Mark Jenkins & Aakash Nihalani

@ www.carmichaelgallery.com/
January 21 - February 18, 2010

street art 2.0

Roberta Smith noted in her recent New York Times article that "street art," the "vibrant successor" of "graffiti art," "originated in San Francisco in the 1990s among artists on the fringe of the skateboard scene." the article was discussing Jeffrey Deitch's recent appointment to be director of MOCA(la) and noted that Deitch "more or less introduced New York to ... street art."

She is presumably referring to Barry McGee and the mission school. Roberta identified Barry as "a talented street artist from San Francisco" and noted that he "offers a cheerful reinterpretation of 80's graffiti art" in her review of his 1999 show @ Deitch. she further contended "although drips are plentiful among these images and some parts are casually painted out, Mr. McGee does not partake of the looseness and speed associated with graffiti art. His notion of finish is refined, even tight." in her review of his 2005 show, she identified "Barry McGee, who helped ignite the street-graffiti art renaissance that emanated from San Francisco in the 1990's."

in thinking about this over the past few years, i've tied "street art" to the global community that was connected through the web by sites such as Wooster Collective. the recent street art exhibit at the Tate Modern was practically curated by Wooster: four of the six artists/collectives (Blu, Faile, JR, and Os Gemeos) are stars of the blog. Moreover, the "long weekend" corresponding to the show also included Graffiti Research Labs, another Wooster Collective favorite, and a Wooster talk.

as a long time follower of Wooster, i have enjoyed watching the street art community flower globally. looking through a search of their "seen on the streets" postings turns up work from around the world (starting with Ann Arbor, Paris, Antwerp, Washington D.C., Bloomington, Manchester, London, Tehran, Buenos Aires, New York, Puerto Vallarta, Amsterdam, Toronto, Williamsburg, Santiago, Hong Kong, Prague, Istanbul, Rouen, Lima, Trondheim, Lombardy, Rome, Munich, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, Kaunas, Tasmania, Milwaukee, Naples, Denmark, Athens, Chicago, you get the idea).

a global street arts community, connected by the Internet (and festivals, like nuart in Norway, the cans festival in London, and fame festival in Italy), may be an outgrowth of what came out of San Francisco in the 1990s, and New York in the 1980s, but seems to be something new: street art 2.0.

available online for free

the amazing Evan Roth issued an open invitation to participate in his sticker project, with the resulting photos displayed on a loop at the elizabeth foundation for the arts one every day show in new york (which runs through dec. 19, 2009)


tonight i emailed my first submission
(kin to my perv: local, organic).

dec. 2, 2009 update

two more submissions (they sent me 3 stickers)

sf camerawork 2009 auction

the preview exhibition for sf camerawork's 2009 auction is free and runs nov10-dec4 (info).

i donated carney (argentina) [archivally framed]


"Highlights include: Berenice Abbott, Richard Barnes, Harry Benson, Ellen Carey, Keith Carter, Judy Dater, Robert Dawson, Larry Fink, Ann Hamilton, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Todd Hido, Pirkle Jones, Michael Kenna, Dinh Q. Lê, Michael Light, David Maisel, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Misrach, Catherine Opie, J. John Priola, Herb Ritts, Holly Roberts, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Larry Sultan, Hank Willis Thomas, Catherine Wagner, William Wegman, Edward Weston, Marion Post Wolcott and many others."

the auction is saturday, dec5th, @ 1pm
($30 or free with sf camerawork membership)

Yoon Lee print

"Expansion II" by Yoon Lee (2009)
9"x27" archival pigment print in an edition of 30 (+2ap/+2pp)

this print, my second print (as proper printing), comes archivally framed in two variations --
ed. 1-15: glossy print face-mounted to plexi, mounted on 4ply museum board, with hidden cleate+spacer frame
ed. 16-30: matte print with uv lamination, mounted on aluminum, with hidden cleate+spacer frame
retail (archivally framed, as noted above) is $1200
available from the luggage store sometime soon

you can see a bigger image of Yoon's print here
my first print, with Tiffany Bozic, is discussed here

superfine @ Morgan Lehman

Eric Beltz

on my recent trip to NY, we stopped by the superfine exhibit @ Morgan Lehman.

Andrew Schoultz

the show has great work with super fine details.

Hilary Pecis


Aaron Noble


Aya Uekawa



Michael Waugh's text based illustration uses text from the Election Reform Commission



Rachel Thorlby


Joseph Ayers


Iona Rozeal Brown


Tom Molloy


Ryan Wallace

the show runs through August 7, 2009 and is much better in person

the gallery also had two additional paintings by Andrew Schoultz ready to show a prospective collector


if you are in the area, be sure to also stop by the high line

bay area currents 2009

bay area currents 2009 @ proarts/oakland art gallery

featured beautiful felted wool sculptures by Stephanie Metz



Donna Anderson Kam's pastels on paper



Daniel Healey's tape transfers



Adam Friedman's large mixed media piece


my local organic cluster


Elizabeth Pedinotti's portraits


Joan Osato's portraits


Bert Bergen's sculptures


Alex Potts' sound installation with gourd speaker array


Annie Vought's paper cuts


& John Patrick McKenzie's drawings

curated by Kevin Chen


the show ran at the merged pro arts/oakland art gallery from june 23 to july 24th, 2009. my bay area currents 2009 flickr set has photos of more work.

Swooning

Michael Kimmelman's June 10th review of the 2009 Venice Biennial seemed to calling for Swoon's Swimming Cities of Serinissima, who were en route. In particular, Kimmelman's summary of the work at the heart of the show -- by the Gutai group ("Japanese avant-gardists from the 1950s/1960s"), Lygia Pape (a Brazilian artist "who came to prominence around the same time"), and Gordon Matta-Clark ("the short-lived American iconoclast of the 1970s") -- could have been written about Swoon and her merry band of travelers:

Devising quasi-utopian projects of hippie-ish experimentalism by often fugitive means, they aimed to engage more than an art audience and to spread joy. They saw themselves as liberationists, optimists, fabulists and troublemakers without exactly being ideologues, who shared an almost alchemical knack for transforming scrappy materials and tests of sensual awareness into fine modernist forms.

Kimmelman notes that these artists bring "cool pleasure" to the main exhibition, and knocks the overall show, noting "the Biennale is meant to be a survey of new art, and while conscientious young artists now dutifully seem to raise all the right questions about urbanism, polyglot society and political activism, their answers look domesticated and already familiar. They look like other art-school-trained art, you might say."

Swoon's crew, by contrast, built a flotilla of boats from discarded trash, running on engines converted for biodiesel, to sail from Slovenia (where much of the wood in Venice originally grew) to Venice, with performances along the route (a play, puppets, music).

This fits more with the "quasi-utopian, hippie-ish experimentalism ... aimed to engage more than an audience and to spread joy" than with "art-school-trained art" (check Tod Seelie's blog of the trip if you don't believe me).

more on the project on their blog, flickr, & facebook pages, in NY Magazine, & all over the web.

mail art update

just stopped by sf camerawork's ersatz mail art show and my work made it safely.

(previously discussed here)

mail art

i got travis millard's most excellent new zine tear jerker in the above envelope.

i love the zines of travis & mel. and their envelopes.

in sharing my new zines (1, 2) with them, i printed my first envelope.


i heart my printer.

extreme digital masking

my submission for sf camerawork's ersatz show, which is seeking "2-D lens-based" mail art work (show runs June 4 to August 22, 2009).

i employed a process i developed and named "extreme digital masking" for this (and other related) work. i think of it as an extreme digital version of the analog masking process whereby part of the negative or positive is covered (masked) during the printing process. spending a lot of time with digital darkroom tools (e.g., photoshop), i push masking to an extreme, masking most of the background image but preserving enough to show the structure, in a way only possible in the digital environment.


(more examples in my san francisco study)

new website

welcome to the billyverse (my new website, it is a work in progress but in reasonable shape)

50/50

"50/50 on & not on / no & not no
(ode to Tauba Auerbach)," 2009

my donation to the lab's 25th anniversary auction


11.5" x 23" facemounted to plexi.

blu musings

the new page in blu's sketchbook (&on his blog) is poignant, and sad. i saw it just as i was thinking his gaza strip, a mobius strip of tanks and bulldozers, met that description, he refined it. the print came out nicely.

perv (local, organic)

in part, i am using phallic local organic produce to poke fun, in a humorous, sex-positive, manner, at what may be considered perverted in our society. one element of perv (local, organic) only "works" if the viewer conflates a vegetable with human anatomy. blurring the line between human and plant will, i hope, help to break down our (human) disconnect with the natural world. i was planning on combining this with local organic for my mfa submission but received strong discouragement from some local arts folk who i trust.

local organic

my mfa application portfolio 2009
(click the play button in the picture above & then use arrow keys to go through it)

cookies chanukah

today i learned that my polaroid photos from a few years back of chanukah cookies

are returned near the top of the google image search for "cookie chanukah" (or a "chanukah cookies" search).

Tournesol 5th Anniversary @ Headlands

Chris Ballantyne


Clare Rojas


Yoon Lee


Leslie Shows


Ana Teresa Fernandez


Paul Wackers

headlands center for the arts gives the Tournesol award to one bay area painter with a recent mfa degree each year. the award includes a studio at the headlands, a $10,000 stipend, and a solo show at the end of the residency.

headlands is now hosting its 5th anniversary exhibition for the program with work from the first five winners (Chris Ballantyne, Clare Rojas, Yoon Lee, Leslie Shows, Ana Teresa Fernandez) and the current recipient (Paul Wackers).

the show runs November 9 – December 7, 2008. check it in person.

more photos after the jump.


Chris Ballantyne



Clare Rojas



Yoon Lee



Leslie Shows



Ana Teresa Fernandez



Paul Wackers