Closed for Indigenous Peoples Day, October 12

October 11, 2015

Gallery 16 & Urban Digital Color will be closed Monday, October 12 in honor and celebration of Indigenous Peoples Day. We hope you'll be celebrating too!

Inez Storer in conversation with Bill Berkson // September 17, 2015

September 09, 2015

BILL BERKSON and INEZ STORER // IN CONVERSATION

& BOOK RELEASE PARTY

SEPTEMBER 17, 6-8 PM @ GALLERY 16

501 3rd St. (x Bryant) / San Francisco, CA 94107

Don’t miss this chance to hear legendary poet Bill Berkson and painter Inez Storer discuss their intersecting lives in the arts. The talk will take place on September 17th6-8pm and coincides with the release of Inez Storer’s new book Inez Storer: Allow Nothing To Worry You, a monograph of the artist’s career, produced by Gallery 16. The book features writing about the artist's work by authors & artists Bill Berkson, Timothy Anglin Burgard, Bonnie Gangelhoff, Barbara Morris and Maria Porges.
The book release comes in conjunction with the artist's solo exhibition Inez Storer: Memories from the Backlot which opens October 6 at Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, CA.

Renowned poet Bill Berkson is the author of some twenty books including a 2008 collaboration BILL with drawings by Colter Jacobsen, published by Gallery 16 Editions. His collection Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems won the Balcones Prize for Best Poetry Book of 2010 and was honored by the San Francisco Bay Guardian with the 2008 GOLDIE Award in Literature. He has collaborated with many artists and writers, including friends Alex Katz, Philip Guston, and Frank O’Hara and his criticism has appeared in ArtNews, Art in America, and elsewhere. Formerly a professor of liberal arts at the San Francisco Art Institute, he was born in New York in 1939, and now divides his time between San Francisco and Manhattan.

Inez Storer’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions consistently thorough the United States since 1971. Her work has been presented at institutions such as the San Jose Museum of Art, the Monterey Museum of Art, the Fresno Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The National Museum of Jewish History, Philadelphia. Storer taught at the San Francisco Art Institute (1981- 1999), Sonoma State University (1976 - 1988), San Francisco State University (1970 - 1973), and the College of Marin (1968 - 1979). She has received numerous grants and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1999, and has worked twice as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome (1997, 1996). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, the Lannan Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University.

Inez Storer is represented by Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, CA, and Gail Severn Gallery in Ketchum, ID.

Charles Linder & Graham Gillmore // September 11 - November 7

September 07, 2015

Please join us for the first exhibition of our Fall Season.
Two simultaneous solo shows by Graham Gillmore and Charles Linder!

Graham Gillmore //

Your Proportions Are Not That Exquisite

Charles Linder //

Invisible Fencing Luminaries

On View: September 11-November 7, 2015

Opening Party: Friday September 11, 6-9pm

Live music by Virgil Shaw and the Killer Views

About The Artists:

Graham Gillmore, renown Canadian artist presents “Your Proportions Are Not That Exquisite”. The title is drawn from a text in one of Gillmore’s paintings that seems to puncture the balloon of the current Selfie culture.

He is best known for his extraordinary paintings that use of text as subject. In a 2013 review of Gillmore’s work critic Kenneth Baker wrote “ Words worm their way into contemporary art because they worm their way into consciousness. Yet they seem particularly alien to painting. The work of Vancouver native Graham Gillmore at Gallery 16 exploits the bumptious quality of words, especially in the mind’s ear, to fine comic effect. He baits our readiness to assume that the voice represented in an artist’s work must be his own.

Thomas Breidenbach wrote about Gillmore’s work in ArtForum “Exploring the word as image, and the image as word, Graham Gilmore twists the knife of a smartass remark, the threatening anonymity of a clinical evaluation. Employing puns and punch lines both lewd and mawkish, and referencing clichés, board games, rebuses, barroom banter, and graffiti, his paintings are by subtle turns playful, earnest, and caustic.”

Graham Gillmore’s work is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Ghent Museum, Gian Enzo Sperone, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, The Royal Bank of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and numerous other institutions worldwide.

Charles Linder is well known figure in the Bay Area art scene. He founded the seminal exhibition space Refusalon in the early 1990’s, as well as Lincart. Charles will present his fourth solo exhibition at Gallery 16, Invisible Fencing Luminaries. The show will include new sculptural work and paintings. For his fourth solo exhibition at Gallery 16, the artist presents work that use the metaphor of the fence.

“I’m thinking of my current work as fencing; the paintings are literally fences between my world and the viewers. Throughout my career, I’ve relied on friends and mentors to point out to me what isn’t working. For me, becoming a better artist has meant knowing when and where to move my fences.”

Linder’s art has long been the tangible remnant of his lifestyle. For some, the merger of art and life is an intellectual process, more thought than action. John Cage famously said “Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.” For Charles Linder, the integration of his life and his artwork is unconscious. He is an instigator of experiences. He uses poetry, punning, humor and a witty intelligence to make beautiful objects from cultural detritus.

new press for Alice Shaw's "Golden State"

August 21, 2015

We're pleased to see Alice Shaw's "Golden State" getting the praise it deserves! Below are a couple of articles that have featured the show recently:

http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Alice-Shaw-finds-gold-in-California-culture-6451051.php

These days Alice Shaw’s old Mission neighborhood is awash with the signs of S.F.’s latest gold rush: tech buses, Teslas and carousing brogrammers.

So the subject of all that glitters feels like a natural one for the California-bred conceptual artist. At “Golden State” at Gallery 16, she spins further from photography, which she has taught at San Francisco Art Institute, and toward readymades, textiles and tweaked found objects.

In her irreverent sight lines are drivers of California culture like commodities, celebrity, religion and that precious urban asset — parking. They play out in the form of an “Unemployment Debit Card for Out of Work Artist From the Ansel Adams School of Photography” and a gold-leaf-embellished “Jesus and His Disciples,” depicting uniformly begowned “icons” and an alt-Christ Jared Leto.

— Kimberly Chun

Continuing through September 4, 2015

Conceptual artist and photographer Alice Shaw deploys her abundant talent and wit to seamlessly blend humor and serious insight in this newest body of work, which comments on much of what the golden state of California is known for: the Gold Rush, fame and celebrity, enormous wealth (as well as economic disparity), even agriculture. For many of the works, Shaw alters found images, many of celebrities, and enhances them by coloring in the background or otherwise decorating them with gold or silver leaf. “Pot of Gold–fame (LA)” features a two-page fashion magazine spread with the headline “Red Carpet Rainbow.” Photos of female celebrities, each in a monochrome dress, are arranged such that, across the page, the colors form a rainbow. Shaw puts a gold halo over each woman’s head, a clear reference to saintly pre-Renaissance paintings. One can also draw out the association between rainbows and the proverbial pot of gold, which is also referenced in “Pot of Gold–Riches (SF).” This piece shows a hand-drawn rainbow dropping down to the lower right corner on a postcard picture of an actual rainbow arcing over the Golden Gate Bridge. Acidly reflecting on celebrity’s place in our culture, Shaw trots out people famous as much for their bad behavior as for anything legitimately earned. A sheet of (fabricated) stamps are appropriately called “Forever Stamps (Paris Hilton, Lance Armstrong, Lindsay Lohan, Barry Bonds, Britney Spears, Tiger Woods, Miley Cyrus, Charlie Sheen).” The title speaks for itself.

Touching on wholly different sector of wealth in the state, “Money Tree” features the elementary school cliché of an avocado seedling sprouting in a mason jar, the pit suspended above the water with toothpicks. The pit here is painted gold. Called to mind in an instant is the key role of agriculture in California’s economy and the ongoing drought. Taking a look at the less glamorous side of California living is “Chariot,” a picture of a beat-up gold sedan parked curbside in front of a Mexican restaurant, a taco truck parked behind it. Our Latino population provides a great deal of the cheap labor for many of the thankless, grueling jobs in the state, a key component behind California’s wealth. For many among these populations, life is a little less shiny.

Review of Alice Shaw's 'Golden State' in SFAQ

August 01, 2015

Congrats to Alice Shaw on a fantastic review by Leora Lutz published July 31 for SFAQ. Read the full piece below or visit the piece on SFAQ's site here.

ALICE SHAW’S GOLDEN STATE, WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD

BY LEORA LUTZ

JULY 31, 2015

Alice Shaw’s solo exhibition, Golden State at Gallery 16, takes its title from the nickname of California. Throughout the exhibition, there are references to the Bay Area in particular, featuring iconography such as the Golden Gate Bridge, but there are also references to Los Angeles and its fixation with fame. Further narratives include California’s car culture, religious diversity, shopping, and body image, but one glaring observation is the overarching theme of money and commodification. Several pieces in the exhibition are accented with gold leaf, which lend a regal quality to otherwise banal objects such as tourist postcards or pop culture imagery, such as Paris Hilton. Likewise, concepts of worship and worth are called into question. During the opening reception, when asked about the use of gold in her work, Shaw stated that she is commenting on increasing the value of the work by applying gold to it.

Alice Shaw. “Entitled #1 (Paris Hilton),” 2015.
Archival pigment print,
4″ x 3″

I would argue that the gesture also places the work within the context of monetary exchange. If an artwork has a subjective value, applying gold to it renders it a competitive object for trade on the market. In 2005, gold was worth on average $400 an ounce since the late 1970s, and prior to that it trailed at $35 an ounce since the late 1700s. Currently, the price of gold is slightly over $1,095 an ounce. Last fall, it reached $1,313, and in the summer of 2011 it spiked to $1,901, an all-time high. After spending some time on business journals, I learned that the value of gold is in direct correlation with the value of the US dollar. When elusive and speculative value decreases, people look to tangible goods such as gold or real estate to invest in, and therefore the demand increases for these goods. Basically, since the economic crash of 2008, gold has increased steadily in value. The dollar has slightly propelled itself back up again, but it is still worth only half of what it was in 2001, whereas gold has only steadily increased overall, now exceeding what the dollar was worth in 2001. Subsequently, as the value of the dollar increases, the price and ultimately the value of gold should go down (as will real estate). Art however, does not operate with this kind of exchange, but in general its value increases over time, and is oftentimes subject to trends in taste or publicity.

Alice Shaw. “Inflation,” 2014. Paper, engraving, and 22k gold leaf,
3.5″ x 6.25″

This brings up several arguable notions about the “art market” and the value of art beyond its role as a mere communicator of commodity. By communicator I mean that artists often use the economy as a subject for critical commentary in their work. The sad irony, as many of us know, is that art prices are often inflated by other notions of fame or popularity that are tied with the reputation of the artist. Unlike gold, an inert thing, people yield contentious and constantly fluctuating value that is subjective and wholly dependent on many other factors besides raw goods. So, the real argument with pricing art is not with the objects themselves, but with the value of the people who made the object or with the reputations of those who represent or exhibit the artists’ work. Not to open an entirely different can of worms of how gold is acquired and the value of people who mine it, let us return to Shaw’s exhibition and how her work is contending with arguments surrounding the potent value of subject, imagery and material.

Alice Shaw. “Jesus and His Disciples,” 2015.
Offset print and 22k gold leaf, 10.5″ x 32″

Jesus and His Disciples is an off-set print featuring a re-appropriated image from a pop culture magazine of red carpet starlets in their gowns, such as Jennifer Hudson, Scarlet Johansson, Keira Knightley, who are accompanied by Jared Leto (sporting a beard and long hair). The headline of the magazine reads “Red Carpet Risk Takers.” The text claims that, by wearing a daring outfit in public, one is taking a risk. The confusion here is that the risk is a materialistic one: a risk of ruining one’s livelihood or living without actually risking one’s life. The background behind everyone is embellished with 22K gold leaf, hand-applied by Shaw. The gold renders the subjects as icons—most akin to an illuminated manuscript—but the double entendre of icon is also situated in American culture’s fixation with celebrity worship. The worship of the almighty dollar is also suggested in the piece Inflation: a dollar bill with a 22k gold leaf halo surrounding George Washington’s head.

Alice Shaw. “Silver Dollar,” 2015. Digital Daguerreotype, 3.5″ x 6.25″

In addition to gold, Shaw also incorporates silver in some of the works, which brings up another conversation about the value of precious metals and their trade worth. For example, the counterpart to Inflation is the piece Silver Dollar, which is a daguerreotype of a one dollar bill. Ironically, this piece may be more valuable than the other simply because of the rarity of its material as a photographic process that is on its way to possible extinction. However, unlike gold’s current value at over $1000 per ounce, as mentioned earlier, silver is only valued at around $14.50. This comparison is particularly apparent in two small embellished postcard images that appear to be from the late 1950s. Golden Gate features an image of the Golden Gate Bridge with the sky above covered in 22k gold. In contrast, the Bay Bridge piece titled Silver Gate features the sky covered in silver leaf over the still existing western portion of the bridge spanning from Treasure Island to San Francisco; the silver usage implies that the East Bay is the lesser valued location. Incidentally, the eastern half of the bridge is being deconstructed at this very moment, fading into extinction like the daguerreotype, although much faster.

Alice Shaw. “Key To The City – San Francisco,” 2014. Brass, 1″ x 2.5″

Shaw is predominantly a photographer, and the use of appropriated imagery in her work is further commentary of the value of the images. Photographs convey meaning with the subjects they represent, which is where the true value lies, not in the cost of the paper to print to image upon or the amount of time it takes to snap a photo. Yet, through embellishing her work, Shaw renders the photos as hand-made objects, thereby challenging their singularity as a two-dimensional documentation, and recognizing photography as something more. This tactile quality extends to several three-dimensional pieces in the show as well, from altered credit cards to a one dollar bill, folded into the Coit Tower, and a real key carved with the San Francisco skyline.

Alice Shaw. “Comforter,” 2014/15.
Satin, polyester, and thread, 89.5′” x 54″

The standout, however, is the satin metallic silver hand sewn quilt titled Comforter. The quilt features the ominous, unfinished pyramid and all-seeing Eye of Providence motif of the Great Seal of the United States, found on the back of the one dollar bill. Sitting and sewing a quilt is the antithesis of the act of taking a snapshot. This slow process is more analogous to old chemical photo processing techniques, which required hours of patience before seeing the results. Unlike digital photography, hand developing photos is also becoming extinct like the daguerreotype, and the Bay Bridge—and the act of sewing could also become a fading art. Certainly, many hand-made things have gone the way of mass production. Yet, instant replication has been one of photography’s benefits since its invention and onset in the general market in the late 1800s, which brings up issues of originality. Comforter, on the contrary, evades the problem of originality that photography began to create for the art world. Additionally, its subject matter seems to epitomize everything that is wrong with the world: that almighty (questionably so) dollar. The quilt, along with the rest of the exhibition is deeply seated in rich and multiple interpretations of commodification, iconography, debt, wealth, nostalgia and so much more. Shaw puts these conversations of worth before us, reminding us that art has more to say than a dollar, which is a very potent comfort.

Gallery 16 @ Seattle Art Fair // Thursday, July 30 - August 2

July 28, 2015

Preview the work in our Seattle Art Fair page on Artsy.
PATRON VIP PASS - early access on July 30, 6-10 pm
TICKETS - single and three-day access

DATES, HOURS & LOCATION
SEATTLEARTFAIR.COM

Alice Shaw: Golden State // Opening July 17th 6-9pm

July 15, 2015

July 17 - September 4, 2015

Opening reception on Friday July 17 from 6 – 9pm

Gallery 16 is proud to present its fifth show with artist Alice Shaw, Golden State.

As the name suggests, Golden State, takes a look at the things that are important to the modern day culture in the California: religion, money, fame, booze, driving, and
parking.

Shaw is a photography based conceptual artist who frequently employs other media in her practice. For this exhibition she has included the ready made, collage, found imagery, fiber arts, and paint on canvas. Shaw grew up in California where people have been coming to find riches since before it was established in 1850. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Shaw’s art, which infuses personal document with humor, is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the di Rosa Foundation. She has practiced photography for over 20 years and she has been a visiting lecturer at UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, CCA and The San Francisco Art Institute.

GALLERY 16 & UDC CLOSED JULY 3 - 5th

July 02, 2015

We will be closed Friday July 3rd & Saturday July 4th in observance of Independence Day. Apologies for any inconveniences. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Art Practical reviews Shaun O'Dell "Doubled"

June 23, 2015

http://www.artpractical.com/review/doubled/
By Leora Lutz

June 23, 2015

Shaun O’Dell’s second solo exhibition at Gallery 16 seems to be an incongruous flurry of the artist’s thoughts that carry over from daily life and find their way into the studio—however, first impressions can be deceiving. As the title Doubled implies, repetition abounds: films of owls, plants in pots, large murals, a suite of sculpture, airbrushed works on paper, pairs of drawings and photo transfers on marble, a series of paintings. A complex and poetically disjointed prose essay written by O’Dell supplements the exhibition, blending personal historical references with pop culture. The fragmented personal stories in the essay create threads of information that link the pieces. O’Dell confesses in the text: “I frequently experience slippages in my perception of time and lose track of where I am in the temporal landscape. My memory feels like it was erased or severely fragmented and I have a disorienting feeling that my memories are not my own.” He passes this deduction on to the viewer through doubling (not to be confused with mirroring or replicating), which political scholar Deems D. Morrione describes as “not merely destructive; it is also creative, as it produces a remainder”1 in his essay “When Signifiers Collide: Doubling, Semiotic Black Holes, and the Destructive Remainder of the American Un/Real.” Morrione opens the essay with an analysis of the Twin Towers as emblematic not only of architectural doubling, but also of the remaining space left behind as a result of their absence. So too can greater meaning be found in the remainders that O’Dell leaves for the viewer—the in-between space of his work, where no verbal or visual language resides.

One frequent departure point for O’Dell is the film Vertigo (1958), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The film’s fixation with time sends O’Dell’s mind reeling with reminders of his family’s past, including a trip with his son to visit the Portals of the Past in Golden Gate Park, which is referenced in Vertigo. The structure of the portal is a marble replica of a classical Greek portico that was relocated to the park as a memorial to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire; it stands now in front of lush forest trees at the end of Lloyd’s Lake—its double reflected in the water. Returning to Marrione, “The real and its stand-in are perceived to have equivalence.”2 Here, the portico’s new location is a somber reminder in a bucolic utopia. O’Dell counteracts the notion of utopia in portal.2.past.carls, (2015), which features a photograph of the portico on the lower portion of a black-and-white print with an image of the Carlsbad Caverns superimposed above, creating heaviness where treetops and sky once were. A conceptual double of the Carlsbad Caverns with an implied reference to Plato’s cave is seen in plato.dbl.SUNS.marble (2015), a black-and-white photo transfer of Plato’s concealed face on white marble. Further doubling occurs with the marble slab substrate acting as a double of the portico, while an image of two suns covering Plato’s face doubles as his eyes.

The sun thread continues in another part of the gallery, where two large murals on two different walls face each other across the span of the room. Titled The Dust (2015) and contributed by Emily Prince, one mural features a large sun demarcated by a black background drawn in charcoal, the dust from the drawing still present on the floor. Its exact inverse is across the way and can only be read as the moon, also hovering above fallen dust. The piece conjures existentialism and mortality awareness; its temporary home in the gallery will be gone when the show closes. Adjacent is an installation of various off-white abstract papier-mâché sculptures on small shelves attached to a black wall. The relics create a cabinet of curiosities, and the material replicates tan recyclable packing materials, similar to egg cartons. The question of use-value comes to mind here, and again in another untitled piece with completely blackened pages that is “modeled” after the Oxford Encyclopedia of Greek History. It is as if history or perhaps even books are dead. If that is the case, where is one to house encyclopedic knowledge ... or furthermore, if documentation is gone, how is anyone supposed to remember anything without some kind of visual reference, be it text or objects?

O’Dell’s recent area of conceptual focus draws from the book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance by Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Berardi’s treatise on economy focuses on the dichotomous issues of growth and debt, wherein the two are forms of societal control enacted by the financial sector—particularly when agents of commerce attempt to influence the market by manipulating language. With that, Berardi proposes that poetry become a new form of political weaponry: “Poetry as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency.”3 This insolvency, Berardi suggests, implies that language alone can be bankrupt, and that real power is in the weight of each word. In the case of O’Dell, each object is made not simply for its face value, but also for its psychological currency, the poetry of visual language.

Shaun O’Dell: Doubled is on view at Gallery 16, in San Francisco, through July 10, 2015.

"Shaun O'Dell: Doubled" editorial recommendation by DeWitt Cheng for VAS

June 19, 2015

Shaun O’DellGallery 16, San Francisco, California Recommendation by DeWitt Cheng

Continuing through July 10, 2015
Shaun O’Dell’s mixed-media paintings and other works in “Doubled” look completely au courant in terms of their formal constructions, but an ironic lyricism clings to them, which the artist’s statement (more on this later) helps to illuminate. A wall-mounted array of paper-mache oddments, their familiar gray, oatmeal-lumpy material painted white, suggests artifacts or implements from some unknown civilization. A trio of minutely detailed paintings of airbrushed dots and squiggles atop a digitally printed image that has been pixelated into incomprehensibility questions the possibility of complete knowledge, while transforming the collision of modes into an immersive, compelling visual experience.
An abstraction with jagged black forms at the margins surrounding a gold (and implicitly heavenly, timeless) center/background turns out to be a high-contrast view of architecture against a cloudless sky. Photographic images of ruined classical architecture and an obscured portrait bust are printed on marble slabs. A handmade book, “modeled after the Oxford Encyclopedia of Greek History,” is composed of black pages. Large charcoal wall drawings of a sphere (like the expanding universe), gray and flecked, faces from across the gallery its opposite, a white circle surrounded by gray background radiation. O’Dell collaborates with his wife, Emily Prince, on works entitled “Dust,” which contain traces of their respective making: powdered charcoal fallen to the floor below. This is just a small sample of the work on view, not all of which explores these issues. A number of very fine abstractions live in the eternal present.
Be sure to read O’Dell’s statement, which links past and present; Hitchcock’s film about obsession and memory, “Vertigo;" the "Portals of the Past" in Golden Gate Park, relics from the1906 earthquake and fire; occultism; Black Magic cameras; Chris Marker’s visionary film "La Jetée;" and O’Dell’s great-grandfather’s photograph of Charlie Chaplin, whom writer Christian Berardi sees as personifying “a gentle modernity ... where different viewpoints can meet, conflict, and then find progressive agreement,” i.e., a liberal synthesis of utopian ideals and social realities. (See Chaplin’s still stirring Everyman speech from his 1940 satire, "The Great Dictator") Berardi sees 1977, when Chaplin died, as the beginning of the end of the physical commons, the year of the Apple II and Johnny Rotten’s musical proclamation of the death of the future. Let’s hope that technological humanity proves Einstein wrong and grows up; stay tuned.
Via Visual Art Source

Shaun O’Dell’s mixed-media paintings and other works in “Doubled” look completely au courant in terms of their formal constructions, but an ironic lyricism clings to them, which the artist’s statement (more on this later) helps to illuminate. A wall-mounted array of paper-mache oddments, their familiar gray, oatmeal-lumpy material painted white, suggests artifacts or implements from some unknown civilization. A trio of minutely detailed paintings of airbrushed dots and squiggles atop a digitally printed image that has been pixelated into incomprehensibility questions the possibility of complete knowledge, while transforming the collision of modes into an immersive, compelling visual experience.

An abstraction with jagged black forms at the margins surrounding a gold (and implicitly heavenly, timeless) center/background turns out to be a high-contrast view of architecture against a cloudless sky. Photographic images of ruined classical architecture and an obscured portrait bust are printed on marble slabs. A handmade book, “modeled after the Oxford Encyclopedia of Greek History,” is composed of black pages. Large charcoal wall drawings of a sphere (like the expanding universe), gray and flecked, faces from across the gallery its opposite, a white circle surrounded by gray background radiation. O’Dell collaborates with his wife, Emily Prince, on works entitled “Dust,” which contain traces of their respective making: powdered charcoal fallen to the floor below. This is just a small sample of the work on view, not all of which explores these issues. A number of very fine abstractions live in the eternal present.

Be sure to read O’Dell’s statement, which links past and present; Hitchcock’s film about obsession and memory, “Vertigo;" the "Portals of the Past" in Golden Gate Park, relics from the1906 earthquake and fire; occultism; Black Magic cameras; Chris Marker’s visionary film "La Jetée;" and O’Dell’s great-grandfather’s photograph of Charlie Chaplin, whom writer Christian Berardi sees as personifying “a gentle modernity ... where different viewpoints can meet, conflict, and then find progressive agreement,” i.e., a liberal synthesis of utopian ideals and social realities. (See Chaplin’s still stirring Everyman speech from his 1940 satire, "The Great Dictator") Berardi sees 1977, when Chaplin died, as the beginning of the end of the physical commons, the year of the Apple II and Johnny Rotten’s musical proclamation of the death of the future. Let’s hope that technological humanity proves Einstein wrong and grows up; stay tuned.

Via Visual Art Source