This was the scene from the top of Bernal Hill tonight (sped up 2000%).
[iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/61596911″ width=”500″ height=”281″ frameborder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe]
Now that I have somewhere to sell them, I finally got around to properly matting my dozens and dozens and dozens of paper prints depicting each intersection of 24th Street in the Mission District. Totally coincidentally, there are twenty-four intersections of 24th Street in the Mission and, somewhat less coincidentally, each of these prints was made on a different size paper. That was a lot of needlessly complicated matting logistics to sort though. Also, this is the type of gross inefficiency that illustrates why it’s good that I still have a day job.
But why dwell on the past? Life is about the present. And you should buy one of these for a present, especially if you know anyone who likes the Mission District, art, or visual experiences of any kind. The great news is that these are available for crazily patriotic President’s Day prices at City Art Gallery till April (828 Valencia, SF, CA).
 |
 |
Here is one of many newish artist bios. I like this one:
After receiving degrees in engineering and philosophy of science, I learned to screen print in the Mission in order to fabricate forty postcards and meet women.
Some years later I am married and operating a small screen print studio on Harrison Street.
The ultimate goal of my art practice is to extend the aesthetic, collaborative, and social possibilities of screenprinting. My projects have ranged from a screenprinted mural depicting the Mission District (installed in the office of SF District 9 Supervisor David Campos), to a 600ft2 screenprinted floor fabricated for Just Theater’s 2011 production of “Down A Little Dirt Road” by Erin Bregman.
In addition to pursuing a consistent studio schedule devoted to producing new work, I consider community service and interdisciplinary collaborations essential to my art practice. I spent two summers, in collaboration with activist Adrienne Skye Roberts co-developing and teaching a 6-week hybrid math-art class for underserved high schoolers at U.C.Berkeley. Students learned math through hands-on studio art projects, culminating in a exhibition of their work at the Oakland Museum of Children’s Art. Other community collaborations include screenprint workshops at Rocks Paper Scissors, CELLspace, Root Division, and Glide Memorial Church, and partnerships with community-minded businesses on screenprint projects including signs, parklets, and installations.
I am currently interested in expanding the orbit of my work towards other creative disciplines through direct collaborations with writers, filmmakers, and actors, with a focus on text, storytelling, and wordplay. My immediate plans include vastly expanding the scale of my screenprinted motion pictures, through a collaboration with Paul Cello (director: 2×4 theater company). In July 2013, I am curating “Character Profile”, a cross disciplinary group show at Root Division in San Francisco that will explore intersections between the form, mechanics and meaning of language.
I have seen the future and it is wet media.
Those kindly and supportive folks following my last few projects may have noticed a painterly touch developing. Or rather than “a touch,” one could fairly call it ” a punch in the face” as there is nothing gentle about it. At least not yet. Like in all all arenas besides street fighting and lab report grading, I do aspire to always brandish a gentle touch. So with the long road ahead in mind, I have been experimenting with inks, washes, and watercolors–the large group of liquidy art materials generally known as wet media–and I aim to harness their drippy and vibrant properties to shift the balance of my screenprinting towards the organic.
One of the things I love about screenprinting is that it involves a unique tension between control and lack of control. Preparing, exposing, and layering stencils is an analytic process with little room for error. It is followed by a printing stage that is tactile, free, and subject to limitless possibility. Most screenprint stuff trends towards one of these poles. For example, on one extreme end I would think of production print work (t-shirts, signs, etc) while some of the more abstract work from the last century stakes out the most identifiable territory on the other. A big ongoing goal of mine is to develop a unique physical screenprinting process that negotiates a balance in between. And that is a long journey.
That’s also a long way of saying look at this practice piece. I recently acquired a variety of really nice papers and this is one of my first shots at applying art to it (possibly for the purposes of one final edition of Silian Rail posters for their imminent, final show ever). From my “Eight Ideas at Ocean Beach” stencils:
Cliff House | Screenprint and ink on paper | 18×24″ | 2013
I think people are getting the wrong idea. So here are your new cardboard art instructions.:
Check out my little piece of the world in the form of the March 2013 City Art Gallery show. Your will find multiple pieces of cardboard, paper, and wood that I have not changed or in some cases slightly increased the value of by applying my art to. If you are rolling down Valencia Street in San Francisco this month, please stop by and check it out. We are right next to Dave Eggers’ pirate store so just maybe hit us up while you are running your weekly treasure-related errands.
Check out this musical apple pie I made for Little Opera‘s annual build day. I didn’t actually take any pictures of the fantastic CandyLand sets we made, but if you want to see some cute kids perform an opera they wrote, designed, and composed you should clear some your schedule at one of these times:
