Shaun O'Dell, "Doubled" Reviewed by Sarah Hotchkiss on KQED

June 11, 2015

Shaun O’Dell Proffers Pairs and Portals at Gallery 16 by Sarah Hotchkiss for KQED

In his second solo exhibition at Gallery 16, Shaun O’Dell draws a meandering line through the past to the present, using layers, doubling and mimicry to tie together a disparate group of two-dimensional, sculptural and video works. O’Dell’s sprawling source material includes the 1906 earthquake and fire, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, pixelated images of technology components, an ancestor’s portrait of Charlie Chaplin and grainy footage of a Stanford robotics experiment.

Through recurring motifs and an accompanying exhibition statement, O’Dell gathers these bits and pieces into an exhibition that enacts a type of thinking that is complicated, cyclical and iterative. This methodology rejects the linear and orderly approach, and in doing so, trades predictability for true surprise.

Over and over in Doubled, things are — as expected — doubled. A video shows quick cuts of two owls puffing their feathers to face unseen foes. The Dust, two wall drawings by Emily Prince, grace O’Dell’s solo show with perfect wall-high circles of charcoal — one filled solid, the other inverted — on opposite sides of the room. And the aforementioned Chaplin portrait captures the star in a slightly shifted double exposure, his two eyes now four.

Even in the personal essay that doubles as an exhibition statement, O’Dell and Prince’s family histories are positioned as parallel narratives, two story lines that ultimately converge into one family unit.

Shrouding the exhibition in a layer of mysticism is a printed image on newsprint hanging behind the gallery’s desk.Portals.2.past.carls is split in two, the top half a photograph of Carlsbad Caverns, the lower half a view of Portals of the Past, a stone portico perched on the edge of Lloyd Lake in Golden Gate Park. Today this isolated bit of architecture functions as a memorial to those who lost their lives in 1906. Local legend holds the portico is a literal portal to the spirit world; ghostly sightings abound.

Portals of the Past figures in Hitchcock’s seminal psychological thriller Vertigo as a place where Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) falls into a trance. The doubling continues: In the film, “Madeleine” is actually the hired doppelgänger Judy Barton. And then there’s the portrait of Carlotta Valdes, another dead ringer for Madeleine/Judy/Kim.

In this way, fictional and real-life history intertwine throughoutDoubled until such classification becomes meaningless. In a real gesture of “rewriting” information, two large airbrush on paper pieces show O’Dell mimicking an underlying digital print (one an enlarged multicolored Intel chip, the other a zoomed-in view of Gallery 16 from above).

The “split” appears again and again in a series of nine same-sized paintings lining one wall of the exhibition. 9. PAINTINGappears to be a continuous work on paper cut in half, with one side flipped upside down and repositioned. This and other off-kilter gestures — like the positioning of a tiny video monitor behind a forest of potted plants — make exploring Doubled a bit like spelunking in a cave of the unexpected.

If, according to the exhibition text, we are to come to “the realization that the present and the past are simultaneous,” where does that leave the future? Doubled advocates for a view of time that retains such complications, allows space for meandering, unmediated experience and unabashedly mines the past for a more meaningful understanding of the present.

Essay by Shaun O'Dell

May 29, 2015

In conjunction with his current exhibition, Doubled, on view from May 21 - July 10 at Gallery 16.
//

Emily and I see Vertigo once a year when it plays at the Castro Theatre. There’s a reference in the film to The Portals of the Past - an old portico that sits on the shores of Lloyd Lake in Golden Gate Park. The portico served as the entryway to the Alban Towne mansion that burned down in the fire that engulfed the city after the 1906 earthquake. All that remained of the house after the fire was the portico. Arnold Genthe photographed it in full moonlight with the smoldering city framed between its blackened columns. It looks like the ruin of a Greek temple somehow survived the bombing of Hiroshima. During the rebuilding period the entryway was moved to the north bank of the small lake as a memorial to those who died in the earthquake and named The Portals of the Past.

In Vertigo, Gavin Elster asks Scottie if he believes that, ”...someone out of the past, someone dead, can enter and take possession of a living being?” He says that recently a cloud has come into his wife Madeline’s eyes and then they go blank and she wanders. He follows her one-day to Golden Gate Park where she sits on a bench and stares across the lake, “...at the pillars on the far shore, the Portals of the Past.”

Emily’s great-grandmother lived in the same apartment building as Madeline during the shooting of Vertigo. It’s called the Brockelbank at 1000 Mason just down the block from where the Towne mansion burned at 1101 California. Next door to the Brockelbank is the Fairmont Hotel at 950 Mason where my great-great grandfather was a chef. He lived a few blocks down the north side of Nob Hill on Jackson St with his wife and daughter, Mabel. When I was a kid, Mabel, my great-grandmother, would tell me about the earthquake. She said fire shot out of the street and burned up most of Nob Hill and that they lived for many weeks in a tent in Duboce Park half a block from where I now live.

A folk-story developed between the years the memorial was placed in the park and the making of Vertigo. The Portals of the Past gained attention in the international occult community as a seriously charged and active passageway between this world and other dimensions of time and space. There are stories about small luminous globes hovering over the lake and ghostly figures creeping around the columns. Spiritualists of the last century warned the inexperienced not to visit the site carelessly.

I took Leon on a bike ride to The Portals of the Past. We rode along the lake on a thin dirt path up to the bright marble steps. When we arrived there was a man with a tripod and a very sleek black video camera. He was filming something inside the portico at the top of one of the columns. Swallows were swooping all around us and frantic chirping filled the air. The man said he was filming the swallow chicks. He walked over to us and played back his recording of the mother hovering at the nest as the chicks ate from her beak. The HD resolution of the camera made the feeding scene horrific to me. The sharpness and detail of all the regurgitated stuff — craning baby bird necks with gaping beaks chirping wildly — crammed onto the tiny screen while the actual thing was happening just above our heads gave me an uneasy feeling. My anxiety intensified when he started talking about “black magic” and “the black magic people” interspersed with animated description of the cameras technical features.

I was beginning to turn the bike to leave when a man in a motorized wheelchair pulled up next to us. He turned the chair to face the lake and like Madeline stared quietly out over the water. The cameraman continued praising the Black Magic - which I now realized was the name of the camera manufacturer. Leon signaled that it was time to go and we pedaled off toward the beach.

“It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. As far back as I can remember, said Austerlitz, I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all...”

-WG Sebald, Austerlitz, 2001

Chris Marker talks about seeing Vertigo when it was first released in 1958. He says that he stayed in the theatre for the rest of that day’s showings and returned the next day and the next until he had watched the film nineteen times. He goes on to say that the film produces a time portal on screen. Marker has said his film La Jetée – a film in which a man travels in time after nuclear apocalypse has destroyed most of the planet to ask the past and the future to rescue the present – is a direct response to Vertigo.

I am always shaken by the tragic intensity of the final scene in Vertigo. Scottie stares into the abyss knowing his obsessive act to remake the past has cast him into psychic oblivion - or in Marker’s words, a ”Vertigo of time.”

The Vertigo of time appears in La Jetée when after fifty days of trying to penetrate and remain in the past the Man succeeds and finds the Woman inside the Paris Museum of Natural History walking among taxidermied animals and large vitrines filled with stuffed birds. The animals and the Woman are timeless and perfect - they are ideal beings. This is a moment of ineffable emotional intensity. The Man is falling in love not only with the Woman, but also the time and the place of this love – the past. He has managed the same feat as Scotty and gone back in time to an idealized moment. The scene is saturated in heartbreak and longing. The Man has returned to the time and place that he knows has already been obliterated by the tragic decisions of the future. The Man also knows that the Woman is already dead. He can only be with her if he impossibly remains in the past. It is like Sandor Krasna in Marker’s film San Soleil says of Vertigo, “It is the only film capable of portraying impossible memory, insane memory.”

In the 1920s my great-grandfather Otto Schellenberg worked as a portrait photographer at Paramount and Universal Studios. There’s a family story that he took a portrait of Charlie Chaplin that my mother now has. I recently found a number of glass plate negatives credited to his studio in the collection of the Museum Of Man in San Diego. All the images are documentation of the opening exhibition of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition called, The Story of Man Through The Ages. The archive notes describe the photographs as “indoor portraits.” They are crisp large format images of naturally lit Arts and Crafts style exhibit halls filled with vitrines. The vitrines are packed with bronze and plaster busts showing age cycle and racial variation throughout man’s evolution as well as diorama’s of southwest Indians and their pottery, clothing, jewelry, drawings, and a collection of Peruvian skulls.

Otto’s photographs made me think of the museum scene in La Jetée with its vitrines and natural light cascading down from the skylights onto the faces of the Man and Woman and stuffed animals. In La Jetée, the Woman calls the Man her ”ghost” and here in Otto’s images, emptied of living people, I imagine them both as ghosts slipping and sliding between reflections in the cabinet glass. The title of the exhibition kept running through my mind, The Story of Man Through The Ages.

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. A sense of loss and melancholy comes over me and it’s difficult to believe I ever existed or will exist in the future. I feel adrift in a changeless fog like time and memory have crystalized into an opaque nothingness.

Franco Berardi says the future is over. Time he says will go on, but our collective and personal belief in a better future has collapsed. The modernist dream of unending and more prosperous futures, are in ruins. The possibility to imagine a future is directly related to our material conditions. Our final utopian vision, technology and what Berardi calls the Wired ideology, were supposed to have made the world a better place with more equality, less working hours and more leisure. Instead we have a society in paralysis with occasional outbursts of rage.

In The Uprising, Berardi singles out the year 1977 as the point where the future begins to end. The Apple II is released and creates a “user friendly interface for the digital acceleration and unification of time.” It is also the year Johnny Rotten sings there is no future and that Charlie Chaplin dies. Berardi writes,

“...The death of that man, in my perception, represents the end of the possibility of a gentle modernity, the end of the perception of time as a contradictory, controversial place where different viewpoints can meet, conflict, and then find progressive agreement...Charlie Chaplin is the man on the watchtower, looking at the city from a perilous vantage point, looking at the city of time, but also at the city where time can be negotiated and governed...”

The sun and the moon at this moment in Earth’s history – even though the sun’s diameter is about 400 times larger than the moon – appear to be the same size because the sun is also 400 times farther away. So the sun and the moon appear nearly the same size as seen from Earth. This is why we can sometimes see a total eclipse of the sun. But as time passes the moon is slowly moving away from us. So, in the future it will be too small to cover the sun and we will no longer see a total eclipse from Earth.

Linear and cyclical time exist together in the universe. For almost all of Vertigo Scottie is caught in an eternal return: time is repeating for him. But at the climax of the movie the loop is severed by his obsession to make it everlasting. The tragedy hits him when the spiral unravels and time becomes linear again. The time of total eclipses on Earth is not fixed. Just as Scottie is eventually torn from his recursive fixation, so too will the perfectly doubled circles of sun and moon forever part. Eternity and impermanence coexist. The Vertigo of time is the realization that the present and the past are simultaneous.

• Shaun O’Dell, 2015

Shaun O'Dell: Doubled // Opening May 21 6-9 pm

May 07, 2015

We are excited to welcome back artist Shaun O’Dell for his second solo exhibition at
Gallery 16, on view May 21st to July 10th. Opening reception will be held Thursday,
May 21st from 6pm-9pm.

Doubled will be an exhibition of recent mixed media paintings, sculpture, video and
a pair of wall drawings by Emily Prince.

In Doubled, O’Dell started with an old portico in Golden Gate Park called The Portals
of the Past. His interest in the site comes from its reference in Hitchcock’s Vertigo
and his own experience of it on daily bike rides. In both the film and San Francisco
folklore the Portals of the Past are associated with the supernatural and a disruption
in our understanding of the physical world. O’Dell uses the Portals as a catalyst to
make an associative journey through autobiographical, historical and fictional
narratives that contribute to an impossible mapping of his position in space and time.

Recently, O’Dell has been influenced by Franco Berardi’s book, "The Uprising: On
Poetry and Finance". In the book Berardi describes the conjunctive and the
connective modes of thinking. The conjunctive is an associative kind of thinking. The
connective is a reduction of everything to straight lines and points (digitization comes
to mind) everything becomes standardized. O’Dell’s recent work is a reaction to
connective thinking becoming the dominant way in which society operates.

Shaun O'Dell was born in 1968 in Beeville, Texas. He is a graduate of Stanford
University’s MFA Program and has exhibited both nationally and internationally
appearing recently at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York; Inman Gallery, Houston; Jack
Hanley, New York; dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel; The A Foundation, Liverpool; Berkley
Art Museum, Berkley; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco and
San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco. His work can be found in the collections of
the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney
Museum of American Art and the de Young Museum.

//

Urban Digital Color Recent Projects Spring 2015

May 02, 2015

Over the past year we've been working with Bay Area photographer Hal Fischer on reprinting of the complete portfolio of Gay Semiotics and the billboard that was produced in conjunction with the original exhibition in 1977. Next week the reproduction of the original billboard will be on display at Pearl and Market Street in the Castro. Be sure to scan the Castro skyline and check out the full exhibition of Gay Semiotics at Ratio 3 on May 22nd. Also there's a great interview between Hal Fischer and Julia Byran-Wilson in the Spring 2015 edition of Aperture.
http://www.aperture.org/blog/gay-semiotics-revisited/

We've had the pleasure of working with photographer Lucy Gray scanning and printing her body of work, Balancing Acts. In March, Princeton Architectural Press published her monograph of the same title. Gray will also be exhibiting Balancing Acts at the Harvey Milk Photo Center May 9th-June 7th. The opening reception is May 9th 1pm-4pm and from 2pm-4pm she will be on hand signing copies of her book!

https://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781616892548

This spring we published Dean Byington by Dean Byington. Byington has worked with UDC for many years, this publication gives insight into the artist's history, source materials and methods. It also includes an original short story and poem by the acclaimed author and essayist Rick Moody.

http://www.gallery16.com/index.php?page=books&book=byington

Dean Byington will be exhibiting The New City at Leslie Tonkonow Gallery in New York City, May 16th-June 10th!

http://www.tonkonow.com/exhibitions.html

Alex Zecca : New Work

March 20, 2015

Alex Zecca: New Work
March 20 - May 15, 2015

Gallery 16 is pleased to present its sixth solo exhibition with artist Alex Zecca.

The new drawings and sculptures of Zecca’s continue the artist’s obsessive and precise methodology. They are time-intensive, process-oriented works made through a laborious accumulation of steady inked lines. Each vibrant abstraction is the literal record of thousands of painstakingly rendered marks, made with only a pen and straight edge.

Art critic Kenneth Baker wrote, “Alex Zecca has long worked with such methodical consistency that I go to each new exhibition of his expecting to see more of the same. But he has not yet failed to surprise. You move around certain of Zecca’s new works on paper expecting flickers of iridescence, so keenly do they recall the powdery luminosity of a butterfly wing or exotic plumage.”

San Francisco artist Alex Zecca’s precise, hand-drawn works marry a sense of the scientific with the art of craft. While process is at the center of his work, his thousands of steady, painstakingly inking lines ultimately reveal extravagant optical Moire patterns. Each piece is produced with a preordained number of lines and colors, melding the conceptual and the handmade.

After studying at CCA, the San Francisco Art Institute and in Italy, Zecca has gone on to show his work in numerous solo exhibitions at San Francisco’s Gallery 16, and has been included alongside other masters of pattern like Yayoi Kusama and Ross Bleckner in the Crocker Art Museum’s exhibition Approaching Infinity: The Richard Green Collection of Meticulous Abstraction.

“My work’s central focus continues to be the result of cumulative action and precise structure. Each drawing implements a unique algorithm. The intersecting lines of which create organic Moire forms.” -AZ

Interview with Charles Linder in SFAQ, Issue 19 // By Paul Karlstrom

February 18, 2015

CHARLES LINDER: IN CONVERSATION WITH PAUL KARLSTROM

SFAQ_Issue-19_C Linder Interview

A wonderful tribute to Rex Ray from KQED

February 11, 2015

Finding Beauty Along the Edges: Remembering Rex Ray (1956–2015)
By Christian L. Frock
Published February 10, 2015

News of San Francisco artist and designer Rex Ray’s death rippled out over the ether Monday afternoon, with many friends and admirers expressing sorrow on social media. Author Rebecca Solnit posted on Facebook about meeting Ray in 1989, and in noting that he designed her first book, wrote, “He made ‘high’ art as well as design and then they merged into something gorgeous and extravagant and joyous and very colorful.” Shortly thereafter a warm tribute to Ray went up on David Bowie’s website, coinciding with a heartfelt post by Griff Williams, owner of Gallery 16 and the artist’s gallerist of nearly 20 years. That Ray’s work so fluidly traverses art and design is a testament to his inestimable talents; that his work is so widely embraced is a testament to him.

I didn’t know Ray personally, but I would know his work from across the room. I first encountered his collages in 2002 at ModernBook/Gallery494, a gallery-cum-bookstore then located in Palo Alto that featured small exhibitions of highly crafted artworks and art books with a strong design aesthetic. Small works on panel by Ray lined the walls; their lush resin coated surfaces and exquisite color palettes drew me in off the street like a bee to honey, and I wasn’t the only one. I worked at a gallery two doors down and everyone who walked in asked me if I’d seen Ray’s show. The work held broad appeal in Palo Alto, to be sure, where Joseph Eichler’s mid-century modern homes are symbols of good taste and timeless design. Ray’s intricate cut paper collages have always been simultaneously retro and contemporary.

His finely detailed images are often evocative of foliage and often present a bejeweled dreamscape, firmly entrenched in loveliness. Ferris wheels, starbursts and delicate chains make appearances, as do organic forms composed of tear-shaped cut paper petals. Ray’s color combinations are somehow optimistic, or maybe it was his implementation of cutaway shapes, giving practical beauty to the cuttings others might have thrown away. But not Ray — in his work negative space is as essential as positive space, and it speaks volumes about his eye for detail. Coming upon his work now, I look for the “edge events,” small details that give powerful visual impact to the edges of his work. The eye could languish in the center of his compositions quite happily, but Ray also knew to celebrate their boundaries.

Even if the work hinged somehow on being “too beautiful” for some people — we all know the type — his rock ‘n’ roll side could engage anyone. By day, of course, Ray was a graphic designer with a penchant for music. He did corporate gigs and commercial projects for the likes of Apple and Levi’s, including a construction barrier that may have one-upped a lot of public art on display at the time. Early on, he designed posters and T-shirts for ACT UP, and later he created concert posters for just about everyone, including Florence and the Machine, Radiohead, Kanye West, Rihanna, The Rolling Stones, Bryan Adams, Beck, R. E. M., and Paul McCartney, among many others.

Beyond all of that, he experimented with putting his work on everything from posters to note cards, mugs to iPad covers, jigsaw puzzles to decorative trays, and beyond. He illustrated children’s books and calendars — and once even wrapped a Smartcar in his designs for charity. The beauty of covering all the bases, the so-called high and low, is that the work belongs everywhere, from the museum walls to the gift shop to the street. I vividly recall seeing SFMOMA’s gift shop window tricked out a few years ago with a display of Ray’s wares. He also had many museum shows, of course, and reproductions, as fun as they are, are never as amazing as the work is in person, but frankly it was his ability and his willingness to experiment in so many arenas that was a huge part of his appeal.

Purists have debated whether Ray’s art was really design or whether his design was really art, but these boring distinctions hardly mattered — really, who cares? He kept working, prolifically imprinting his legacy everywhere. Gone too soon, at just age 58 after years of battling lymphoma, he left a tremendous array of art and design to populate the void. The work that remains, all of it, reminds us to look for art high and low — and to find beauty along the edges however, wherever we can.

Work by Rex Ray is currently featured in the traveling group exhibition,Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting, which is organized by René Paul Barilleaux, Chief Curator, for San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum. A public memorial for Ray is scheduled for March 12, 6pm, at Gallery 16. For more information, see Gallery 16’s site.

None of Us Is Doing This Right: Improvising in the Art World // A conversation between Tucker Nichols and Griff Williams

February 11, 2015

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 6-8 PM @ GALLERY 16.
Please join us! RSVP.

How did we think a life in the arts was going to look? And how is it actually now that we’re doing it? How far does following your gut really take you? What do we do with all of the unspoken rulesof finding success? And, of course, should you put prices on the checklist or not?

Please join Tucker and Griff as they continue their ongoing conversation about navigating a life in the arts. But this time they’ll do it in front of an audience. They will probably field questions and maybe ask them of people in the audience too.

Please come have a drink or two and listen to these two dig a conversational hole from which they can’t possibly emerge.

This talk will take place amidst Tucker Nichols’ exhibition, on view at Gallery 16 until March 6th. For this exhibition Tucker presents a show of new paintings, his fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is made up of 40 paintings and framed drawings, mostly of vases with flowers, a long-favored subject for the artist. “Flowers are a near perfect subject for a painting,” Nichols says. “They offer a bit of content but they can really look like anything. They’ve also been used as a stand in for inexpressible ideas since humans first started talking.” The new paintings explore more abstracted forms as well, in some cases resembling smokestacks or disheveled cakes.

Earlier this year, Nichols began making small flower paintings on paper to send by mail to sick friends. These evolved into a permanent commission of 40 framed works at the new UCSF Hospital at Mission Bay opening in February. This fall he began making the larger paintings for this exhibition “for people too busy to take care of real plants.”

Unlike previous installations in which Nichols combined many works into larger pieces, this show is composed exclusively of stand-alone paintings and drawings. “I like playing with context and location in installations, but it’s good to make things that can live on their own too,” Nichols says. “These paintings don’t need anything, not even water.”

REX RAY 1956-2015

February 09, 2015

It is with great sadness and a wounded heart that I write with the news of Rex Ray's death. He passed away last night after a long struggle at the age of 59. I’m honored to say he was my friend of nearly 25 years.

At a very early age, Rex knew that art-making was his passion. And for the
rest of his life he worked everyday at fine tuning his craft. Work was
important to Rex--The work of making art, the work of relying on his
imagination and accepting the consequences. He invented a way of working
as an artist that was singularly his own. How many of us can say that? How
many of us can ignore our critics and truly follow our own particular
sensibility? Rex did that everyday. Not without self doubt, he had that for sure.
Not without failure, he was frank about that as well. But, he lived his life and made his work with grace.

He loved music. Did he! He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and
Tower Records. He was an avid collector of vinyl records with a wide open
mind and a curious ear. His collection was the envy of his friends and the
collection itself was frequently incorporated into his graphic artwork.
No pussyfooting!

His epic catalog of rock posters is enough to cement his creative
reputation. His tour posters and album art is a who’s who of rock royalty
including David Bowie, The Stones, Radiohead, Beck, Robert Plant, REM and many more.

But, that was his day job. His passion was a lifelong studio art practice. Making
artwork was the unerring focus of his life. His exuberant canvases were so
singularly his, made with a collage technique developed through trial and
error over decades of constant work with the goal of describing his own
particular sense of beauty. It just so happens that many thousands of
others found that it was their sense of beauty as well.

I am stunned by the global outpouring of those touched by his work. He
was a true populist art star. Rex exhibited his work in the second show I
organized after founding Gallery 16. For the next 20 years I’ve
marveled at the way he crafted a life in the arts utterly of his own
making. He was often opposed to the dominant trends of the art world, but
was always aware of them. His success was not aided by powers in the art
world, collectors or curators. His success was the result of a populist
outpouring of people who coveted his work. While all artists borrow and
steal from those who came before, Rex did so while developing a style that
was uniquely his own. A style that has become so routinely imitated. The
artist David Robbins proclaimed “ Make whatever you like and accept the
consequences without complaint. Don’t ask curators. Don’t ask the
marketplace. Don’t ask New York. Don’t ask Hollywood. Insist on complete
access to your own imagination.” This could have been Rex’s mantra.

I loved Rex. His bright smile, his dark humor, his effortless cool, his
eagerness to say YES! Rex was a deeply driven creative spirit and an
extremely humble man. He was generous to others, self deprecating and
fiercely loyal.

So, in Rex’s wake lets look within ourselves, within each other, and
embolden those gifts that make each of us distinct: not wealth or fame,
intellect or pedigree, but the extraordinary beauty of the human heart.

-Griff Williams

ArtLTD artist profile: Tucker Nichols (January 2105)

January 24, 2015

Art LTD Magazine
artist profile: Tucker Nichols

By Barbara Morris

With the work of artist Tucker Nichols, the whole is invariably far greater than the sum of its parts. Nichols’ studio is a cheerful orderly space, his small vibrant drawings and paintings dot the walls—grids and stripes in red, blue, violet, green or DayGlo pink, or simple calligraphic line drawings of sticks, plants and vases. “Art is such a beautiful language of complexity,” says Nichols. Given to creating multitudes of small works on paper each day, his work is as much about the “editing” process as it is the act of making them.

Born in Boston, he became interested in Asian art history as an undergraduate at Brown University. In a survey class, he was struck by the ability of a brushstroke from an ancient Chinese painting to reach across the years and convey an intense feeling: “I’ve been following that ever since.” He received an undergraduate degree in Chinese Art History and moved to Taiwan, immersing himself in a community of lively and innovative artists and musicians.

Returning to the US, he obtained a position at the Asia Society in Manhattan. “It was a place that was really understaffed, but with a very ambitious director and program,” he recalls, “so it was ideal really for me to do things for which I was not actually trained for or entitled, really, to do, like exhibition design... handling a lot of priceless ceramics and scrolls.” Deciding that the kind of creative life he wanted to pursue—perhaps, he thought, as a museum director—would be best served by further study of art history, he embarked on a master’s program at Yale. “Pretty much as soon as I got there,” he revealed, “I knew that I had taken a wrong step.” He simultaneously began having serious health problems, diagnosed as Crohn’s disease. Nichols managed to complete his MA requirements in one year. Nichols enjoyed several summers during college spent with friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, moving to the West Coast in 1989. During the dotcom boom, he worked for an internet start-up with a “somewhat ill-conceived plan to sell fine art on line.” When that ended, and with continuing health problems, Nichols came to the realization that he did not want to waste his precious time and energy in a corporate job, and started to reinvent himself as an artist.

He first began showing with SF’s Lincart gallery, where director Charles Linder became a very important figure in his early career. Moving into an empty studio space near Linder’s, Nichols realized that the space had been vacated by a failed start-up. “It looked like they’d left in kind of a hurry,” he laughs. He began drawing directly on the walls, creating a hypothetical “brainstorming session gone awry” flow chart, as though he were the last man standing at the company. This work has continued to feed into other conceptual projects and commissions, such as a recent one for Facebook.

Griff Williams’ Gallery 16 has been showing the artist since 2009. “I found in Griff the perfect collaborator, he is nothing if not open to artists showing things they don’t quite understand yet.” Nichols’ last exhibition there, “Stockhouse,” mounted in conjunction with a theatrical set piece commissioned by the SFMOMA, included small works on paper in DayGlo pinks, black, lemon yellow or bright greens with simple, child-like designs and patterns, all carefully arranged into wall-size compositions. The result was to ultimately convey a great sense of intention that becomes, in some way, profound.

Nichols’ upcoming show at Gallery 16 in February will tie into the concept of how objects convey meaning. Nichols expects that it will evolve from a recent commission of 40 works for the children’s infusion ward at UCSF Hospital at Mission Bay. “I’m just completing the first project that really unites my health world with my art world.” Nichols himself regularly visits an infusion center to keep his Crohn’s disease in check. In one work, a simple outline of a vase on an irregularly cut piece of paper sprouts wayward lines, these stems capped with bold circles in red-orange that convey the essence of blossoms, perhaps poppies. “In a hospital environment you see a lot of flowers in vases in people’s rooms,” Nichols says. “It’s an attempt to communicate… something beyond words.”

Tucker Nichols’ new solo show will be on view at Gallery 16, in San Francisco. From January 26 – March 6, 2015. www.gallery16.com

Published January 2015

Tucker Nichols - ArtLTD 2015