful symmetries lurking within the miasma of pop culture at the nexus where representation and witness converge. "

Kevin Scott Hailey

I like the lose quality of Kevin's mixed media works. His main focus is his clothing line, Coma and Cotton, but he's definitely not limited to textiles. You can find his studio at Million Fishes art collective in the Mission.

Marcin Łukasiewicz

Marcin Łukasiewicz, Oczyszczenie, 2008, olej, płótno, 135x115 cm

Artist: Marcin Lukasiewicz
Exhibition Title: Medicine
Gallery: Leto
Exhibition Dates: November 15 - December 9, 2008
Opening Reception: November 14, 7.00-9.00, P.M.
Address: ul. Hoza 9c, Warsaw

"The eruption of themes, drastic motives, the easiness in treating form and composition prove that the artist works beyond aesthetic and customary limitations. Lukasiewicz often shows human figures in rather unusual poses: huddled as if in fear of something (and coming from something), tied with 'ropes of their instilled knowledge'. The painter fashions their bodies according to the subconsciously established canon. He 'abuses' the protagonists of his paintings, deforms sadistically their bodies, giving them a new identity, though not always in agreement with our categories of memory and perception."

MICROBIA III, CRUSTACEAPODS

MICROBIA #3, subtitled; "CRUSTACEAPODS"
by Rsconnett on Flickr

24" x 24" (61 cm x 61 cm) Acrylic on Canvas, Completed Oct. 2008

"This is third in a series which includes MICROBIA #1 (BLUE) www.vomitus.com/museum/NewVmmPages/BlueMicrobia_vmm.html ... and MICROBIA #2, (RED) www.vomitus.com/museum/NewVmmPages/RedMicrobia_vmm.html

This painting is a good example of my fascination with tiny primitive sea forms. (Real and imaginary)

With each painting I get a little closer to feeling satisfied with my work. After many experiments, and many derivatively influenced works, (influenced by the artists I admire) I have come to two (2) distinct styles that most dominate my paintings.

This painting is the type "A" painting I "escape" into. Thus, I suppose it is "escapist art", at least for me it is. I find the subjects challenging mostly in technical ways. The color, the placement of forms, the illusion of depth and transparency. These challenges keep my mind engaged during the process. There are a few references to things "unrelaxing", such as the machine fetuses in the spheres, and the food chain scenarios. However, the subject matter of the piece is purposely not provocative.

My other painting style, (I'll call it type "B") acts as a catharsis for my feelings of anxiety, fear, anger, etc. Usually these paintings concern the state of the world, and more particularly the state of my world. The cruelty, ignorance, foolishness and evil that obsesses and plagues me. Also, my dread of death and growing anxiety over life's briefness.

When I'm not escaping into my personal dream world, I'm thinking of the huge evil that shrouds our existence. War, crime, hunger, hate, violence and death. These things should not be ignored, but more than not, they are. Who's responsibility is it, if not an artists, to portray these in the unique venue available to him?

At this point in the evolution of my painting, I wonder what road I will take. Will my escapist fascinations take over? If so, will I always feel that I have betrayed my true perceptiveness, to feel safe with my "pretty pictures"? Or will my more substantive style take over, allowing me to express important feelings and ideas, yet salving me not?

Must I have only one focus for my work? I will try to allow my work to find it's own level."

Thoughts on Conceptualism

From Conceptual Art by Tony Godfry

From the first chapter, discussing the rejection of Duchamp's "Fountain" in the Society of Independent Artists 1916 non-juried and uncensored exhibit.

"Authority was not just a political matter: it was also religious, sexual (patriarchal) and cultural. Academies and groups such as the Society of Independent Artists represented authority just as much as any parliament or king. Art, even Modernist art, it was believed, stood for certain things: culture, decency and high aspirations - hence Glacken's refusal to see something indecent as art. It was indecent to him not only in breaking the decorum of the academy, but in raising issues of sexuality and the unidealized body. It was a low-life object. Above all it was an anti-authoritarian object, because it questioned the definition of art. By what authority could the directors of the Society say it could not be defined as art? And, contrariwise, if they could not define what art was, what authority did they have?"

Started reading this book today. The ideas in the first few pages reminded me of what I saw while unpacking Erik Foss' work at Gallery Three. I'm excited to read more.

Timothy Cummings

Timothy Cummings

Timothy Cummings was raised in Albuquerque, NM and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1993. A self-taught painter, Cummings renders exquisitely crafted narrative and portrait paintings on panel that defy his lack of formal training. The subjects in his work are often children and adolescents trapped in adult worlds and struggling with issues of sexuality and sexual orientation. Cummings’ work has been included in exhibitions throughout the United States, including San Francisco State University, CA; The Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami, FL; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; LACE Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA. His work has been reviewed in Artweek, Art Papers, Flash Art, Details, and Juxtapoz. In recent years he has had been invited to work at Trillium Press in Brisbane, CA and the Hui Noe’au in Makawao, HI. His work has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco since 1994. In 2004 he also began exhibiting with Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York. For his most recent show in San Francisco, he collaborated with Aaron Plant and Shane Francis on a video project, Iodine—his first foray into this medium.

Images and text c/o Catherine Clark Gallery Website

Shepard Fairey on CBS

Stencil in the TL

Caught this beauty on the corner of Larkin and Post.

NaturalSynthetics Opens Tonight

Lindsay Jesse


Artist: Group Show
Gallery: Adaptive Path
Opening Reception: November 6, 2008 from 7-9 p.m.
Exhibition Dates: November 6 - February 6, 2008
Address:363 Brannan St




Joey Piziali






Deric Carner






Erik Otto






Chris Russell






Kevin E. Taylor







Bailey Winters






Whitney Lynn






Ernesto Ortiz

Lauren Gibbes

I'm feeling Lauren Gibbes' paintings.
Here's more on her in the New York Times arcticle "

The next morning, I visited with Lauren Gibbes and Jason Weatherspoon, who live and work several doors down from Payne. Gibbes is a fine-boned woman of 26 with long brown hair and large dark eyes. The space she shares with Weatherspoon is a large brick warehouselike enclosure with concrete floors, a sleeping loft and a wood stove behind a wall of bare two-by-fours.

The paintings that Gibbes had on display were deft, faintly arch references to the color-saturated, low-glamour world of 1970's television. They were mostly diptychs and triptychs, salvaged from screen shots of retro game shows and photographs that she had come across online: a teenage cheerleader reclining in the summer grass, her eyes obscured by a glittering bar of diamond dust; a woman in a straining bodice, gazing with dark amour at the adjacent panel, which showed a walnut-colored thoroughbred, glistening as if it had been dipped in baby oil; a contestant on "The Match Game" caught in a slack-jawed reverie under the studio lights, emanating a grim, jaundiced radiance.

Then Weatherspoon, who is a co-owner of the biodiesel facility, walked in, and we had a look at his sculptures, of which there were a few dozen, crowding a concrete slab on one end of the room. Weatherspoon, 30, wore his hair pulled back in a ponytail, and had a goatee twisted into a clutch of little stubs. He sculptures ceramic figures, beautifully wrought but far darker than what tends to sell in downtown galleries. We looked at his sculpture of a squalling, grotesquely obese baby with its face sinking into its torso flab. "It's my new American cherub," he said. He showed me a near-life-size couple in cross-legged copulation, each participant bald and painted in a lustrous coat of candy-apple-red auto paint, the man holding out a beseeching palm and grimacing, despite the circumstances, with deep displeasure. He also showed me his reimagining of the Buddha, recast as a thunderously fertile, ecstatic woman with a gigantic bosom spilling out of her arms, and a second bosom on top of her head, but instead of nipples, each cranio-breast was punctuated by a set of male sexual anatomy.

When we'd finished the tour, Weatherspoon bent down to pet a piebald Chihuahua that was scratching at his pant leg. He and Gibbes laughed and stared at the floor and talked about how, while contemporary art was beginning to find its place in Asheville, it was still rough going for people making art that wouldn't necessarily brighten someone's living room. Weatherspoon sighed. "It's tough being a contemporary artist in the South," he said. "We had a bunch of tourists in here the other day. They looked around and looked around, and after a while they said, 'Don't y'all do any pictures of trees?"'

It is not about YOU, It is about THEM

Gallery: Nyehaus
Opening Reception: November 6th from 7-9PM
Exhibition Dates: November 6th - December 20th, 2008
Address: 15 Gramercy Park South, New York. NY 10003


House of Leaves was released when I was a junior in high school. I remember it blowing my mind and being a genius idea for a book. So, being that this exhibit is in New York, I'm still posting it here since it has to be known about.

THE HOUSE
On Frozen Time and Differing Spaces

Mark Z. Danielewski's book House of Leaves begins with the measuring of a house that ends up being larger in the inside than on the outside. As often as its inhabitants re-measure it, it always remains the same. From Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools to Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel; from Douglas Cooper's Amnesia to Piranesi's endless corridors and hallways Ð the fantasy of the secluded, total inner-space gives birth to a world, very similar to the one we know but yet significantly different: As if seen upside down through a camera obscura.

Four of the most interesting artists in Europe have been commissioned to create productions in situ throughout the following twelve months. Adina Popescu has invited the artists RothStauffenberg, Jonas Dahlberg, Micol Assa'l and Tris Vonna-Michell to work on productions in situ at NyehausÕ gallery and former Library at The National Arts Club in Gramercy Park. This project leads toward the total transformation of the space into THE HOUSE.

The consecutive four productions constitute the notion of an endlessly reformulated place, herein known as THE HOUSE. The artists are all involved in the mission of re-interpreting our understanding of material: including the architecture of the given space and its components. By doing this, the mere process of production is brought to the center of attention again.

"A Ship is the ultimate Heterotopia", comments Foucault on the notion of "les-contre-espaces" (counter-spaces). He considered these as being specific types of spaces that relate to any other space within a given culture by inversing, suspending or neutralizing their predominant conditions. In contrast to Utopias, which are non-existent hypothetical spaces, Heterotopias as real spaces within society. We like to think of Art as this counter space, a Heterotopia in which the notion of what could be possible can be extended and realized within the actual material -ad infinitum.
- Adina Popescu


Adina Popescu is a writer born in Romania and living between New York and Berlin. She is a contributor to Artforum, and has been included in several books with her plays and theoretical essays. She has lectured at the Sculpture Center NY and the Wissenschafts Akademie Berlin, among other institutions. She has curated an "Intervention" at the 2007 Moscow Biennale, has ÔcuratedÕ a radio show on sound pieces with W PS1 Radio at 2007 Venice Biennale amongst several shows at galleries, world wide. At the moment she is working on her PHD on 'dysfunktional architecture' and postcommunist urban structures.