The 2012 California College of the Arts post-graduate exhibitions featured artworks by nearly 50 MFA artists graduating this spring, as well as post-graduate students in Architecture and Design programs. Unfolding throughout CCA’s San Francisco campus, the MFA Exhibition is just a single part of a year-end celebration that includes thesis exhibitions by seven CCA graduate programs such as the Baccalaureate Exhibition, featuring works by students graduating from the 21 undergraduate programs and the Annual Fashion Show.

CCA’s MFA Exhibition was a lively showcase of works across a range of media. It was organized by faculty member and Artforum art critic Glen Helfand: “This year offers a fascinating range of formats and subjects, with works in various media addressing the space race, fame, identity, commodity culture, the masculine theater of television wrestling, and genre cinema. There are paintings composed of plastic sheeting, installations merging textiles and animation, a work that harnesses the literal and figurative power of the slide projector, and an artist-devised tarot deck that foretells powerful things for the future.”

Visual Aid’s Live Art Auction May 10 was an intimate evening event that featured stunning work graciously donated by local emerging, mid-career, and established artists such as Ema Sintamarian, Jenn Shifflet, Rex Ray, Amy Casey, Suzy Barnard, Patter Hellstrom, Enrique Chagoya, David King, Olivia Brown, Mark Erickson, and Silvia Poloto, as well as generous support from the most well-known galleries in San Francisco.

Since 1989, Visual Aid and San Francisco artists, collectors, and art dealers working together have helped to preserve, present, and promote Bay Area artists from a multitude of backgrounds who have life-threatening illnesses. Costs and time taken from these artists by their illnesses are alleviated by Visual Aid’s assistance.

Visual Aid’s annual auction and fundraisers raise significant funds to continue their art-assistance and educational programs like their voucher and ArtBank programs that provide art supplies to artists, the extensive lectures, workshops, and outreach programs, an impressive exhibition program, and the maintainance of their comprehensive image archives.

Exactly how the passage of time and life experiences distances people from knowing each other is truly a matter of perspective; barriers created by circumstance and by ourselves. Paul Schiek‘s 15 re-presentations of prison identity portraits of men from the 1950s at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, created from an original cache of photographs found by his friend in an abandoned Georgia prison, explore these themes. Schiek, a graduate of California College of the Arts and currently living in Oakland, cropped the images to remove all official documentary references to allow the image to become anonymous. What remains with the photographs in this re-presentation are the stains, staple marks, tears, and other signs of age, making these signs of decay and age that were once incidental and accidental now integral to the the reading of the photographs. The enlarged portraits hang eye to eye with a common viewer, and printed on highly reflective chromogenic paper reveals their audience to themselves, developing a deeper connection between the viewer and the former inmate.

These photographs are so compelling not only for the nostalgia they represent, or the personages of the sitters: a wry smirk of defiance, or hair slicked back in an unkempt yet fashionable style. They’re compelling also for the remarkable interplay of reality and romanticization of the prisoners created by the myriad distances from the sitter and the audience, whether that is the greater passage of time to a feature as simple as unmet eyes with the camera lens. Schiek was struck by his subjects’ brutally glamorous attractiveness, what he describes as “the American male stench.” In general, American art and social culture have often enjoyed portraying this allure, the gray area between cinematic fantasy and real-life danger with either “mug shots” or criminality in general: from Warhol’s portraits of America’s Most Wanted at the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair to the fame and cult following of bank robbers like John Dillinger during the Great Depression.

Schiek, a Wisconsin native, drew major inspiration from Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, a 1973 esoteric publication and film recounting the sordid history of a small Midwestern town of the Victorian era through historical photographs and documents, an important passage reads “the pictures you are about to see are of people that were once actually alive.” Schiek echoes this sentiment of his photographs: ”The truth in the photos is these men died. Like all men die. Like I will die.” he turns the glamour of illegality and delinquency into a poignant reminder what is seen as being far removed from contemporary life is actually much closer than thought. Although a unique translation, Schiek’s poignant sentiment is not novel, it echoes the infamous phrase from Massacio’s Trinity fresco painted above a skeleton in its tomb: “What you are, I once was; what I am, you will be.”

Recognizing the thin line that connects and separates these men from him, Schiek’s organization of the photographs were mostly according to age, race, hairstyle, and build that drew a fleeting visual resemblance to himself. It is misleading to rely upon the title of the exhibition, “Dead Men Don’t Look Like Me” to guide the viewer through an understanding of the photographs,  it instead challenges how the work is viewed. Schiek may be asking viewers to come to terms with his and their own self-imposed barriers with these criminals, that they are somehow of a disparate class, a different time. We are not so removed as it seems.

Paul Schiek’s “Dead Men Don’t Look Like Me” is at Stephen Wirtz Gallery until June 2, 2012.

OPEN CALL FOR ARTISTS:
INTRODUCTIONS 2012 AT ROOT DIVISION

Deadline for Submission: Monday, June 18, 2012
Exhibition dates: September 6-29, 2012

http://www.rootdivision.org/call_Intro12.html

Root Division invites artists working in all genres to submit work for an exhibition called Introductions 2012.

Jurors for Introductions 2012:
Kimberly Johansson, Johannson Projects
Sergio De La Torre, Artist; Assistant Professor, University of San Francisco
Juror 3: TBA

Eligibility requirements:

• Artists must be living and/or working in one of 9 counties of the SF Bay Area.
• Artwork submitted for review (or work very similar in nature to that submitted) must be available for listed exhibition dates.
• Artists cannot have existing gallery representation in the Bay Area.

Checklist of application materials:

• 4 images (jpegs: 72dpi, 600×800 pixels max) (Digital only please; Sorry, no slides) AND/OR Link to 3-minute clip of video on Vimeo or other video platform. (If not available on the web, please submit a 3-minute video clip on CD/DVD for Mac)
• Artist resume (1-2 page max)
• Artist Statement (1 page max)
• SASE (for return of materials if desired)
• E-payment can be paid via PayPal (or submit a $15 check/money order made payable to Root Division)

• Completed application form.  Available at this [LINK]

Deadline for Submission: Monday, June 18, 2012

Email submissions can be sent to submissions@rootdivision.org. Submissions will also be accepted via USPS & can be mailed to: Root Division, Attn: Introductions 2012, 3175 17th Street, SF, CA 94110. If your submission is mailed, we prefer that all documents are saved as either word docs (.doc) or PDFs (.pdf) and burned to a CD with your images rather than printed. (Please note that the $15 fee must be on file by 06/18/2012 for the email submission to be considered.)
Please call 415.863.7668 or email events@rootdivision.org with any questions.

** Artists selected for the exhibition will be notified by July 16, 2012 via email or phone about the inclusion of their work in the show. Representatives from Root Division will conduct studio visits as necessary, but good documentation of work for submission is strongly suggested. **

Call for Submissions

This summer SF Camerawork will host a members-only exhibition from July 13th to August 25th. This is a fantastic opportunity for members working in the photographic arts to exhibit work at our new location in San Francisco’s Mid-Market Arts District. Lisa Sutcliffe, Assistant Curator of Photography for SFMOMA, will curate and title (and may provide a thematic for) this exhibition.

Deadline for submissions:

Monday, May 21st at 5 pm PST

(You must be a current member whose membership is valid through September 2012. To become a member, please visit this link.)

For more details, please visit our website.

Broadsides were used in England and the early United States to announce an event, proclamation, news, or other public matter. Later, broadsides became a prime means of communication and featured cartoons, poems, and song lyrics. During the twentieth-century Harlem Renaissance, Concrete and Beat writers claimed the broadside as a subversive means to get their poems and prose to the public. As printed matter became less necessary, turning over the dissemination of information to its digital counterparts, the broadside became a nostalgic medium like the letterpress, and piqued artists’ interest in exploring its aesthetic qualities.

Intersection for the Arts’ “Broadside Attractions: Vanquished Terrains” curators Maw Shein Win and Megan Wilson with Intersection’s Program Director Kevin Chen invited twelve visual artists and twelve poets/writers to work together in pairs to create new visual and literary works using the theme “Vanquished Terrains” as a point of departure. In a two-year process, visual artists provided their writer partner with a movie, a song, and a location (real or imagined). From these fonts of inspiration, the artist created an image to be placed on the top of the broadside and the writer created a short, 1,000 word prose for the broadside below. Later, a completely separate artwork was created, derived from the visual piece and prose on the broadside.

The resulting artworks, created in a far more convoluted process than similar visual and prose exhibitions usually produce, create a strong, intriguing relationship with the two. Liz Worthy and Jenny Bitner see the broadside as a means for dialogue. Their installation and performance of a tea service every Wednesday and Saturday were inspired by the  intimacy and yet public interaction created by the broadside. Patricia Kelly and Vince Monatgue’s works, however, explore the broadside medium and its place in social history: “A broadside is a protean form… The vessel changes but the messages are timeless: the making of images with the human hand, the sorrow of the human heart, and the ephemeral mystery of the beautiful.” Within the individual 12 projects, the works may all directly refer to each other, while some have taken the opportunity for each creation of work to complement the others. Dwayne Marsh and Nan Twumasi’s broadside and layered photograph retain the clasped hands image, and how words work aesthetically with it. In a different approach, Karrie Hovey & Elise Ficarra with Evelyn Ficarra’s impressive art around and above the gallery staircase that uses sound, felt, and figurative elements only abstractly refers to the broadside’s image and poetry. It is this enhanced entanglement of the visual and written that makes the artworks in this exhibition so strong in both meaning and significance to the genre.

Broadside Attractions: Vanquished Terrains will be at Intersection for the Arts until May 26.

Incline Gallery’s current exhibition, ”Counterproof: The Other Side of Print,” organized by guest curator, former San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator John Zarobell  features a diverse group of artists working in a number of media exploring new avenues in contemporary printmaking, both celebrating and deconstructing the medium. While we are accustomed to think of prints as a highly-productive combination of ink and pulp, this exhibition at Incline Gallery distills printmaking to simply the practice of introducing the multiple and the matrix in contemporary art practice. Print is shown to be not only a technique but a modality, an approach to larger conceptual print ideas: any work intended for ephemera, reproducibility, and/or sharing information.

The exhibition is nicely balanced with experimentally conceptual and formal approaches derived from printmaking, which pushes the medium further, dissecting its characteristics. Elisheva Biernoff‘s “Out the Window,” a delightful, glowing work made of paper, sound, and light as you come up the first ramp of Incline greets with singing birds and a silhouette of a mid-spring window scene. Behind the work are three layered papers of geometric forms and figurative cut-outs, similar to how screen printing (and photography) is deployed that creates the dimensionality and difference of shadings. Adam Feibelman’s works use paper more formally, but equally conceptual. Like Biernoff, Feibelman’s works create dimensionaliy and instricacy by layering cut out stencil paper on top of each other, sewing the final product together. The color on the edges of the stencils are achieved by Feibelman’s using stencils in some spraypainted works.

Works by The Great Tortilla Conspiracy, Imin Yeh, and David Linger balance the more conceptual works with more direct questions that achieve a closer relationship to traditional printmaking. The Great Tortilla Conspiracy members: Art Hazelwood, Jos Sances, Rene Yañez and Rio Yañez print with vegetable dyes upon tortillas. Their “Wall Street Sushi” in this exhibition consists of 99 torillas formed into the image of a fish closely on the tail of a tortilla printed the image of a red and white fish with “1%.” The work, with its novel methods of printmaking, recalls the infamous statments and intentions for social change from the Occupy movement. The work is also a delicate balance between one-dimensional print and sculpture. David Linger’s beautiful, minimalist porcelain tiles that create images from old photographs in a grid or linear pattern and Imin Yeh’s unassuming brilliant paper installation, “Scrap Paper” reproducing a wall upon a wall complete with electrical sockets, tubing, and the grid-fashioned wallpaper both express an interest in the ephemerality, edition, and reproduction commonly associated with print.

“Counterproof: the Other Side of Print” is at Incline Gallery until May 11th.

The arbitrarily-organized information of the Internet and its applications and websites for social networking are major catalysts of contemporary social dynamics and the arts and visual culture. On view until May 5, Hilary Pecis’ and Erin Riley’s solo shows at Guerrero Gallery illustrate how the Internet and the proliferation of images has affected our relationships to the world and each other.

Hilary Pecis’ photo-collages in “Consensus,” composed from image files sourced mainly from Google Images, explores the artist’s continued interest in imagery disassociation due to oversaturation of images in a Post-modernist age. Pecis’ works attempt to reunite meaning with the disparate images and their search words or phrases from the internet’s inherent disorganization. Her works also wish to bring to light media’s ability to influence and at times distort perceptions of events and things, thinly veiled as public information. Pecis’ “Big Sky,” an idyllic landscape where the horizon lies at midpoint with top half blue sky and the bottom green grass pushes the original images further, as the warped dimensionality and choppy assemblage in the final product may also speak to the artificial depiction of nature in such searches. Some of Pecis’ works also achieve this with humor, such as her collage “Johns”: floating heads of people named John: from the everyday to celebrities John Waters, Jon Bon Jovi, and John Goodman. Many of Pecis’ word searches are not abstract nouns, which would account for the variance of images, but her use of common phrases and words still resulting in abstracted, equivocal imagery attest to the strength of her works.

Erin M. Riley’s tapestries in ”Forgotten in a File,” made from a Macomber floor loom with hand-dyed wool yarn, are inspired by imagery produced by the generations of youths from the Internet social networking and photo-sharing age.  This kind of visual dialogue alters traditional ideas of sex & sexuality:  an addictive interest in new images, recognition or approval through quantitative “likes,” and conversation through comments of these images or statuses. Subject matter of the tapestries, drug & alcohol paraphenalia both as still lifes and implemented by faceless tattooed, inebriated naked women, comment upon the presence of overtly visual stimuli in social culture like Pecis’ images, but Riley’s are more obsessive, taken to an extreme, but how extreme can’t be determined. Riley’s use of tapestries also creates a very intriuging examination of the traditionally feminine, domestic craft of weaving blended with computer, webcams, and smartphone derived imagery and subject matter of women engaged in sexual activities. Yet, “Forgotten in a File” alludes to these images being of people and activities lost within the maze of the Internet, connotations of compassion, as well as the myth of ephemerality in social media. Two works titled “Self Portrait” seem to further engage with empathy towards these women as they attempt to make sense of their generation for which there is little precedent.

Erin M Riley, “Forgotten in a File” and Hilary Pecis, “Consensus” will be at Guerrero Gallery until May 5.

Gallery Paule Anglim’s special exhibition organized by Barry McGee at the off-site space, The Paule Anglim Contemporary Arts Centre at 1717 17th Street reunites some of the now-coined, ”Mission School” artists whose art filled the streets of San Francisco like The Potrero Hill district in the 1990s.

The exhibition of sculpture, drawings, installation, and paintings in the arts centre eschews paradigms of traditional gallery spaces, aligning more with the aesthetics of street art: no listings of which by whom, works propped on the floor, stools, and tables, illustrating what made artwork by these artists so novel and remarkable. At first glance the works seemed placed somewhat haphazardly together, yet with more time it became evident each were placed with care, existing almost as a single body of work. The iconic styles of Barry McGee and works by invited artists like Chris Johanson, Claire Rojas, Josh Lazcano, Alisha McCarthy, Margaret Kilgallen, Ruby Neri, and Bill Daniel filled the room. In many ways, this exhibition is a tantalizing precursor to the much anticipated retrospective exhibition of McGee’s work at the Berkeley Art Museum in August.

Special Project Organized by Barry McGee will be at the Paule Anglim Arts Centre until May 19, 2012.

On Saturday, April 14, San Francisco Art Institute graduate students in the Dogpatch neighborhood opened their studios to the public, providing visitors to this one-day only event with a unique look at the experiments and challenges within disparate media, and a chance to see the visually stunning results of the creative processes the students have undertaken throughout their academic career.

Over 200 MFA, Dual Degree, and Post-Baccalaureate students engaged with the arts enthusiasts, discussing their work and intent throughout the day. The assortment of artwork included various forms of painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, installation, performance, and digital media. Also on view were various solo exhibitions within the larger art spaces on the floor by graduate students.