Park Life is happy to announce the opening of Shraya d’Ashureta, an exhibit of new works by Esther Elia.
“Shraya d’Ashureta” loosely translates in Assyrian to “the light of the Assyrian woman.” This references my crude attempts at lamp making, but also my earnest joy of painting Assyrian bodybuilder deities over the last few years. As we all doom-scrolled through the pandemic, my feed was filled with Instagram reels of Assyrian women in my community bodybuilding and powerlifting. I started painting my community members as bodybuilder deities, referencing our ancient pantheon, and thinking of these new figures as the offspring of our ancient ancestors who followed us into diaspora to provide strength and protection for us there. These “new” deities now show up in different applications as I think about ancient Assyrian palace art, large bas-reliefs and monumental sculptures, and play with dimension, material, and concept.
As a final thought, I’ve been reflecting lately about Assyrian women — our intensity, many times our unlike-ability — the many women in my lineage that were tough and lacking in warmth. As I represent them in deity form, they’re allowed to be intimidating, even unlikeable. Their job is to protect, and I wonder how I can better celebrate the “bakhta karobta” (woman who angers quickly), the QinTayta (dangerous), the Palashta (fighter/warrior) — how these traits can illuminate my own path – can become my own “shraya” (light).
Esther Elia is a mixed Assyrian-Irish artist from Turlock, California. She graduated from California College of the Arts, BFA 2019 and University of New Mexico, MFA 2023. This is Esther’s second show at Park Life.
Park Life II, a paper goods and homewares focused extension of the Main store is open everyday 11-5 at 201 Clement St..right across the street from our current store.
Park Life is proud to present Third Culture Kid, new work by Oakland-based artist Dawline-Jane Oni-Eseleh.
The term “Third Culture Kid” was first coined in the 1950’s to describe the expatriate children of diplomats who created their own culture from a blend of their birth country, the culture of their parents, and the culture in which they currently lived. They simultaneously belonged to each and to none, but what does it mean to belong to a place?
As I explore my place in the African Diaspora as a person apart from my ancestral culture who lives in another more Eurocentric one, I often think about perception, history and integration, both in the face of the dominant culture and on a personal level within myself. I think about the fact that within 1 generation, I have lost the language of my grandparents as well as their culture, food, names and faces.
As a body of work Third Culture Kid explores visual stories from West African history and the African diaspora from a deeply personal lens. I am inspired by the colorful patterns of Dutch wax fabric and Yoruba indigo dyeing, and I incorporated images and scenes from my daily life – flowers, birds, insects and even stray thoughts into the block printed patterns created for these paintings. The history of colonization, displacement and resource theft from the African continent and its global impact on its people, and particularly my family, figure into my thinking around the creation of each piece. For me, the idea of belonging is a constantly shifting idea. Every day I create the record of my new third culture, a blend of old and new.
Artist Bio
Dawline-Jane Oni-Eseleh (she/her) is a first-generation Afro-Caribbean visual artist and arts educator who lives and works on Ohlone land (Oakland, CA). Her work explores memory, history, and personal narratives.
A New York native, Ms. Oni-Eseleh attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and has exhibited her work in spaces across the United States and internationally. Her illustration work has been featured in The LA Times, ProPublica and Teen Vogue.
Park Life is happy to announce the opening of Cold Comfort, an exhibition of new paintings by artist Martin Machado.
From the Artist:
Sometime toward the beginning of the pandemic I began a ritual of occasionally making plein air paintings at night. They were typically done around the time of the full moon each month and mostly painted from a beach or pier looking out to sea. They became little meditative excursions, walking or biking to find a good spot, painting with a dimmed headlamp, trying to keep my eyes adjusted to the darkness yet have just enough light to see my canvas and palette. Of course, there are challenges associated with working outdoors at night; numb hands from the sheer cold of the sea air in the middle of winter, having to sneak onto a locked pier, as well as those typical fears that come with being alone in the dark and wondering what might sneak up on you. The resulting paintings were usually a surprise when seen in the light back at home, both a record of what I had seen and imagined. This is a collection of some of these plein air works as well as paintings done in the studio that were directly influenced by the palette and style that resulted from those experiments.
Martin lives in San Francisco with his family and has shown his work internationally and has been featured in The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times Magazine, Juxtapoz, New American Paintings, and most recently The Surfer’s Journal. This is his second show at Park Life.
We’re excited to announce our new show featuring paintings by Joe Ferriso. Associate will be on view March 26th thru May 6th with an opening reception on March 26th from 6-8 pm. VIEW WORKS
From the artist:
All of the paintings have been made in the last few months while living at The Sea Ranch. I’ve also created a book to accompany the exhibition with thirty-five color reproductions and a bit of writing about my life and painting process.
“The Sea Ranch is a sculpture garden of large and small wooden boxes filled with people thinking, living, and creating in an otherwise sparsely inhabited stretch of coastline. As a community bound by architectural codes, there is a visual attitude to the place. The homes are like a saw blade cutting through the bluffs and hills, reciprocating triangle forms that both separate and blend into the natural landscape. Sometimes hiding in the hedgerows or peeking up through mounds of grass, the homes here exhibit emotional characteristics. The open eyes of the windows, peering over the ocean or deep into the woods, ruminate on the place. I try to paint their expressions, heightened through glowing color relationships of prismatic grays punctuated by pure bursts of color. This is the imagining part, to see in a spectrum of colors what is limited by grayscale and earth tones.”
We will also be releasing a new book with the artist..
Park Life is pleased to announce the opening of Soft Magic, an exhibition of new paintings by Elizabeth Walsh.
Looking at the world of plants as a guiding force, where one sees their own reflection in the spirits and energies found in the dark spaces. These works attempt to interpret the power found in the natural world, possibly harnessing these elements as divine guides. The imagery hopes to stimulate internal paths that suggest ideas of revelation, self-love, acceptance and rebirth, sometimes felt but not seen.
Liz Walsh lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Inspired by the plant life and city sprawl of California, Liz’s practice is focused on the mix between technology and the entropy of the natural world.
Liz received an MFA in Painting from CCAC, and a BFA in Painting from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has attended the Headlands Center of the Arts residency as well as a residency at Cooper Union in NYC.
Park Life is happy to announce the opening of Jeffrey Sincich’s first exhibit with the gallery, OPEN/CLOSED, which will feature a series of new fabric and mixed media works.
Open/Closed is a body of work that aims to highlight every day, essential services and objects
that often went unnoticed or were under appreciated pre pandemic. Shining a light on the things
that helped keep our lives running during the past year and a half of uncertainty and daily change
is the artist’s attempt to say thank you. Signs advertising constantly changing hours, window
grates keeping people out while also attempting to be beautiful, and an ever-changing landscape
of businesses are all inspiration for this work and are a reminder that it requires a constant effort
to keep a community running.
Inspired by the built landscape around us and how we interact with it, Sincich is intrigued by
handmade signage, architecture, long standing storefronts and other human made alterations of a
place. Signs offering repair work, storefronts selling everyday products and architecture that
shows signs of use and wear all offer an insight into how our world works. He believes these
things are worth celebrating, as they are what create the unique fabric of the places that we live.
Sincich uses quilting to represent the feeling of comfort, tradition and history. Like a handmade
quilt, elements of the urban environment offer people a sense of place, belonging and safety.
They both have traces of the hand that created them and are unique in their own ways. They can
be displayed, passed down, altered, mended or repurposed or discarded. They each represent a
part of their community, surroundings and history and offer different meanings for anyone who
lives with or around them. The use of found objects brings a sense of history or familiarity that
can hold different connotations to each viewer.
Bio
Jeffrey Sincich (he/him, b. 1990) is an artist based in San Francisco, CA. He graduated from the
University of Florida in 2012 with a BFA in ceramics and has co-run a sign painting company in
Portland, OR since 2015. His work uses textiles and found objects to highlight everyday objects
and scenes from his environment that often go unnoticed but deserve attention.
Header Body Footer is Bijan Berahimi’s commentary on digital life in the pandemic era of pervasive professional burnout paired with more time to think, feel, and gain a deeper understanding of oneself. The body of artwork explores the tensions between the positive and negative aspects of technology—and its impact on our daily lives.
Confronting the ways in which the digital universe co-opts reality, each painting reflects the constant blurring of lines between our digital and physical worlds. The subject matter is informed by the artist’s career as a graphic designer alongside his meditations on his own existence. Through the use of colorful grids and shapes, Bijan ruminates on his Iranian heritage, painting geometric patterns reminiscent of the Islamic ornamentation that he grew up around. As the artist spends much of his workday staring at a glowing black mirror—obsessing over pixels—each painting acts as an outlet for a deeper expression and link to the ideas that inhabit his physical world.
About the Artist
Bijan Berahimi (b. 1989) is an Iranian-American artist based in Portland, Oregon. In 2013, he graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with a degree in graphic design. His work focuses the visual world around us, highlighting mundane, everyday situations and interactions.
Park Life is happy to announce our second gallery show with artist Gina Contreras. Gina’s show titled Hey There Lonely Girl will include a selection of new paintings and works on paper.
Artist Statement
I approach my work with a symbolic perspective, painting melancholy self-portraits that are light-hearted and depict honestly my aspirations and disappointments with Western beauty standards and romantic prospects. I seek to produce and create an abundance of sexual vulnerability that reflects and accepts the physical space I take up, but not to minimize myself, to make others —or the male driven aesthetic ideal—comfortable.
Bio
Born in the Central Valley of California, Gina M. Contreras incorporates drawing and painting to examine the complexity of traditional and cultural standards. Contreras uses self-portraits to embrace the narrative between her conventional Chicana upbringing and her admiration for modern lowbrow culture of self-awareness and body acceptance. In 2008 she received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and internationally. She currently lives and works in San Francisco.
In the era of Covid, physical human connection became something more complicated and required a new layer of risk assessment for actions we once took for granted.
Next Best Thing is a series of felted wool sculptures that is meant to be visually inviting and approachable utilizing soft textures and playful colors. The forms are inspired by the parts of people and life we missed while adjusting our lives to conform to a new, precautionary, lifestyle. The materials used in this collection represent our new alertness to microbial safety with wool’s natural anti-bacterial traits. Everything about these pieces are meant to invite people to come in close.
Living in the taboo of touch and connection for over a year, I want to celebrate the real connections in our life with a deeper sense of preciousness.
The abundance of my work seems silly and playful which is visually approachable at face value but there is a personal story behind each of these quirky creations. My aim is to utilize the power of play, as a vehicle, to replenish one’s emotional energy, and inspire stronger connections between us. My artwork is quite colorful and made with the intention for all to enjoy but there is always a deeper meaning.
Risa Culbertson is a multimedia artist, illustrator, and owner of Papa Llama; a playful stationery company based out of San Francisco. Specializing in wacky, whimsical, and colorful work meant to brighten up the gloomiest of days. Risa is constantly experimenting with a wide variety of mediums including paper art, felting, sculpting, illustration, stop-motion animation and more. Her artwork is all about being playful as a way to recharge the creative spirit and find ways to stay connected to those we love.
Park Life is proud to present Night Diver Press and Friends, an exhibit featuring independent printing and publishing presses Sun Night Editions, Floss Editions, Tiny Splendor, Night Diver Press and others. These independent print studios will present new prints, books, zines, paper goods, and other artist editions. Based in the East Bay, these printers provide artists the ability to create works within traditional printmaking techniques: Screen Printing, Relief, RISO, Monotype, & Bookbinding.
We are excited to host this month-long Gallery event that will highlight and expand artists' creative
practice while providing avenues to reach new audiences and collectors.
This collection of presses represents a cross section of a much larger network of artists, publishers,
printmakers, zine-makers, art book enthusiasts, galleries, etc. We selected these specific presses for this
exhibition mainly because we are huge fans of their work but also because we have worked on projects
together to some degree. For example – Sun Night Editions has screen printed the covers for some of
Floss Editions’ books. Tiny Splendor has let us use their Riso machines to print our books in exchange for
screen printing some of their book covers. Sun Night has printed transparencies for our screenprints..
The list goes on.
There is a shared mentality among most small presses of universal access that makes for a larger
network of tools and resources needed for printing and publishing. If you don’t have the thing you need
for a project in your studio, odds are somebody you know knows somebody who does. This benefits not
only us but the artists we work with and supports the networks needed for an art community to thrive.
Night Diver Press
Night Diver is the collaborative art practice of Peter Calderwood and Lena Gustafson. Night Diver Press is
our small print publishing studio with a mission to work with visual artists to develop original works
intended for reproduction and print media. We mostly use screenprint and risograph to create and
publish multiples in the form prints, books, and a magazine called ‘Practice’.
Sun Night Editions
Sun Night Editions is a print publishing house run by Yoni Asega and Drew Grasso in West Oakland. We
provide artists the ability to create works within traditional printmaking techniques: Screen Printing,
Relief, Monotype, and Bookbinding. Sun Night Editions concerns itself with sustaining and strengthening the diversity essential to an artistic career that is mutually beneficial to the artist and to their community.
Floss Editions
Floss Editions is a risograph printing and publishing house run by Meg Fransee and Aaron Gonzalez out
of their home in Oakland, CA.
Tiny Splendor
Tiny Splendor started in 2012 as a tiny collective, traveling around sharing our and our friends’ artwork
out of a small wooden fold-up gallery. We’ve since grown into two separate studios, one in Berkeley and
one in Los Angeles, providing print and publishing services to artists locally and from around the world.
We continue to pursue self-publishing and a love of ink on paper, producing print editions, zines, books,
Matt Gil received his BA from San Jose State University and has been exhibiting his sculptures for the past 30 years in solo and group shows. His work has been featured in several shows in both private and public spaces in the Bay Area, including the Bank of America building and the Oakland Museum of California at City Center. In 2005, Gil was honored with a residency at Kunststiftung Lutz Ackerman Bildhauer, Gäufelden-Nebringen, Germany. Additionally, Gil’s work is held in several prestigious public and private collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the San Jose Museum of Art; Oracle Corporation, Belmont, CA; Allergan, Irvine, CA; Yahoo! Sunnyvale, CA; Saks Fifth Avenue, New York, NY; and the Sydney International Airport, Sydney, Australia, among many others. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, Architectural Digest, Artwork, flavorpill.com and California Art Review.
Matt Gil’s passion for form is evident in his distinctive pieces that reflect his freewheeling use of ideas and shapes. Gil’s superb craftsmanship, whereby he hand-fabricates his sculptures, seamlessly blend a classic and playful sensibility.
What do we value? Who is ‘we’? What is ‘value’? Where is everyone? Are you ok?
Be In Touch, is a series of new works by Caitlyn Galloway. The show, which includes painting and collage, looks for signs of life in the disorienting loneliness and individuation of late capitalism, specifically from within the depths of pandemic isolation. Using an almost-legible vocabulary of numbers, letters, strokes and symbols, presented alongside escapist collages made from farm seed catalogues, the series is a critical digestion of the prevailing social order that defines value predominantly through transaction, and less through mutuality, vitality, and care.
Caitlyn Galloway is a visual artist based in San Francisco. Her work, often informed in part by her training as a sign painter and her experience as a farmer, is an ongoing study of all that is alive in the city.
We are happy to announce of forest and shore, an exhibit of new works from Bay Area-based artist Jonathan Anzalone. Anzalone will be showcasing a new body of work that includes paintings and sculptures of wood, plaster, cement, sand, and pigment.
Forest and shore are ecosystems that provide the material and inspiration for these paintings and sculptures. –Forest: a dense growth of trees and underbrush, which absorbs carbon, supplies oxygen, and provides timber for our homes. –Shore: a place where water meets land, consisting of broken, sifted, and deposited sediments. The fusion of organic matter serves as the foundation for this work, which combines wood and sediment into configurations that illuminate and honor the material and its natural origin.
This will be Anzalone’s 4th show with Park Life. Jonathan Anzalone has an active workshop in the Richmond district of San Francisco where he lives with his wife and child.
Interiority and Other Objects unites two groups of paintings set in distinct but analogous environments: the swamp and the home. Both places provide their own form of sanctuary to Fallon’s off-kilter characters. Some have been drawn to the swamp for clandestine communion, under cover of shadows and peculiar flora. Others have congregated indoors amongst artifacts meant to signify sophistication, but which instead project banality.
Fallon’s people possess archetypal tokens of beauty (flowing hair, painted lips), but they are nullified by skewed placement and aesthetic flaws. In the tension between flatly-rendered people and the three-dimensional objects with which they interact, we see the crux of Fallon’s work: interiority (or inner nature) is beset by the disconnect between our aspirations and inability to fulfill them. The strength of this struggle is so great that it manifests as a near-physical entity, as palpable as a tchotchke on a table or a flower in a swamp. In this universe, inanimate objects and plants hold far more narrative power than the individuals living vicariously through them. You can find information about cheapmotorhomes.
In one painting, a woman (borrowed from Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl) stands in a corner, removed from the male figures in the foreground. Her features are detailed and dimensional, theirs are abstracted. She is reduced to an exoticized object. In another painting, three figures of varied affectations are reposed on a sofa, gazing blankly beyond the items assembled before them, their environs defined by suburban notions of elegance. An indictment of the human condition is surely sprinkled in all of this, but more so it is a tender recognition of shame and material culture’s role in it, and we are all implicated.
Khulta d’beta roughly translates to “home food” or “food of the house” in the Assyrian language, Syriac. Khulta d’beta, a solo exhibition by Esther Elia, is a deep dive into the Assyrian identity through the Assyrian grocery stores and markets Elia grew up shopping at in her birthplace of Turlock, California.
Assyrians are a people without a country, a minority group indigenous to modern-day Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Linguistically, the Assyrian culture and language has become increasingly more of a Middle-Eastern creole— mixing in each dominant group’s language and customs to the point where a new “mother-tongue” was created. To be Assyrian is to house the history of every occupation since Assyria ceased to exist, speaking to the determined adaptability this minority group has maintained for centuries. To speak Assyrian is to speak the history of the Middle East. The Assyrian grocery store therefore became a library and history lesson for Elia through its shelves, showing the diversity of the Middle-East and the role of Assyrians in preserving this unique mix. However, in the last century Assyrians have increasingly had to vacate their indigenous lands due to religious persecution and genocide, and with this expanded diaspora in mind, Elia documents cultural changes through the food. Her paintings reveal how her family’s recipes have changed, specifically with their move to California — jalapeños, salsa, and El Pato became essential ingredients to their Assyrian recipes. She creates patterned rug-like paintings based on recipes that reflect the multiple cultures that have influenced Assyrian cooking. For her, they are a reminder of the many homes that exist to children of diaspora, as well as the comfort in change — it means you and your people still exist. Much of Elia’s work deals with the sense of loss that comes with being Assyrian, especially in regards to the forced immigration her family experienced during the 1915 Armenian, Assyrian, Greek Genocide. Her pieces continue to center around the home and furnishings of the home as a direct salve to the loss of the indigenous home. This show is an ode to the Assyrian grocery store — it serves as a space to swap recipes, stories, and provide any and all furnishings for the Assyrian home and lifestyle. Everything needed to provide nourishment for the body and spirit, and in many ways the only directly transplanted remnant of the homeland.
Esther Elia is a recent graduate of California College of the Arts, and is starting her MFA in painting at the University of New Mexico this Fall 2020.
Throughout his life David King made scrapbooks, developed collections, and accumulated images, objects, books, and ephemera. These projects ran right alongside his primary work in graphic design, stencils, photography and woodworking. But in his later years the recording of these collections seemed to gain greater and greater importance, and his choices—his personal aesthetic—became the work itself. His many specific shapes, characters, masked figures, photographs, clippings, cartoons, and toys became a kind of introduction—something that says, “This is who I am.” These collections tethered him to this world, and their record would remind us that he had been here even after he was gone. I would suggest you to follow aboriginalbluemountains for more information.
Happy was one of the last projects David worked on before he passed away in October of last year. While disheartened by a long illness, he was still full of ideas and found a focus in his many projects. Determined to complete as much as he could, David began photographing many of the small treasured objects he kept in his library and studio. He took the photographs in his room on a stand he had made, using a piece of bright yellow poster board as the backdrop. He waited until the light was just right, often in the late afternoon. He took thousands of these photos. You can take guidance of mysunrise to know more.
David King had an incredibly generous eye. He was always able to find joy in the everyday and beauty in the smallest of things. We can only assume that David chose the title Happy to express the way that the objects that he collected and photographed made him feel. drssa Can provide more information.
Park Life would like to thank Courtney Johnson, Jeremy Grey, Luca Antonucci, Matt Borruso, Tamara Freedman, Jessica Flemming, David Kasprzak, Dione King, John Borruso, and Phillip Maisel for their work in organizing this exhibition.
A new beginning! 2019.75! The future! Dramatic communication! Self inquiry! Top shelf tomatoes! No stinkin’ thinkin’! Being on the wavelength! Taking names! Getting fit! Feeling lit! PMA! General positivity! Feeling feelings in CAPS LOCK! Body heat! Uncanny Valleys! The best of everything, squared! The BEST of everything! Wingdings 1 and 3! Super exceed!
Extending her interests in language, cliche, pop culture, iconography, repetition and design, Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough’s solo exhibition “I’M FEELING EXTREMELY PASSIONATE ABOUT EVERYTHING” departs from her previous excavations of semiotics that consider limitations of spoken language and use symbols as proxies for concepts or feelings. The text-based double entendres within this show—all laser-cut acrylic, hand-inlaid “flat sculptures”—blur the already-muddled relationship between lexical and logical structures in pursuit of connotation and codification within visual syntax.
MEY is a San Francisco-based visual artist working across many disciplines in a broad range of materials—acrylic, metal, wood, sound and performance. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as New Langton Arts and Luggage Store in San Francisco, New Image Art in Los Angeles, Kunsthall Fridericianum in Germany, and The Hara Museum in Tokyo, Japan. She was the recipient of Arteles residency in Hämeenkyrö, Finland and the 2015 and 2017 San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant.
Park Life is pleased to announce Tendrils, an exhibit by artist Ari Bird. This will be the artists first show at Park Life and featuring new paintings and sculptures.
Ari Bird (b. 1988, San Diego, CA) seeks balance in the interactions between seemingly disparate objects, shapes, and colors through many mediums. Primarily a painter and installation artist, Bird lifts symbols from her surroundings to create new narratives. Her sculptural ‘props’, which are usually either comically large or small in scale, explore the cosmic and psychological meaning we imbue in objects.
Tendrils are the small curls cascading from vines and plants. They’re the coils of hair that wrap around your ears or get tangled up in your earrings. They are small, less noticeable offshoots; seemingly frivolous attachments. But they add beauty, delicacy and complication to our everyday. To honor these side-notes and to make them large challenges our perception of what’s valuable, questioning who makes value and why.
Bird has exhibited in galleries and diy/underground spaces nationally, and occasionally pursues curatorial projects. She has been an art educator for over 6 years combined, and currently helps paint and maintain the sculptures at Children’s Fairyland. Her studio and home are in Oakland, CA.
Park Life is proud to present Sola Chola, a solo exhibition by artist Gina M. Contreras. Gina will be showing a series of new paintings in her first show at Park Life.
Sola Chola is a series dedicated to all the cholitas out there who lust, love and are lost.
These self-portraits, some detailed and others left bare, are deeper than the surface level.
Although inspired by real heartbreak, these portraits are about empowerment, self-love and overcoming all those dicks in your life.
Gina M. Contreras is a San Francisco based artist with Central Valley roots.
Picture a seasoned, mild-mannered assistant director of the St Louis Zoo spending the day in conferences about upcoming and innovative technology and how it will assist the average patron’s experience at his zoo in the years to come. Picture a gregarious marketing guy from Sun Microsystems (located in the San Francisco Bay Area) spending the day in conferences in St Louis, pitching his company’s latest platforms and the robustness their technology has and how it will assist in the innovation of this traditional establishment. Get Goose Bumps to your digital marketing technique here. One Click Power could be the best way to know about learn about trending technology.
For latest technology updates follow colabioclipanama2019 .Now that you have these two characters roughly placed in your mind… Imagine that they meet for the first time, hit it off and become fast friends. This is a time before internet, or cell phones and the only way that these two can stay in touch is by long distance, land line phone calls, which is exactly what these two gentlemen do. For years they call each other religiously on Thursday mornings (in honor of the day they met) and for 15-20 minutes they catch up and exchange family news.
After over five years of phone calls, the two friends finally agree that their two families should meet and they go about hatching a plan, meeting in Salt Lake City for a long weekend. The two families rendezvous at a Best Western right off the I-80.
Click here rooftopyoga for latest updates of upcoming shows.. Introductions are made. It is Friday, May 3rd, 1984. Their two youngest sons meet for the first time and just like their fathers, become immediate best friends.
Jimmy “Porous Walker” Dimarcellis and Ferris Plock were those two boys and they went on to be pen pals, cohorts, collaborators and visionary soul mates. They continue to this day to nurture their friendship through various creative endeavors.
We are happy to announce Martin Machado’s exhibit Hove To opens at Park Life Gallery on March 15th, 2019. This will be his first show at Park Life.
Being Hove To is a nautical term for having one’s forward sail intentionally backed to counter the pressure of a main sail. With the two opposing forces balancing themselves out, the boat essentially comes to a stop, save for the drift. Used by some to weather a heavy storm; while hove to the sailor does not need to steer the vessel, giving them the chance to make repairs, eat, mend an injury, or take a much-needed rest.
Machado presents a suite of recent oil paintings, most of which were painted in some part on site. Many of these paintings are tied to labor, through his travels as an international merchant mariner on containerships and as a commercial fisherman. Others were worked out on a small sailboat during short solo voyages upon San Francisco Bay, from a row-boat, or simply from the shoreline. Throughout these works are dualities and the struggle to find balance between: labor and leisure, home and work life, nature and industry, color and form, progress and stasis.
In addition to the exhibition space of paintings, Machado has created an immersive installation in the form of the living quarters of a fictitious sailor on a modern merchant ship. Playing with scale, a small bed invites visitors into a space that is both intimate and industrial. On a small beige wall is a porthole behind which a monitor plays film clips from Arthur Thanash, a San Francisco based mariner now in his 80’s, who filmed his experiences at sea starting in the 50’s, a pre-shipping container era. The rest of the space is filled with contributions from other artists, sailors, surfers, commercial fisherfolk, and amateur scientists. Machado states “I wanted to have an element of community for this show, so I decided to create this installation and reach out to a wide maritime community to help fill the space and create an identity for a fictitious character.” Contributors include: Alexis Amann, Stephen Amato-Salvatierra, Corey Arnold, Ben Ashton, Matthew Bajda, Bill Daniel, Futurefarmers (Joe Riley & Audrey Snyder), Carrie Hott, Robert Lepur, Patrick Trefz, and Kanoa Zimmerman.
Martin Machado is a visual artist based out of San Francisco, CA. His artwork is largely influenced by his experience with maritime labor, spending portions of his year working on international containerships and commercial fishing vessels. These voyages and the crew he works with have become intertwined with the narrative of his artworks.
His work has been shown internationally and has been featured in The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times Magazine, Juxtapoz, and New American Paintings. Martin has an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
FOG Art+Design Fair January 17th – 20th, 2019. Park Life will be exhibiting again at FOG Fair at Ft. Mason in SF where we will be releasing new Editions from artist that include Chris Johanson, Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough, Emily Prince, Lauren DiCiccio, Mark Mulroney, Davis Shrigley, Tucker Nichols, Lena Gustafson, and many more. We’ll also be hosting book signings with David Maisel, Catherine Wagner and Janet Delaney.
We are happy to announce that we will be hosting an Exhibit and Book Signing with Ed Templeton for the Publication of his new Book with Um Yeah Art, Tangentially Parenthetical. More details to follow.
Ed Templeton: Tangentially Parenthetical
Tangentially Parenthetical is a selection of photographs from Ed Templeton’s vast street photography archive—curated, arranged and then rearranged by the man himself. The next chapter to his previous book of photos (Wayward Cognitions, 2014), Tangentially Parenthetical picks up where the latter collection ended. By combining intimate, accidental and unconnected moments into one linear piece of work, he tells hundreds of new stories through the thoughtful arrangement of semi-related yet completely unfastened imagery. “I’m out there shooting photos all the time that don’t necessarily fall under any theme other than general life,” says Templeton, “which is a lame title for a book.” With a wink to the absurd, sandwiched between a cover of patterned parentheses and with an afterword built from his own stream-of-consciousness storytelling, Templeton delivers a visual mountain from an archive of stunning molehills—the images are carefully chosen, shuffled by hand and laid out with the dueling impulses of wonder and wit.
Born in 1972 and raised in the suburbs of Orange County, California, Ed Templeton is a painter, photographer and a respected cult figure in the subculture of skateboarding. His work has been exhibited worldwide.
We are stocked and ready for the Holidays..over 1200 square feet of new Design Products, Books, Apparel, Stationary, Art, Prints, Editions, Jewelry, Toys, and Gifts. We’ve got some new Editions from some of our favorite collaborators..Chris Johanson, David Shrigley, Tucker Nichols, Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough, Jason Jagel, Lena Gustafson, Mark Mulroney, and many more..
Park Life will be open Everyday from 10am –8pm in December (Sundays Until 6pm).
Park Life will be participating in FOG Art/Design Fair once again. Ft Mason Center January 17th – 20th, 2019. We’ll be releasing new editions from over 12 different artists this year.
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Marina Luz’s Show Close Enough, will be showing in the Gallery through the Holidays.
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In January, we’ll be hosting Book Signings for artists including Ed Templeton, Davids Maisel, and Janet Delaney. Stay tuned for more details.
Our Gallery program for 2019 will include shows with Lafe Harley Eaves, Martin Machado, Gina Contreras, Mark Mulroney, Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough, Arii Bird, Jason Jagel, Porous Walker/Ferris Plock and more. Details and dates to be announced soon.
Park Life Gallery is proud to present Close Enough (How We Describe Books When We Can’t Remember the Name or Title), New Works on Paper by Marina Luz.
Park Life Gallery
220 Clement st
SF CA 94118
Opening Reception Friday November 30, 2018 6-9pm
November 30 – December 30, 2018
When you are trying to find a favorite book from your childhood, or that novel you read for a class years ago and now wish you had kept, but you can’t remember any specific details, what do you do? Turn to the internet, of course.
Close Enough examines the selective and often cruelly humorous nature of memory by taking, unaltered, the subject line of plot descriptions on internet book search forums. Marina Luz designs and paints book covers for these plaintive pleas for help in tracking down these half-remembered stories. With memory being such a fickle thing, the resulting descriptions used as titles are alternately poetic and amusing.
Marina Luz is an Emmy Award-winning illustrator and artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, VICE, ProPublica, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, among others. She runs her design studio HONEYLUX out of Oakland, CA.
“Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.”
– David Abrams
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
Sound of a Bloom, Lena’s second show at Park Life, showcases a series of work which examines ideas around sound, time, memory, and reciprocity. The paintings were born from the idea that sound is occurring all around us, though the majority of it is either too low or high a frequency for us to perceive. A sound wave is simply a transfer of energy as it travels away from a vibrating source. In this sense, a plant pushing out a bloom should make a “sound.” We just aren’t able to hear it.
This body of work explores intangible questions around sound and the natural world. What would the sound of a bloom look like? At what frequency does anxiety ripple? Does it explode or implode? And can vibration carry a soul?
Lena Gustafson is a visual artist based in Oakland, CA. After graduating from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in 2011, she cofounded Night Diver Press with her partner Peter Calderwood. Together they use silkscreen and other alternative printing techniques to create and publish multiples in the form of prints, books, zines, and monotypes. Lena’s paintings are technically informed by her background in preparing images for screen-prints.
A Group Show featuring Chelsie Kirkey, Nathan McKee, Tara Booth and Pat Falco. Curated by Yarrow Slaps.
Park Life
San Francisco
August 3 – Sept 2, 2018
Opening Reception Friday August 3, 6-9pm
Phone Culture, curated by San Francisco native Yarrow Slaps is the product of his visit to New York last summer. Out of his element, in a big city, Yarrow found himself people watching and listening to passing conversations while walking down the Lower East Side/Bedstuy streets. He began thinking the words phone culture, noticing everyone immersed in their pocket sized technology. Whether someone is walking through an intersection immersed in Instagram, or taking selfies at a park, it’s obvious that phone culture puts us in our own boxes, looking through others profiles, making us self absorbed and forgetting our own social skills. Here you can read now How and where you can buy instagram followers. For the best review about jarvee which is all about the follower increasing tool visit us. When we’re bored most people will just scroll through their phones instead of getting in what could be an enlightening conversation with someone they don’t know. How would some of his favorite artists depict the current state that we live in, where literally everyone is on their phones? Phone Culture investigates how artists Pat Falco, Nathan Mckee, Tara Booth and Chelsie Kirkey interpret these feelings and concepts, incorporating their unique brands of humor, and emotion.
Chelsie Kirkey (b. 1987) is an American artist living and working outside of Chicago. Figurative and made with careful composition, her paintings, often self-portraits, invite the viewer to witness captured and intimate moments of home life, and offer personal reflections of both body and spirit. Employing photography as a reference for many of her paintings, her process to create is thought-out and meticulous. Recurring motifs in her work include floral and woven patterns, fine details, and rich colors that evoke a sense of romanticism and time and place. Chelsie has shown in number of cities nationally and internationally, including Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Oslo.
Nathan McKee is an artist and illustrator who lives and works in Portland, Oregon. McKee’s illustrations and paper cutouts utilize simple lines and flat color, and are inspired by comics, sports, music and other elements of popular culture. His works have been included in exhibitions around the world like Los Angeles, New York,Chicago & Japan and clients have included but not limited to Bleacher Report, Adidas, Puma, and the Ace Hotel. McKee studied at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. For more updates about the brands visit davidthompson200.
Tara Booth’s paintings are very relatable. She has nothing to hide and comforts her audience by exposing and painting universal neuroses. Lately, she’s been animating and narrating, giving even more life to her raw, emotional, and super funny self-portraits and scenes which she expertly turns into comics that convey a strong and engaging narrative, even without words. (via juxtapoz interview with Kristen Farr)
Although seemingly playful and lighthearted, Pat Falco’s drawings and pithy texts evoke subtle yet provocative truths. For the Biennial, the artist inscribes placards with witty declarations by hand, excluding visual embellishment, and places them as signposts on public ground. These works point to noticeable facts and obvious truths about the physical location of the signs while simultaneously satirizing both art world politics and larger social realities. These text-based pieces also signal the metaphorical location of Falco’s own work, which stands at the intersection of art and everyday life. (via https://decordova.org/pat-falco)
Park Life is proud to be hosting an exhibition featuring the work of Chaz Bear. Chaz will be showing a body of prints created is his signature style; loose and immediate. Chaz has described the creation of these drawings as a type of meditative exercise or yoga with an URBNFit yoga ball, where his mind turns off and his hand does the drawing. Whereas ‘doodles’ are often cast aside as unimportant, or at best, used as reference material, Bear chose to examine the ideas deeper. As these drawings are scanned, scaled, altered, colored, and ultimately screen printed, they take on a new life as new associations, ideas, and meanings emerge.
Chaz Bear, known professionally as Toro y Moi, is an American singer, songwriter, and record producer, artist and graphic designer. He currently lives in Oakland.
Park Life is pleased to announce that we are hosting McFadden and Thorpe’s 10th Anniversary Celebration. This legendary Design Firm will be exhibiting their work in the gallery from April 20th to May 20th.
On St. Patrick’s Day, 2008, Scott and I started our first day at work in a studio that was just slightly larger than our own bodies, with one window, one door, and a minifridge. Now, amazingly, 10 years later, we have an incredible team that we love working with, thousands of projects have coursed through our hard drives, and our fridge has not just one, but two freezers. We owe so much to the many clients, friends, fellow creatives and others that have been part of the community that sustained and nurtured MT, and we’d like to invite you to a celebration next Friday at Park Life. Come as you are, bring whomever you like, and we look forward to raising a toast to the wonderful world of graphic design!
Friday April 20, 2018, 6pm-9pm
Park Life, 220 Clement St, San Francisco, CA 94118
Toy soldier packs used to come with wounded figures. Some of them dead. Their
predicament locked in plastic perpetuity. As kids we incorporated these cruel, yet
honest, forms into our daily game. War is hell. Complex issues of good and evil
debated by nine-year-olds. Eventually, the fallen figures disappear from the
platoons at Walgreens, along with candy cigarettes and decent cap guns. The
hunger for magic remains.
Check now at visaliaweddingstyle for further updates.
Further investigation. Reasonable obsession. A craving to be inside the figure we
hold in our hand. The desire to be dwarfed by the object. To experience the jewel.
Further. If we can’t get smaller, we’ll have to change our perspective. Embarking on
the fantastic voyage, we find a world of sculptural significance: folds and
expressions worthy of Rodin. Plastic figures with the soul and story of their bronze
counterparts. We document the trip. Come see the results.
The twist. Tracing the work of the unnamed hero. An attempt at recognizing the
creators of a million tiny sculptures. There would be no show if someone else
hadn’t made these figures in the first place. We don’t know the names behind the
majority of the art we interact with daily. A pleasant realization. We are surrounded.
Art everywhere. More great unknown artists than known. A change in perspective,
and their distinction emerges. Are we playing Gertrude? Marveling at the details?
Hopefully.
Biography
Fearless art nerd meets returning immigrant. Good cop, bad cop. Not sure who’s
who. Phil knows thick book stuff and is willing to try anything. An MFA from RIT and
a garage full of tools testify. Ivan’s first commission was in fourth grade. Nude
figures in the bathroom stall of a South American private school. He made the
inevitable career choice and has the resulting sense of gentle urgency.
Their friendship: born in the splintered sunlight of UC Santa Cruz. Performing in a
local band destined to stay local (although one member did manage to slip out and
win a Grammy). Life as art. Owning nothing. Reveling in the cultural detritus of the
80’s. Phil and Ivan deepen their bond. A time of listening and exploring. A chicken
roasting contest cements the art partnership. The Yardbird Social, with its coveted
golden wishbone, catapults a flurry of silkscreens and found paint. Here begins a
common thread in their art: use what is available. The artistry of flow and nonconsumption.
Tom Gilmore, founder of LA’s Main Museum, is their first patron. He fuels
Downtown Art Night Los Angeles and gives the boys carte blanche. For months the
evenings fill with images of the Basin’s past and present. From basket weavers to
Jack in the Box, from saber teeth to Ponch, John, and beyond. Tom validates their
art and waters seeds of subsequent work. The pair are eternally grateful.
The partnership spills into a no-budget movie. “Brothers in the Wind” is made in
one day on an abandoned orchid farm. Dark biker pulp. Of Mice and Men on
wheels. Ivan plays the myopic director. Phil plays Lennie and mumbles about bad
people. A German woman will later approach Phil as he is selling merchandise
from the movie. She holds up a three-piece “Dream Stealer” outlaw patch kit. “Who
would think of such a thing?” she asks, aghast. The stealing of dreams. Phil agrees.
Ivan basks in the glow.
Phil lives in Los Angeles and teaches art at Mount Saint Mary’s University. Ivan
lives in San Francisco and just completed a public exhibition entitled “Summer of
Love – Trading Cards”, a poster series in collaboration with artist Kate Haug,
sponsored by the San Francisco Arts Commission. Living an hour by plane from
each other, Phil and Ivan continue their constant dialogue through custom van
pictures and coffee-driven conversation.
The art game is hard. They admire those who brave it without a partner. Like
raising children alone. Luckily, they have each other. Common bonds. Helpful
differences. Agreeing most of the time. Grateful when they don’t. Comrades in the
wilderness. Art the product.
We’re excited to announce that Kristofferson San Pablo will have his first Park Life show titled DOGS PLAYING POKER – opening reception Saturday Nov 11 7-10pm.
Kristofferson San Pablo is the Co-Founder of Vacancy Projects and lives in Los Angeles.
Joins us for a the opening ofLena Gustafson’s first show, titled Loud Body, at Park Life. Opening Reception 6 – 9pm.
Lena will be showing Acrylic works on panel and paper. For inquiries contact info@parklifestore.com
Lena Gustafson, Visual Artist, Oakland,CA.
“My lens is often focused on the strength of femininity. I am interested in the private relationships women have with their bodies and with others. Much of my creative output is from the culmination of many observations of women being themselves, doing their thing. My hope is that this work can be used as a mirror to the people from whom I draw.”
Lena’s recent work uses bright colors and large female figures at the center of each image. She uses repeated visual symbolism such as flags, water, plant life, color, and repeated gestures to communicate different stories within the body. Often times the line that separates the figure from her environment are blurred.
Traditionally the female form has been used as a symbol to indulge others’ fantasies, dreams, and fascinations. Lena is interested not in what can be projected onto it, but instead what lies to be awoken within the body itself. She is interested in the idea of body memory and aims to visualize what this would look like if we could see it. Rather than the figure itself it is the stored information within the figure as well as its surroundings that interests Lena. By engaging with the history of representation of the female form, Lena contemplates new narratives for which the female body can understand itself.
Lena is a visual artist based in Oakland, CA. After graduating from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in 2011, she cofounded Night Diver Press with her partner Peter Calderwood. Together they use silkscreen and other alternative printing techniques to create and publish multiples in the form of prints, books, zines, and monotypes. Lena’s recent paintings are technically informed by her background in preparing images for screen-prints.
Park Life Gallery is proud to present, HOW WE DESCRIBE BOOKS WHEN WE CAN’T REMEMBER THE AUTHOR OR TITLE: new sculptures from Marina Luz.
Opening Reception Friday July 14, 2017 6-9pm
July 14 – Aug 20, 2017
Park Life Gallery
220 Clement st
SF CA
When you are trying to find a favorite book from your childhood, or that novel you read for a class years ago and now wish you had kept, but you can’t remember any specific details, what do you do? Turn to the internet, of course.
HOW WE DESCRIBE BOOKS WHEN WE CAN”T REMEMBER THE AUTHOR OR TITLE examines the selective and often cruelly humorous nature of memory by taking, unaltered, the subject line of plot descriptions on internet book search forums. Marina Luz designs and paints book covers for these plaintive pleas for help in tracking down these half-remembered stories. With memory being such a fickle thing, the resulting descriptions used as titles are alternately poetic and amusing.
Marina Luz is an Emmy Award-winning illustrator and artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, VICE, ProPublica, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, among others. She runs her design studio HONEYLUX out of Oakland, CA.
Saturday, July 22nd – 11am – 6pm
Sunday, July 23rd – 11am – 5pm Preview – Friday, July 21st – 6pm – 10pm
The 2017 SF Art Book Fair is an annual multi-day festival of artists’ publications. This event is FREE and OPEN to the public and will feature artists’ books, art catalogs, monographs, periodicals, zines, printed ephemera, and artists’ multiples. These works will be presented by over 100 independent publishers, antiquarian dealers, artists, collectors, and enthusiasts. Over the course of the weekend, the fair will be complemented by a diverse range of talks, discussions, book launches, on and off-site special projects, exhibitions and signings.
The mission of the fair is to foster the unique art publishing community of the Bay Area while providing a platform for national and international publishers to exhibit their work to a new audience.
The SF Art Book Fair will be held at Minnesota Street Project. The project’s landmark location, 1275 Minnesota Street, houses 10 galleries, a not-for-profit, temporary exhibitions spaces, media room, and a recently opened restaurant.
Please join us for an exhibition of Photographs by French Artist Fred Mortagne at Park Life Gallery. Fred will also be signing copies of his new Monograph – Fred Mortagne (French Fred) “Attraper Au Vol” published by Um Yeah Arts. Opening Reception Friday March 3rd 6-9pm.
This exhibit made possible by Element along with Thomas Campbell and Um Yeah Arts.
We are excited to announce the opening of Serena Mitnik-Miller’s new exhibition of paintings at Park Life Gallery. W I L D will open Friday Nov. 11 and run though xmas. View the works HERE.
Thanks everyone who was involved and came out for it – Minnesota Street Projects, Colpa Press, all the volunteers and Exhibitors. Over 7000 people came though to see it this weekend. Can’t wait until Next year!!
Park Life Gallery is proud to present, IF I DON’T FIND THIS BOOK I WILL DIEnew paintings from Marina Luz.
Opening Reception Friday July 8, 2016 6-9pm
July 8 – Aug 14, 2016
Park Life Gallery
220 Clement st
SF CA
When you are trying to find a favorite book from your childhood, or that novel you read for a class years ago and now wish you had kept, but you can’t remember any specific details, what do you do? Turn to the internet, of course.
IF I DON’T FIND THIS BOOK I WILL DIE examines the selective and often cruelly humorous nature of memory by taking, unaltered, the subject line of plot descriptions on internet book search forums. Marina Luz designs and paints book covers for these plaintive pleas for help in tracking down these half-remembered tomes.
The resulting descriptions used as titles are alternately poetic and amusing. With memory being such a fickle thing, it stands to reason that a book written by an author who had hoped to tackle themes of love, loss, mortality, and the very meaning of existence could be boiled down to Complicated Love Story, a world of fantasy is reduced with devastating efficiency to Narnia-esque or that a richly-written character novel on overcoming adversity is remembered only as Victorian Prostitute with Dry Skin.
Marina Luz is an Emmy Award-winning illustrator and artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, VICE, ProPublica, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, among others. She runs her design studio HONEYLUX out of Oakland, CA. She found these descriptions while attempting her own search for a forgotten book, Iceberg Shows Up Overnight in Front of Hotel. If that sounds familiar, please let her know the title and author. Thank you.
We are happy to announce that Kristina Lewis’ show SQUARING THE CIRCLEopens Friday June 3, 2016 at Park Life Gallery.
June 3 – July 3, 2016
Opening Reception Friday June 3 6-9pm.
Park Life Gallery
220 Clement St
SF CA 94118
“As the geometer his mind applies
To square the circle, nor for all his wit
Finds the right formula, howe’er he tries”
-Dante
Metaphorically, the endeavor of squaring the circle—a mathematical exercise that’s been proven impossible—came to represent any task beyond human scope—such as delineating the shape of the afterworld.
Firmly planted here on Earth and totally at the mercy of nature’s chaos, people of past eras used materials at hand to try to bridge the gap between the palpable and the impalpable—using objects as intermediaries to reach beyond the limitations of their bodies. Totems, masks, amulets, shields, statues and vessels were infused with holiness in their maker’s imaginations, and charged with the task of connecting mortals to unknown deities. Imagining that their meek constructions would be read, understood and perhaps satisfy these invisible beings, people used them in ceremonies, rituals and burial to relay all their hopes, and mitigate their fears.
Today, though still limited by the earthly sphere, our territory is man-made and high tech. The “incomprehensible” we strive to understand may or may not be divine. Out of a heavily mediated and consumerist landscape, in Squaring the Circle, I experiment with constructing “sacred” devices (future relics) out of the stuff around us—lines, angles and arcs of plastic, nylon, wood and metal. Still grappling with the unknown, whether in the scientific or spiritual realm—I imagine that we will continue our attempts to grasp the infinite with finite things.
We are excited to announce that we are co-producing the first annual San Francisco Artbook Fair that will take place at Minnesota Street Project from July 22-July 24, 2016. The event will feature over 70 independent publishers exhibiting art related books…as well as a handful of retail exhibitors. There will also be signings, lectures, workshops, music where you will even be able to buy Soundcloud plays.
1275 Minnesota Street is a 35,000 square-foot building in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood that houses 11 galleries, temporary exhibitions spaces, a media room, and a cafe.
Much thanks to the artist Jason Jagel for his beautiful new Mural at the Corner of Clement and 3rd Ave. ALso thanks to Supervisor Eric Mars office, The SF Arts Commission and the Clement st Merchants Association.
Park Life will be opening it’s new gallery space on Friday April 15th, 2016 with a solo show from Mark Mulroney titled Mark Likes Baseball Part I. VIEW THE WORK HERE
“Mark Likes Baseball Part 1” is the first in an ongoing and sporadic series of shows about the history, graphics and social impact of baseball on our culture. Paintings, collages, wood-carvings, interactive sculptures and plenty of homemade baseball cards will be included along side written descriptions of the works. In an effort to communicate his enduring love for the game of baseball Mulroney has made all of the works in the spirit of friendship and generosity. You can visit our website by Clicking here touroftoowoomba . If you love baseball you might find something to like in this show and if you hate baseball you might hate it a little bit less after seeing this show.
Mark Mulroney Lives in New York and has shown in Galleries all over the world. www.markmulroney.com
Park Life Gallery
220 Clement St
SF CA 94118
Opening Reception Friday April 15th 6-9pm.
This show is being presented in collaboration with Ever Gold Gallery.
We’re excited to be exhibiting at this years FOG Art and Design fair at Ft Mason Jan 13- 17, 1016.
Park Life will be installing a store that will feature a curated selection of objects, editions, books, design items, and art.
We’ll have new editions and products from artists Todd Hido, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry Mcgee, David Shrigley, Jonas Wood, Paul Wackers, Alec Soth, Carissa Potter, and many more.
‘OFFCUTS’ is a celebration of the by-product. Shop waste, materials that would usually be discarded, and found objects often yield shapes and color relationships that would be missed in their original contexts. By taking such overlooked objects, transforming their color, and pairing them with contrasting materials, it is possible to appreciate their inherent qualities. Those qualities could be the purity in the line of dry sea kelp, or the complex optical effect of packing materials. My interest lies in how these ordinary materials continue to spark a visual dialogue. Painting, sculpture and furniture are all part of the same
conversation. The joining of parts is as much a visual and psychological union as it is a strong physical connection. The offcut, because it is not burdened by the primary focus is liberated to find it’s potential through the laws of chance.
Jonathan Anzalone lives and works in San Francisco, Ca. He was born on Long island and graduated with a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2003. The past 7 years have been an effort to bind the studio artwork with a business making custom furniture and installations.
Todd Hido and Marina Luz – Photography and Drawings.
Park Life Gallery
3049 22nd st SF CA 94110
The Perfect Measure is a one night only exhibit – on Friday July 24th, 6 – 9pm.
A gift from Marina Luz to Todd Hido was the trigger for the collaboration between the two artists. Between their work, there is a connection that is evident but not spelled out completely, based on the mutual recognition of gestures and expressions reaching a measure of empathy with which they both identify. You can find their work on mysunrise .
Working together and sometimes taking inspiration from the same situation, while at other times associating images realized separately, Hido and Luz have selected a number of works for this site-specific installation that originally appeared in Milan in April 2015.
Their collaboration led to change and growth in both of their work; Hido is working with very small-scale prints (nothing larger than 8″ x 10″), and Luz has been forced to examine the emotions her images convey, rather than just considering the form.
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————————————————————————————————————————Todd Hido’s work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Getty, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. He has over a dozen published books; his most recent monograph titled Excerpts from Silver Meadows was released in 2013. His upcoming mid-career survey will be published by Aperture in 2016.
Marina Luz is an Emmy Award-winning illustrator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, VICE, Propublica, and Center for Investigative Reporting, among others. She runs her design studio HONEYLUX out of Oakland, CA.
We are excited to be hosting an informal residency and workshop for the Belgium collective Atelier Pica Pica along with Francesco Deiana.
Duration – July 1 through July 20, 2015.
Opening reception Friday July 3 – 6-9pm.
Publication Release reception Wed July 15 – 6 -9pm.
The Gallery will be open on Saturdays 12 -6 during the duration.
Park Life Gallery
3049 22nd st. SF CA 94110
Atelier Pica Pica is Boris Magotteaux (1978), Manuel Falcata (1979) and Jerome Degive (1980), all born and raised in Liege, Belgium.
The collective has a very distinct, personal and yet somehow obvious universe. You will, provided you’ve kept somewhat of your inner child, be simply marveled by their simple constructions and colors. Speaking of construction, these Industrial Cooling Towers were just built right next to our building, if you are interested in having one on your grounds, then check out how ours were built.
What seems simple at first, is in fact the result of a collection of multiple references and different techniques. Through photography, sculpture and painting, Atelier Pica Pica develops a very personal alphabet. A shape, subject or color skips from an art work or medium to the next with absolute fluidity and coherence. The sculptures influence the paintings that influence the photography and vice-versa.
The 3 artists from Atelier Pica Pica produce all the paintings, drawings, photographs and installations jointly. They have worked together since 1999, first within the ERS collective and as Atelier Pica Pica since 2007.
Jug Life , New Contemporary Still Life. Featuring work from over 70 contemporary artists. Curated by Andrew Schoultz and Patrick Martinez.
Featuring:Dennis Mcnett , Cody Hudson, Joshua
Petker, Brian Willmont, Libby Black, Glen Baldridge, Tim Biskup, Ryan Wallace, Harley Lafarah Eaves, Adam 5100, Richard Colman, Dennis Kernohan, Michelle Blade, Hilary Pecis, Tracy Timmens, Ryan Travis Christian, Alex Nicholson, Andrew Martin Scott, Bill Mcright, Kevin Taylor, Alex Lukas, Ian Johnson, Jonah Olsen, Gin Stevens, Joey Piziali, James Marshall, Terry Powers, Kevin Chen, Erin Riley, Serena Cole, Osei Key, Beau Roulette, Juan Carlos Araujo, Kelie Bowman, Joseph Hart, Louise Sheldon, Louis Schmitt, Joshua Rubens, Alan Gonzalez, Brad Bernhardt, Ben Venom, Jefferson Eisenberg, Ryan Shaffer, Timothy Bergstrom, Megan Gorham, Thomas Ovlisen, Leo Eguiarte, Aaron De La Cruz, B+ Brian Cross, Estevan Oriol, Ernesto Burgos, Gregory Bojorquez, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Millie Brown, REVOK, Michelle Guintu, Kevin Lyons, Brent Rollins, Elizabeth Valdez, Ricardo Estrada, Gary Garay, ZES, Sam Friedman, Ramiro Gomez Jr., Carlos Donjuan, Pretty Puke, Rigo Jimenez, Andres Guerrero, Marco Zamora, Sabio, Conrad Ruiz, Raymundo T. Reynoso, Maxwell McMaster and others…..
San Francisco-based artist Casey Gray will present a new series of paintings for his first show at Park Life Gallery.
The show titled Wave Pool, will feature Gray’s “wavy” paintings that depict universal symbols of everyday life in a wavy or rippled motif that communicates a feeling of uncertainty or mistrust; a general cynicism related to the current changing socio-economic climate and related identity crisis of San Francisco. The symbols themselves are generally lighthearted and optimistic, some having humorous meanings or connotations. The distortion of these symbols inject a level of cynicism and lack of control into their emoji-like imagery.
Casey’s more formally composed still-life and cabinet paintings also gain inspiration from his everyday experience. Digitally sourced objects are chosen and composed in a way to suggest a non-linear narrative that is both real and imagined. The artist is interested in using images without context or history and injecting new importance into them by their association with and relation to other images. The works are an attempt at communicating the artist’s complex relationship to the world around him, and are an exploration into the overlap of virtual and actual reality.
All works are spray painted acrylic on wood panel.
For more information please contact gallery@parklifegallery.com
The Facebook Artist in Residence program is excited to announce the release of our Season II catalog at Park Life Gallery on February 27 from 6:00-8:30 pm. Come to learn more about the artist in residence program, meet an artist or two, and pick up a catalog. There will be Drinks and snacks.
All proceeds from the catalogs sold tonight ($20!) will benefit the Headlands Center for the Arts.
The catalog features the work of artists Jane Kim, Barbara Holmes, Jessalyn Aaland, Paul Morgan, Val Britton, Chris Duncan, Tucker Nichols, Kelly Ording, and Jeff Canham.
Who: You!
What: The Facebook Artist in Residence program Season II catalog release party
Opening Reception
Friday, February 20th from 6-9pm
Park Life gallery presents Ajar, a selection of recent paintings by Joe Ferriso. These modestly sized acrylic and latex paintings on panel unfold color sensitive spaces. Visit bmtdesigntechnology and take a look of more such famous paintings.
“All these doors leave one’s thoughts ajar. As if in wind or mind. What’s in there? Nothing, insofar as “art has no inside, nothing you can’t see,” to quote Hugh Kenner. But really, what’s in there, in those rooms the doors adjoin. It looks like one invitation after another, each opening into someplace distinct and different. So maybe it’s just that—the pleasure of arriving in a brand new place. Brown and gray studies, simple huts, little neon verandas from Miami or the Mediterranean, ordinary adjacent spaces: the tidiness has an immediate thrill. Their disorders (more charming still) will disarm you at length. ”
– Jason Morris
Park Life Gallery
3049 22nd St. SF, CA 94110 at Shotwell
415.757.0107
gallery@parklifegallery.com
www.parklifegallery.com
We are excited to be hosting Photographer Todd Hido for a book signing during our Pop Up Store at the FOG Art/Design Fair.
Todd will be signing copies of his new book Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and The Nude published by Aperture Saturday Jan 17th at Noon at FOG Art/Design Fair at Fort Mason.
We are excited to announce that Park Life has been selected to install a store at this year’s FOG Art and Design Fair at Fort Mason the weekend of Jan 14-18, 2015.
FOG will be featuring some of the best galleries in the world; David Zwirner, Salon 94, Ratio 3, PACE, Altman Siegel, and many others..
We will be featuring a selection of Editions, Objects, Books, and Art by artists Tauba Auerbach, David Shrigley, Paul Wackers, Tucker Nichols, Robert Lazzarini, Jonas Wood, Todd Hido, and many others.
Welcome to Park Life’s Annual Holiday Season Update.
We’ve once again stocked the store with a shit-ton of new merchandise; Bags, Appearal, Books, Design Objects, Gifts, Toys, Artist Editions, Prints, Watches, Wallets, Stationary, Home Wares, Sunglasses, Journals, etc..
Including:
– New Limited editions from Artists David Shrigley and Tucker Nichols.
– Bags and Packs from Topo Designs and Alite.
– A Pop-Up Shop featuring editions from the Headlands Center for the Arts.
-Limited Edition Art and Design from Polite UK, Propaganda, Third Drawer Down, Areaware, Grey Area Foundation, IMM Living.
-The latest new books on Contemporary Art, Design, Typography, Food and Culture; including publishers Aperture Foundation, Steidl, DAP, RAM Publications, Plumb Goods, Mack, Chronicle Books, and more.
-A wide selection of new Hoodies and Sweatshirts.
We’ll have extended hours for December as well. 10 am to 8pm Monday through Saturday. 10 am to 7pm Sundays.
In our new gallery space in the Mission you can see Paul Wackers’ and Jessica Hans’ new show Earth Wizard, which runs though December. You can preview the show at our new Park Life Gallery website.
Wishing you a Happy Holidays from the staff of Park Life.
Park Life Store
220 Clement St.
SF CA 94118 415.386.7275
Park Life Gallery
3049 22nd St. @ Shotwell
SF CA 94118 415.757.0107
Our New Gallery Website is now live. Thanks to our friend Samuel Shelton Robinson for the effort on finding the top web development companies to hep us. You can find it here at parklifegallery.com
Park Life is excited to announce the opening of Earth Wizard, an exhibit of ceramic sculptures and works on paper by Paul Wackers and Jessica Hans.
Opening Reception Friday, Nov 21, 2014. 6-9pm.
NY based artist Paul Wackers will be debuting a body of ceramic sculptures as well as new works on paper. Wackers’ ceramic sculptures offer a new dimension to his work, giving life to elements found in his intimately painted compositions; potted plants, objects and personal collectables, and abstract moments.
Philadelphia based artist Jessica Hans’ colorful, mishappen pots and sculptures are inspired by her love for plants, landscapes, and textiles. Her creations also reflect a shared connection with geology, minerals and deep sea life.
This exhibit is made possible with the cooperation of Eleanor Harwood Gallery where Paul Wackers’ Solo show of new paintings opened on Nov. 8.
Park Life is proud to present S W I R L, an exhibit of new paintings by Serena Mitnik-Miller.
Park Life Gallery
3049 22nd st. (at Shotwell)
SF CA 94110
Serena Mitnik-Miller is an artist and designer working in California. She splits her time between San Francisco and Los Angeles, combining her days painting, designing, collecting and collaborating with her local artisan community. Serena’s paintings are created by hand using watercolor pigment on paper.
Each painting strikes a balance between layers of color, repetitive lines and the integral qualities of all the materials she employs. This body of work focuses on the interplay between contours within boundaries and forms that she creates. Her compositions are interconnecting patterns of concentric shapes where structures break apart and link back together. Transparency and transitions of her paint stroke display an in-between of control and freeness.
View the works here.
Our current exhibit features work by Jacob Magraw-Mickelson and Rachell Sumpter. The show, titled Home Again Home Again runs thru June 22nd.
Jacob Magraw will be showing embroidery pieces on cloth along with painted, gouache works on paper. His paintings are vibrant slices of memory, the subject of which are left up to the viewer. Figures rarely appear, but their presence is everywhere. Tools, monuments, and shelters litter the paper. Each piece is drawn first in pencil to work out form and perspective then colored in. The paintings are small and detailed. In keeping each piece small (approx. 12” x 10”) he’s able to cover more ground but retain a level of detail that is central to the feeling of a personal history. The individual sizes are less important than the volume of total work. He sees the entirety of his work as a catalog, a collection of impressions gathered from a deep well of emotional history.
The embroidered pieces are stations for thought and interpretation. The basic shapes and divisions are easily lived with. The hope is that each piece can reflect long enough for personal interpretation to transfer and be contained with the shapes and patterns.
Rachell Sumpter paints scenes of colored splendor dropped into scenes of desolate wilderness. Using layered gouache and pastel, she paints scenes that are of community and of isolation. There are melting mountain tops, ghosts and graves; vast monuments and tiny moments that speak to the legacies a generation leaves and the promises it makes. Sumpter borrows imagery from religious and political traditions, from dream, from our threatened natural world. Yet amid these artifacts, memories and future relics there is a human closeness and physical intimacy. This spirit lends optimism to what might otherwise seem like an elegy. In this bleak and changing landscape there are celebrations as well as lamentations. Using a deceptively simple strokes she creates an iconography for the longed-for and the feared; a mythology of mystery, pleasure, and the foreshadowing of loss.
Rachell Sumpter and Jacob Magraw split time living in Sacramento and a tiny island at the top of Puget Sound with their children. Both received their BFAs from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Home Again Home Again marks their first show at Park Life Gallery.
Park Life Gallery is proud to present Crash, a new series of collages from Hilary Pecis.
For Crash Hilary Pecis presents a series of collages composed of large scale photos of high profile NASCSAR crash scenes that were cut up and reassembled in order to present a reinterpretation of the events. The reference scenes are familiar and widely circulated in digital form, and were chosen for their spectacular formal qualities. Pecis provides enough information for the viewer to decipher the image, but information is intentionally left out and/or multiplied. Pecis further scrambles the borrowed digital images by cutting and pasting them into a surrogate image. The use of crash scenes is for the most part formal, however the mangling of the vehicles that occur in the image is further manipulated with the rearrangement of the collage. The artist furthers the drama of the scenes that can appear both exciting and familiar. The images portrayed also echo the rearrangement of the physical object and metamorphosis into something else, at times resembling a more organic arrangement.
Park Life Gallery
220 Clement st
SF CA 94118
415.368.7275
Please send press inquiries to Info@parklifestore.com
It was a great time. Special thanks to Luca Antonucci (and Colpa Press) and Tucker Nichols, Dave Kasparzak, Ferris Plock, Kelly Tunstall and Francesco Deiana for contributing their time and effort for the limited edition print give away. They went fast.
Please join us this Friday evening for our Grand Opening Reception. We are working with several artists to produce limited edition prints that we will be giving away while they last…including Tucker Nichols, Luca Antonucci, Dave Kasparzak, and more. There will also be Drinks and Snacks.
When Jamie Alexander and Derek Song opened the first Park Life store on Clement Street nearly a decade ago, they knew they were taking a risk by moving into a neighborhood better known for its cheap eats than its appetite for left-field art and design. The boutique flourished in the Inner Richmond, ushering in like-minded retail spaces such as the clothing retailer Seedstore and eco gift shop Foggy Notion. Now the Park Life partners are hoping to repeat the formula with their second outlet of the same name, which opened this month at the corner of 22nd and Shotwell streets – a tree-lined residential neighborhood in a formerly rough patch of the Mission District. “We like the idea of not going into places with an established aesthetic or feel,” says Alexander. “That would be kind of boring.” The new store carries a similar assortment of urbane home goods, books, stationery, art and T-shirts, with a slightly different slant. With its smaller footprint there’s no room for a gallery, but collaborations are already under way with nearby studio spaces like Southern Exposure and We Are Will Brown. “There’s so much going on here we don’t have to depend on a retail corridor,” Alexander says. For its official opening party on Friday, Park Life will hand out exclusive prints by celebrated locals Tucker Nichols, Luca Antonucci and Francesco Deiana. “People are really embracing us down there,” Alexander says. “I feel like it’s going to work.”
Folding the Blanket of Time is a three-person show of San Francisco artists Sarah Hotchkiss, Courtney Johnson and Maysha Mohamedi. One day Courtney told Maysha and Sarah a story about folding blankets after childhood sleepovers, chanting the phrase “folding the blanket of life” with her friend. Sarah misheard this phrase as “folding the blanket of time,” loved it and refused to hear anything different. Courtney and Maysha decided not to correct her.
With the misheard phrase as a prompt, Sarah, Courtney and Maysha present work blending abstraction with representation and hard edges with loose brushwork to create a group of brightly colored paintings and sculptures.
Courtney’s paintings delve into an uneasy alternate reality where the abstract idea of time becomes a pattern thrown onto forms like a blanket. Color and line combine into nightmarish results. If painting is a form of virtual reality, she creates a world just slightly off its axis.
Sarah presents new sculptures based on three questions: 1. What would the holodeck render if requested to produce art? 2. What makes something recognizable as a functional object if its purpose is unknown? 3. What kind of future do these objects inhabit?
Maysha’s playfully associative paintings depict recurring motifs applied to the surface directly by hand. When Maysha folded her blanket of time, she was transported back to a prehistoric era where figure models were culled from the local dinosaur population.
Artists Include: Angel Jo, Daren Wilson, Peter McBride, Andrew Kontrabecki.
Opening Reception Friday Feb 21st. 6-9pm.
There is beauty in functional pottery in its potential to contain. A cup of tea, a homemade meal, a flower gathered from a walk all transform the object to take on a new image and role. With function, the object becomes a collaboration full of meaning, sometimes beyond the imagination and intent of the creator.
Image in the Object showcases the work of four artists in the bay area who use ceramics as a tool for creative usability. Each body of work has gone through a similar process of building and firing, but the variety of design all began with the artist’s sense of the environment the pieces will ultimately live within.
Info: FOG Design+Art, San Francisco’s premier modernism fair. Presented in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this new fair will feature important 20th-century and contemporary design dealers from across the country and beyond as well as a selection of leading modern and contemporary art galleries. Furniture, fine art, and design objects representing design movements from the last century to today will be presented in a dynamic layout designed to complement the exhibitor offerings.
Beginning in December we will once again be doubling our floor space for the Holidays..and this year we’ve stocked the store with more merchandise than ever before.
In addition to the normal inventory of art and design related products we will be stocking:
– New, Select Book Titles: cooking, design, typography, art, etc.
– New Bags and Packs by Topo Designs.
– New Design Goods and Editions from MAKR, Areaware, Grey Area Editions, The Thing Quarterly, Polite UK, Third Drawer Down.
– New Tee Designs by Tucker Nichols.
– New David Shrigley Skate Deck Edition.
– New Park Life hats and caps.
– New Limited Edition Prints.
– New Park Life Hoodies.
– New Design and Electronic Goods from Native Union, Bruno, Braun, Marshall, and more.
– New and expanded inventory of children’s items.
– Sunglasses from Knockaround.
We will be hosting a Headlands Center for the Arts merchandise Pop Up section.
We also will be offering new custom printed gift bags with purchase.
Gallery Shows for 2014
January — Louis Schmidt —
February — Group Ceramics Show —
March — Courntey Johnson, Sarah Hotchkiss, and Maysha Mohamedi —
April — Hilary Pecis —
May — Jacob McGraw and Rachael Sumpter —
June — RISD Group show —
August — Andrew Paynter —
September — Serena Mitnik-Miller —
October — Ian Johnson —
November — TBA —
December — No show (Holiday Retail)
David Shrigley, Politicians Make Me Sick Skate Deck. Exclusively for Park Life
7 ply skate deck. 4 color silk screen bottom image, Natural wood finish on top.
Dimensions – 33″ x 8″. Limited Edition of 150.
In stock now.
Scooter expert Jason May of MyProScooter reported that longboard by Quest are “quicker than most skateboards, and the ride is generally much smoother.” Good thing is that both boards are good for anyone, and the designs can be replicated to one another.
Thursday, November 21st marks the Third Annual Clementime Microhood. We love the community and feel of the Inner Richmond neighborhood and can’t wait to return! The Bold Italic and Google Local, in partnership with Park Life, are excited to bring you an evening of fun on Clement Street between 3rd and 7th Avenues.
Well you can follow Best in Nashik to know about best businesses. Enjoy offerings from these amazing businesses:
Park Life offers refreshments in the form of drinks and snacks. They are also raffling off an original art piece by a Park Life artist. Free raffle ticket with purchase.
Green Apple Books keeps you entertained with music from RonDre and plenty of beer. They are taking 10% off everything and are hosting Docs of The Bay outside their shop for burger goodness.
Seedstore serves white wine throughout the evening while an acoustic musician plays in the shop.
Pretty Please Bakeshop sweetens the event and takes 25% off all bakery items and 10% off all holiday orders placed during the night. They’ll also hook you up with spiked (or regular) eggnog.
Foggy Notion celebrates their two year anniversary with complimentary drinks and snacks.
Dirty Trix Saloon keeps you full with complimentary meatball sliders and $1 off cocktails.
Kisha Studio gives out champagne and fruits plus 10% off the store for the evening.
Park Life is proud to present Close Wilderness, an exhibit of new paintings and drawings from Amze Emmons.
The work in this exhibition tracks a research thread connecting, vernacular architecture, informal economies, and self-organized systems of community & exchange, essentially the intersection of Système D and material culture. Emmons finds something inherently hopeful embodied in these improvised solutions, spaces, and markets. He is inspired by walking the cities, photo-cataloging aspects of street life. In particular, he is interested in evidence of local place making and the global circulation of material goods.
By collaging the source material within the drawing process, Emmons aims to present how the things we consume and build connect us to one another, to show the way everyday objects contain both histories & creative potential, and to make the familiar strange through proximity.
This exhibit will also feature contributions from by special guests: Anni Altshuler, Glen Baldridge, Matt Furie, Michael Krueger, Nathan Haenlein, R.L. Tillman, Nathaniel Parsons, Imin Yeh
Bio
Amze Emmons (b. 1974, Amsterdam, NY) is a Philadelphia-based, multi-disciplinary artist with a background in drawing and printmaking. Emmons received a BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University and a MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. He has held solo exhibitions at Park Life, San Francisco; Kesting Ray, New York; Space 1026, Philadelphia; OHT Gallery, Boston; and Works on Paper Gallery, Philadelphia. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions including EFA Project Space and the International Print Center, New York; the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington; the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines; Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago; and The Print Center, Philadelphia. Emmons has received numerous awards including a Fellowship in the Arts from the Independence Foundation; an Individual Creative Artist Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Arts Council; and a Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony.
Also featuring contributions from by special guests: Anni Altshuler, Glen Baldridge, Matt Furie, Michael Krueger, Nathan Haenlein, R.L. Tillman, Nathaniel Parsons, Imin Yeh
Amze Emmons (b. 1974, Amsterdam, NY) is a Philadelphia-based, multi-disciplinary artist with a background in drawing and printmaking. His images evoke a sense of magical/minimal realism inspired by architectural illustration, comic books, cartoon language, information graphics, news footage, consumer packaging, and instruction manuals.
Emmons received a BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University and a MA and MFA from the University of Iowa.
Issue 20, by visual artist Tauba Auerbach, takes the form of a 24-hour wall clock. Auerbach is known for creating work about language and logic through a variety of media. Her training as a traditional sign painter often informs her text-based work. For this issue, the artist designed the clock face and its 24 numerals. The clock’s mechanism runs from midnight to midnight, meaning the hands circle the clock once every 24 hours. This time keeping system, also known as military time or astronomical time, is the most commonly used numerical time notation in the world today, yet very few analog clocks employ a 24-hour mechanism.
Made entirely in the United States, the clean design of the clock features black aluminum hour and minute hands and Auerbach’s 24 gold-hued numerals against a clean white face. The clock measures 10.5 inches in diameter, can be hung up with a built-in hook, and is powered by a single AA battery (not included). THE THING and Ms. Auerbach collaborated with New York-based design team Assembly to design and manufacture this issue almost entirely from scratch.
Park Life is pleased to announce Hagazussa, a show of new paintings by Rachel Budde.
Rachel Budde explores the boundary or the ‘hedge’ in her new body of work Hagazuss.
Hedge, hex and hag all have their roots in the Germanic word hagazussa. Hagazussa implies a certain malevolent/benevolent magic on the boundary where the wild and the cultivated meet. This edge is illuminated by her work, embodied in her trickster goddesses manifesting in various forms from medicinal weeds, to potholes to windows into the void. Working with weeds as a manifestation of her trickster force, these self-seeding, medicinal herbs thrive in our urban environments, often harboring medicinal properties which address common ailments in urban environments. She imagines the weeds fertility coming from an insatiable sexual appetite. Through her own visual mythology, she presents the trickster Goddess, ever straddling the cleaved boundaries that betray the illusion of our binary world.
Rachel Budde infuses the cliche of the Earth Goddess with more sinister and unpredictable dimensions as reflected in the Cheshire grin of the Trickster to re-envision the earth goddess in a more active, if not paradoxical, role. The false dichotomy disconnecting Culture from Nature creates a fetishized relationship to the latter. Refashioning the contemporary vision of the natural world allows her to rethink our own natures. The Earth Goddess is not just a symbol of fertility. We’ve been trained to see only this in forms like the Venus of Willendorf: passive, ever fertile and ready to conceive. Just as importantly as her power of procreation, the Goddess wields wrath and destruction. The narrative of her productive womb is advantageous in a patriarchal society. But she is also the consumptive tornado, the scorching volcanic shower, the hedonistic sexual pulse that propels life forward.
Opened by Lee Kaplan in 1987 and newly located in the historic Helms Bakery district, Arcana: Books on the Arts is a fixture of the Los Angeles scene. Photography is a specialty at the store, but the shelves contain far more, including rare and collectible titles on modern and contemporary art, design, architecture, cinema, music, and fashion.
visit retainedfirefighter for top books you want to read it. Long a favorite of Hollywood insiders (John Waters can regularly be seen flitting through the stacks), Arcana’s selection is unparalleled and the staff is knowledgeable and friendly. MurrayNow can provide more information.
Run by the gracious, ever-informed Dagny Corcoran, the first Art Catalogues opened in 1977 above the Nicholas Wilder Gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard. In the intervening years, Art Catalogues had several homes. It is now happily settled on the grounds of LACMA, where Corcoran has the talent and authority to craft a full roster of talks, readings, and interviews with some of contemporary art and photography’s shining stars. You will get latest updates about books at carrefour-maires . The shelves are always filled with a great selection of known and obscure monographs, catalogs, anthologies, and essays. You can check bridge for more interesting books.
With over twenty thousand titles in stock and thirty years of thriving business under its belt, William Stout Books is exactly what you want in a neighborhood bookstore: an open, airy space; an informed staff; and shelves and shelves of art, design, photography, and architecture titles from around the world. What started as essentially a favor—travels abroad yielded unseen titles that friends wanted access to—has become a mainstay of the tightly knit San Francisco art community. The shop near Chinatown is the original store, and there is a great second space in Berkeley.
ARTBOOK | D.A.P. is the nervous system of the independent art and photography book community in North America. Under the laser-sharp leadership of Sharon Gallagher, the company has continued to thrive in this attack-of-the-Amazon era by simultaneously publishing new titles, distributing books by more than two hundred small art publishers, fueling art fairs with their book booths, and nurturing independent bookstores from sea to shining sea.
For further updates visit our second page at excelpasswordrecovery .Its Los Angeles showroom, ARTBOOK | D.A.P. Showroom, Los Angeles, is open by appointment to bookstore and specialty retail buyers, cultural institutions, journalists, and other bibliophiles (that’s you). Contact Tricia Gabriel at triciagabriel@gmail.com or call (323) 969-8985.
Another combination bookstore and art gallery, Park Life marries the feel of a neighborhood shop with the leanings of a hipster/fringe artist hangout to produce a space some have affectionately referred to as “Giant Robot North.” The photobook selection is smartly curated and placed amid design titles, graphic novels, and other contemporary artist monographs. Don’t forget to pick up a Chris Baird– or Tucker Nichols–designed T-shirt while you’re there.
Kristina Lewis Solo Show at Park Life Gallery. May 24 – June 23.
Park Life Gallery
Material Record introduces samples from a larger body of work in which I contemplate discarded objects in my immediate urban environment as archaeological finds in an unknown and distant future. Server Core is one of these radically new features. Server Core allows for a minimal version of Server 2008 to be installed on machines that only need specific functionality. For example, Server Core can be configured to take on common functions that servers normally perform such as those of the DHCP server, DNS server, file server and Active Directory, as well as operations such as streaming media, print services or even Windows virtualization. Server Solutions that scale with your business to deliver exceptional performance on even the most demanding media streaming projects. Melbourne weekly eastern can provide all updates on business projects. Previous server installations had a separate management console for each role contained within the Manage Your Server dashboard. Manage Your Server was a convenient enhancement over previous server releases where management consoles were not all so neatly gathered together. However, with Server 2008, this convenience is taken a step further with the completely new Server Manager. There could be many more pros & cons but I’ve pointed out some of the major ones. Managing a web server starts as a full time job, you must constantly monitor its performance and security. This can sometimes be an exhausting task, especially if you currently have other responsibilities. Though, the control you will have over your website and its performance is rewarding enough. You no longer have to wait for technical support or approval to install a script onto the server. salbreux-pesage We provide best guide for your business. You can have as many websites and databases you want, as long as your hardware can handle it. You no longer have to go into the discussion forums and search for the best web host or rant about how much you hate your current host. You can even begin hosting family & friends personal websites. Dedicated server is a single computer connected to a network (internet). This computer and all of it’s processing power is dedicated to a single person or organization. Meaning that the computer resources are not shared by anyone else. You have the full control of the machine and you are free to run any software you want on that computer. Because your website or application is hosted exclusively on this dedicated server, you don’t run the risk of the server being congested by requests for other people’s websites or applications. On a shared hosting plan, the speed at which your web application loads is dependent upon how much traffic other websites that are on the same shared hosting server are getting. This causes slow loading times for high traffic websites and other websites that share a server with them. Dedicated server hosting avoids all this by affording your web application exclusive bandwidth. Shared hosting is also risky because you have no idea who is uploading what to the same server that you are hosted on. John in Nantucket might be uploading a web application containing an as yet unidentified virus that deletes everything it touches.
If your website resides on the same server as John’s, then, to put it technically, you’re screwed. Dedicated hosting avoids all this and lets you sleep a little easier at night.
For any business to remain successful, its expansion is vital. During its course of expansion, a business may move to a bigger office, employ additional manpower, need the services of a bigger marketing company, and in case of online businesses, require the upgrading of the website host server. Companies reaching the next phase of expansion usually look for dependable virtual private server (VPS,) a virtual mechanism that keeps reproducing a copy of its own operating system. In case you realize that VPS is the most effective way for the growth of your company, here are a few vital factors needing consideration while looking for a competent provider who comes up to your expectations:
Linux Or Windows
When you start looking for your VPS host, the first issue that you need to resolve is if you would prefer a Linux or Windows operating system. These are the two most widespread operating systems these days. Though the functioning and performance of these two is quite similar, you should avoid deciding randomly for your business. Do not forget that your business is passing through an expansion phase. You may believe that Linux operating system, being open source, would be cheaper, as you’ll just need to incur expense for supplementary support applications. Linux OS is compatible with a range of programming languages, giving you considerable level of control, comes with cPanel plus offers options of CentOS and Debian. Moreover, it is preferable to have Linux OS for developing a website using PHP scripting language. Conversely, you should prefer Windows OS when using a DOT NET software structure. Also, Windows OS proves a better option for users who lack the adequate technical experience. This system is convenient for the not so IT savvy users, and excellent for MS SQL databases; it gets usual support and updates from Microsoft. Its interface is also user friendlier.
Is the VPS Unmanaged or Managed?
Quite like you have two major options for choosing an operating system, you get two options for the selection of server management: unmanaged or managed. If your business employs little to fairly technically competent staff or IT wizards who would better utilize their talents on more worthwhile company affairs, your first choice should be a Best Managed VPS. Services you can expect from managed VPS include regular update plus installments, keeping an eye on usage, security threats plus disk space etc. However, bear in mind that, while this system is more convenient, you should ensure that your provider offers flexibility and the overall expense of managing the system is rational.
How much server RAM/Bandwidth will I get?
While making an assessment of the OS and the ease of server management, you should also compare features such as bandwidth and RAM offered by the different VPS providers. You should have a fairly good idea of the extent to which you are presently using the available bandwidth and RAM. It is imperative that you choose a system that offers a scope of further expansion. You may find out the bandwidth and RAM being used by other companies of your level and kind of business, and then select a provider offering the upgrade of bandwidth and RAM to suffice your future requirements.
Archaeologists rely on the material record to explain the behaviors of prehistoric, pre-literate cultures. But even when a historical record is available, material data provide crucial, unbiased revelations. Interestingly, a considerable amount of information is gleaned from the study of ancient trash.
Convinced that our own junkcarries coded explanations of contemporary habits, I analyze discards from gutters, sidewalks, thrift stores and the tops of refuse bins, reading patterns, folds, curves, colors, holes, prongs, breaks, fissures, hollows and solids for information.
Perhaps future archaeologists will find our trash and take it to be treasure…or perhaps they will find our discards re-engineered, jerry-rigged tools and talismans, manifestations of creative necessity in the face of limited resources.
Whatever they discover, I imagine advanced beings lining up to view our refuse enshrined in protective cases, fascinated by what it describes.
Tauba has produced a series of 6 Etchings (Color Softground) with Paulson Bott Press in Berkeley that will be available for shipping as soon in June.
Each Print is in an edition of 40. The release price is $4500 per print and Paulson Press will increase the prices as the editions sell. They are available individually and as sets.
Pictured:
Tauba Auerbach – MESH/MOIRE I, 2012. Color Aquatint Etching.
40 ¼” x 30”inches. Unframed. Signed/Dated Edition of 40.
Opening Reception Friday April 19th, 2013. 7-10pm.
Chris Lux is a painter and sculptor from San Francisco.
Lux’s practice, which has taken shape as a series of paintings and sculptures, investigates the history of objects, time periods and people, and his own history as an artist.
In his new show at Park Life, painted frames, tables and ceramics, speak to a shared idea of arts place in daily life.
Lux’s work draws subject matter from the past, most notably, from the world of Mythologies. His most recent book “12 Saints” with writer William Rockwell, drew exclusively from hagiographies of the lives of Christian saints taken from “The Golden Legend” (Jacobus de Voragine, c. 1260). In his new works, Ancient Mythologies from Japan have taken center stage . The works speaks in the language of painting and composition to not only tell this stories from the past, but also the story of his own practice as an artist. Playing with three distinct styles, black and white illustrate works, crisp bright colored graphic work, and funky dripping ceramic works, they are used interchangeably to speak of stories from the past. This self referential sampling from the artist own past works and styles, keeps the work from being simply illustrative, and adds a level that speaks of the myth making of artists own careers.
Lux is represented by Jancar Jones Gallery in Los Angles. His most recent show has been “Eating out of the Drain”, at The Popular Workshop in San Francisco. He has shown extensively in the US and Europe.
We are excited to be hosting an event for David Shrigley at Park Life in May for the release of The Thing Quarterly issue 19. More info here. The event will take place from 5;30-7;30 on May 10th.
David Shrigley will be in the Bay Area courtesy of Headlands Center for the Arts were he will be in residency this Spring.
Park Life is pleased to announce, Bad Company, new works by Christopher Baird. Baird will be exhibiting a show of new paintings and mixed media works as well as a site specific installation in the Gallery.
With straight forward, essentially trompe l’oile paintings of found (and often thrown away) book covers Christopher Baird deals with the Bad Company of his (and our) contemporary world. Through a kind of realist/minimalist lens he selects these discarded images and remakes them. They have a looming presence and it’s meant to be. They are confrontational and not reassuring, pessimistically optimistic. Bad Company belies real feelings, and its presence is uncomfortable, casual in its straightforward manner and almost funny in imagery. Bad Company pokes fun and pays homage simultaneously loathing and lauding the history, aggression and machismo of abstraction and the mainstream acceptance of its representatives.
Christopher Baird was raised by Bay Area Californians in Portland Oregon. After high school at the Arts and Communication Magnet Academy, he studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute where he received his BFA. His work was recently included in group exhibits at Park Life, San Francisco, The Popular workshop, San Francisco, Jancar Jones Gallery, Los Angeles and Partners and Spade, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco, Receiver Gallery, San Francisco, and Adobe Books Gallery, San Francisco. He lives and works in San Francisco, CA.
Co-Organized by Ever Gold Gallery and Jamie Alexander of Park Life, San Francisco.
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 16th, 6-10pm
Ever Gold Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work from Sadie Barnette. “Composed and Performed” brings together sculpture, installation, and photography to support the at-once boldly minimal yet complex language of Barnette’s work, within which she constructs a visual language system out of sub-culture codes and west coast vernacular, economic formalism, text and abstractions. Her work is concerned with extra-legal economies, luxury as drug, counterfeit capitalism, glitter as hypnotic, outer space as head space, the everyday as gold, family and lived identity experience, and the party.
Also available will be a new limited edition artist book, the latest in Barnette’s interest in zines’ and handmade books’ ability to provide an intimate yet accessible art object that anyone can own. There will be a limited print-run of Barnette’s new artist book released through Park Life at Printed Matters’ LA Book Fair this January, with the official release and signing happening at Ever Gold during the opening reception. Barnette is also currently in an exhibition at the Harlem Studio Museum, Nov 11th– March 10th.
The Holiday Season is here and starting in December, Park Life will be doubling its retail floor space and doubling the inventory of merchandise. We will also be extending our hours and opening at 11 am everyday.
Here are our expanded hours for the Holidays:
– Monday through Thursday 11AM to 8 PM
– Friday through Sunday 10 AM until 9 PM (Sunday til 7 PM)
For online shoppers we are offering free shipping for orders over $75. (domestic orders only)
We double the size of our retail store for the Holidays per usual. That means twice as much merchandise for your holiday consumption. Gifts, Art, Tees, Books, Editions, Design Objects, Toys, Stationary, Prints, Tech Stuff, etc…
We will also be hosting a Headlands Center for the Arts Pop up shop at Park Life. Artists designed Merchandise that includes apperal, objects home-wares, gifts, etc..
Park Life is proud to present What Have You., an exhibit of new paintings from Evah Fan.
August 31 – Sept. 30, 2012.
Opening Reception Friday August 31, 7-10pm.
Fan’s delicate gouache paintings are narrative, poetical and minimalistic and sometimes puzzling. Her sparse and colorful compositions contain elements of nonsense, mystery, and whimsy. Fan tackles mundane objects and figures in negative planes throwing in elements of parody and irony that address a certain naïve humor. Her subject matter often mines historical details from Victorian and Egyptian eras.
For What Have You. Evah Fan increases the size of her works, using color blocks to highlight what might happen in the everyday indoor scenarios. The works contemplate windows and aspects of openings in a closed space. She also incorporates collaged elements and figures collected from her personal archives which are then arranged on a flat plane.
Evah Fan has a BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, 2004, and an MFA University College of Arts Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Sweden 2011. She is represented by Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles. She currently Lives in Oakland.
Park Life Gallery is proud to present Through the Blinds, an exhibit of new paintings from Eric Shaw. See the works here.
The show opens Friday, June15th, 2012 and runs through July 15th. Opening Reception June 15th from 7 to 9pm.
Eric Shaw is a self-taught artist who currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. His bold and often disquieting paintings, executed exclusively in gouache, depict a world of totemic grotesquery where disaffected biomorphs lounge seductively among the detrital emblems of early modern abstraction; the waiting room of a new-age dentist in which Miró, Bosch, and Patrick Nagel sit discussing the advent of the Internet. Through the use of a self-restrictive visual vocabulary, Shaw explores the creative potential of semi-blindness and the almost pathological intrigue of obsessive reduplication. One’s eyes are one’s blinds, and only achieve second sight through the partial obfuscation of the real.
The Park Life Gallery exhibition, “(Invisible) Relic,” curated by Andrew McClintock, examines works by two generations of California Conceptual Artists working with performative actions and re-appropriated objects in a variety of mediums including video, photographic, audio, sculpture and performance.
On November 19, 1971 at F Space in Los Angeles, a young Chris Burden stands in the middle of a white walled gallery. Not far from him, another man with a rifle exchanges a few words, takes aim, and a gunshot is heard. During the same period in San Francisco at MOCA [1970-84], Paul Kos arranges a vast array of microphones focused on two blocks of melting ice. At the same exhibition, in front of an attentive audience, distinguished conceptualist and curator Tom Marioni climbs a ladder and urinates into a metal washtub 5 feet below.
Forty years later, a new wave of Bay Area Conceptual Artists continue to explore the boundaries of art through performative actions. At the Park Life opening Josh Short will be frying fish outside with its amplified sound broadcast over the FM airwaves within the confines of the gallery. From 1998-2003, Guy Overfelt’s “relic” comes from his series of Trans Am performances that exhibit the sound and imagery of burnt rubber on pavement: using the classic American car as his performative tool. Mauricio Ancalmo’s kinetic sculpture challenges the use and product [relic] of the viewer’s experience by visualizing sound through light using discarded objects, questioning what is “out dated” technology, giving those objects new function and expropriating them for the purpose of art.
For centuries relics have been associated with religious activity. Only recently, at the advent of Happenings, the Japanese Gutai movement and Fluxus, have artists begun participating in performance art pieces that create no product but leave behind traces of the action, such as posters, programs, photography and video.
But do relics have to have physical properties? Can the sound of frying fish become the performative relic. Can it be a sense memory? And are these fleeting invisible memories more true to the nature of the action than mediated responses?. Gunshots, urination, burning cars, white noise, food frying, radio static, can now be manipulated by the artist for creative purposes.
Which is more important – the action, or spectator’s memory of said action? What happens when invisible relics are collected and “exhibited” in a gallery setting? “(Invisible) Relics,” addresses these concerns in a cross-generational reappraisal of the primacy of the art object.
*For any press and sales inquiries please contact Park Life Gallery at 415.386.7275
Anzfer Farms is a workshop dedicated to making one of a kind items. Started by Jonathan Anzalone and Joseph Ferriso in 2009 to make works which blur the line between art and function.
Jonathan Anzalone was born on Long Island, studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated in 2003. After six years of woodworking that supported an art making habit, Anzfer Farms was founded as an effort to expand the creative process to a full time position.
Joseph Ferriso grew up one mile from Jon and received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2003. He worked as a fine art framer, installer and teacher in NYC before moving to SF in 2009. Recent solo shows include Heliopolis in Greenpoint, Brooklyn 2010 and Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles 2011
More Light features the work of two young artists that currently call San Francisco their home. Both artists employ graphite, ink and mixed media on paper to illustrate abstract representations of varying themes that include socialization, behavior barriers, society and our relationship to the natural world.
Park Life Gallery
220 Clement st
SF CA 94118
415.386.7275
415.386.7275
Harley Lafarrah Eaves lives and works in San Francisco. His work focuses on abstraction and the psychedelic. Using meticulous lines and patterns he creates narratives that reference the occult, mortality, social interactions, and refracted light. The more literal elements of these themes (trees, pyramids, lines, light) come together to form compositions that allow the viewer insight into the artists psyche.
Francesco Igory Deiana was born in Milan, Italy and lives and works in San Francisco. Known for his probing and large and ball point pen drawings on paper. His pursuit bounds together the connections between man, nature and the social system we’re living in. His masks metaphorically represent the mental and behavioral barriers that civil society imposes to us, causing a condition of stress and frustration that is at odds with the primordial emotions generated by the nature, regulated by spontaneity and pure instinct..
Starting Friday November 25th we will be opening at 11am everyday ..extended Holiday hours.
And starting the the Week of November 28th we will be using the Gallery Space for Retail ..doubling our space devoted to merchandise. More updates to follow…
Courtney Johnson paints wild and gnarled women engaged in wild and gnarly behavior. The reckless figures in her invented world bare multiple rows of razor sharp teeth and glare with no remorse. She considers these traits through line drawings within her paintings, to emphasize an unresolved, half-in-this-world woman.In her current body of work, Johnson cultivates a sense of character and place somewhere between convention and fantasy, where figures are unhinged and consumed by impulse.
Courtney Johnson was born in Virginia.She received her BA in 2004 from Prescott College and her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2011.She is a 2010 recipient of the Murphy Cadogan Fellowship.Her work has been show at the Carville Annex, Kokoro Studio and Worth Ryder Gallery, all in the Bay area.Courtney lives and works in San Francisco.
Landscape art represents the cultural, political, and spiritual aspirations of a particular group of people. Because humans are nostalgically inclined and landscapes are forever in flux, people may often find it challenging to appreciate the vistas before them, instead preferring to wax sentimental about the past or to anticipate a gilded future. Michelle Fleck’s paintings, however, don’t offer viewers such pastoral panoramas. Instead of arcadia, Fleck foregrounds overfilled dumpsters, stripped billboards, and construction sites. These scenes are familiar, but nothing in the pictures Fleck includes in Somewhere, her solo exhibition at Park Life, indicates a particular locale. Because of their ubiquity, dumpsters and construction netting generally go unnoticed, and if people do pay attention to them, it’s scornfully. Fleck’s strongest pictures encourage viewers to look more conscientiously; she critiques increasing cultural homogeneity while calling attention to the abundant opportunities for aesthetic pleasure in contemporary American urban and suburban landscapes.
The artist’s sense of composition and economical handling of paint are strong suits, but in Your Ad Here (2011) and Coming Soon (2011), where Fleck’s line of sight is angled up at rooftop billboards or over walls, the skies read slack and the paintings lose energy. When her focus shifts towards the ground, however, things get exciting. In two of Fleck’s standout works, Blacktop (2011) and Repaving (2011), common road repair supplies—an orange-and-white barricade, piles of asphalt, netting—are vignettes in the center of the paper, their colors and shapes turned into lean, formalist bricolage. In Convenient Parking (2011) and New Acquisition (2011), stakes and nylon fencing encircle piles of sand and gravel, setting them apart from their surroundings as if the materials were sacred offerings. By focusing on these demarcated forms, Fleck highlights the potential for aesthetic experience in quotidian settings.
Repaving, 2011; acrylic and aerosol on paper; 11 x 14 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Park Life, San Francisco.
In Fleck’s Picket Fence (2011), the exhibition’s finest work, an orange construction fence snakes over ground littered with debris. The crooked path of the fence moves across and out of the picture plane, calling to mind Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence, a 24.5-mile-long and eighteen-foot-tall white nylon fence installed in Northern California in 1976. Whereas Running Fence was a grand, Romantic gesture that questioned the concept of boundaries (e.g., private property lines or socio-political barriers like the Iron Curtain), Fleck’s Picket Fence is less heady and more utilitarian. She reclaims the fence for workaday service while also calling attention to its inherent aesthetic appeal, thereby ennobling the prosaic with her discerning eye.
Somewhere is on view at Park Life, in San Francisco, through October 30, 2011.
Christopher Reiger is a writer, artist, and curator currently living and working in San Francisco. Artwork can be seen at his website, and essays on art, natural history, and miscellany can be read at his long-running blog Hungry Hyaena.
Michelle Fleck is a San Francisco-based painter whose work focuses on the relationship between man and the landscape. She is interested in our desire to replace what is old and dated, and how that manifests itself in the urban landscape. Influenced by everyday life in the city, her paintings serve as snapshots of an ongoing cycle of wear and replacement, showing our constant reinvention of the landscape around us, and the marks we leave upon it. Her hope is that these pieces have a sense of relevancy in a culture driven by a need for expansion, change and newness.
Fleck is from California and graduated from San Francisco State University.
Please join us tonite at Paulson Bott Press in Berkeley for our opening reception of the Park Life temporary Pop-Up shop. There will be booze, music, food (Vik’s Chaat House is catering). There will be shopping. See the new Tauba Auerbach Prints too.
Park Life (San Francisco) is happy to announce we will be forming a temporary Pop-Up Store in Berkeley at Paulson Bott Press. Park Life will be curating the Store and Gallery in the Paulson Bott Warehouse space in West Berkeley. We will be featuring a special selection of merchandise that will include Books, Design Objects, Editions, Artist Tees, Limited Edition Prints, Original Art and more. We will be debuting new works and editions from artist that include Tauba Auerbach, Andrew Schoultz, Tucker Nichols, Clare Rojas, and many more. Follow oceannenvironment for more information.
Please join us for the opening reception on Friday, September 9th from 6-9pm. There will Music, Refreshments, Food Trucks and Shopping!
The Pop-Up Store will last through September 16th during Paulson’s regular business hours.
Park Life/Paulson Bott Press Pop-Up Store
2390 C Fourth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
MAP www.parklifestore.com www.paulsonbottpress.com
Telephone – Paulson – 510 559 2088 Fax 510 559 2085
Telephone – Park Life – 415 386 7275 Fax 415 386 7272
info@parklifestore.com
info@paulsonbottpress.com
Paulson Bott Press is open Tuesday – Friday 11 – 5pm and Saturday Noon – 4pm.
Opening Reception Thursday August 18th, 2011 6-9pm
Runs through September 15th, 2011
Thomas Wold is a furniture designer and builder who creates sculptural furnishings that have been described as being “pushed to their functional and conceptual limits.” His process combines new and recycled material and seamlessly mashes up references from various decorative movements, architecture, graphic design and painting/illustration to form new hybrid furniture. Composed like paintings, the creations layer unlikely elements to form flowing and surprising arrangements that teeter on the edge of workability. Wold likens his design process to creating music with electronic samples, manipulating snippets of random structures to form songs that are at once deeply familiar and completely new.
Park Life Gallery
220 Clement st.
SF CA 94118
www.parklifestore.com
415.386.7275
Last Time It Was Gray
A two-person show featuring the work of
Sadie Barnette & Ian Johnson
Opening reception: Friday July 8th, 6-10pm
Show runs July 8th to August 14th, 2011
Park Life Gallery
220 Clement St
SF CA 94118
415.386.7275
www.parklifestore.com
Park Life is proud to present Last Time It Was Gray, a two-person exhibit featuring the work of Sadie Barnette & Ian Johnson.
Bay Area artists Sadie Barnette and Ian Johnson come together to exhibit a new body of work featuring their respective styles; figurative elements that they inextricably link to their own versions of what could be referred to as a ‘new abstraction’. Incorporating different but overlapping dramatic visual narratives into their work, Barnette and Johnson offer their engaging works on paper, drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations in a collaborative event. Their works address and give insight into themes that include popular culture, class, consumerism, music, gender roles and contemporary art. Providing only fragments of information, the completion of the storylines, images and thoughts are left to be formed in the minds of the individual viewers.
Sadie Barnette
Sadie uses drawing, photography, and objects to construct a visual language out of sub-culture codes, west coast vernacular, geometric formalism and economy. She activates meaning and power in anonymous faces, signs for nothing, and negative space.
Her work allows simple forms and gestures to present ideas of social chaos, the fragility of being, ecstasy and the impossible.
Bio: Sadie Barnette is from Oakland, California. She received her BFA from CalArts in 2006, and is currently pursuing her Masters in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego.
Ian Johnson
Ian Johnson’s style and visual language has an instantly recognizable character and unique voice. His work draws its structures and graphic impact from his scope of influences that includes Jazz music, literature, and film. Johnson adds elements of abstraction giving his compositions the expressive immediacy and elevated moods that are rooted in the culture and histories he references. His paintings and drawings incorporate elegantly drafted elements of figurative line work and abstract patterns that combine with color building on his established and ongoing visual narrative.
Bio: Ian Johnson was born in Syracuse, New York and lives and works in San Francisco. He is the Creative Director of Western Edition Skateboarding.
We had a great time this weekend at ArtPadSF @ the Phoenix Hotel. Was definitely a successful event for us and telling from the crowd that filled the place each day I think overall for most everybody else involved too.
Some highlights from the weekend: Being next to Ever Gold Gallery..those boys party and Mark Mulroney’s work is hilarious..seeing Neil Young (twice!), Steven Wolfe’s window display, Michael Rosenthal Gallery’s Tattoo Machine, our awesome staff: Marina, Dan and Amy, Saigon Sandwiches all day long, frequent Hank appearances, the always empty VIP room, Dina from Triple Base’s last week in SF, putting our furniture on the roof, seeing Larry Rinder, Stanley Gatti and Joachim Bechtle in our room at the same time, visits from Matthew Palladino, Andrew Schoultz, Thomas Campbell, Kenneth Baker, Glen Helfand, Robert Shimshack, Gay Outlaw, Rena and Trish Bransten, Balloon Dogs!, DFW*, Jack Hanley phoning it in, Louis, Austin, Ben, Devin, Orion, Dave, Greg, Andrew, Ashley, Jay, Tucker, Alan, Marianna, everyone else…
ArtPadSF is a provocative new 21st century boutique art fair that focuses on emerging and contemporary art from the Bay Area and beyond. San Francisco’s world-renowned museums, galleries, arts institutions, and artists create a vibrant and visionary community of increasing international art prominence, and an ideal locale for the debut of ArtPadSF.
Recognizing the need for an independent art fair to further engage and create new audiences for Bay Area arts, Chip Conley, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Joie De Vivre Hotels, along with ArtPad director, Maria Jenson, will debut ArtPadSF at the legendary Phoenix hotel May 19th, 2011.
ArtPadSF offers art enthusiasts and seasoned collectors alike the opportunity to discover current trends and artistic practices presented by local, national and international art galleries and artists.
Our most recent press release HERE
Park Life Gallery is pleased to present Metric: a two-person art show featuring the work of Dana Hemenway and Anthony Ryan.
Metric: Dana Hemenway & Anthony Ryan
May 20 – June 26, 2011
Opening reception: May 20, 6-9pm
Curated by Jessica Brier
Not unlike the way two old friends can finish each other’s sentences, Metric brings
together the work of two artists who each pick up and extend the ideas and
concerns of the other. Dana Hemenway and Anthony Ryan, both emerging Bay Area
artists with outstanding technical skill, share formal and material concerns that
effectively push forward the dialogue around fine art, design and craft. The work on
view occupies a liminal space between utility and abstraction.
Underpinned by the notion that framing and context imbue every-day objects with
meaning, Dana Hemenway’s sculptural work repurposes found objects to construct
formal installations stripped of context. She also flips this relationship by replicating
every-day objects used for framing or installation, rendered useless as art objects
on display. Her work is carefully hand crafted, putting her practice in dialogue with
contemporary craft as much as Minimalism.
Trained as a printmaker, Anthony Ryan’s most recent work pushes his material
interest in paper a step further by using it as a sculptural material. Ryan collects
massive amounts of cast-off paper strips from industrial printers and weaves them
together, using the test patterns on the paper scraps as formal blueprints. Each is
composed according to its own internal logic.
Aptly using ParkLife as its frame, this exhibition calls attention to the often-blurry
distinction between art and design. Both artists make work that points to various
stages of commerce, using discarded consumer materials to create finished works of
art. Metric points toward the shared interests of Dana Hemenway and Anthony Ryan
around the supremacy of formalist geometry; repurposing discarded consumer
by-products; and the roles of design and craft in art. Metric refers to the precise
measurement shared by each work on view and installation of these works together
in the gallery.
Please send press inquires to info@parklifestore.com.
Park Life is proud to present Living Room, a group show curated by Joey Piziali and Vanessa Blaikie of Romer Young Gallery (formerly Ping Pong Gallery).
The exhibit opens Friday, April 8th, 2011. Opening reception 7-10pm
Park Life is proud to present Living Room, a group show curated by Joey Piziali and Vanessa Blaikie of Romer Young Gallery (formerly Ping Pong Gallery).
The exhibit opens Friday, April 8th, 2011. Opening reception 7-9pm
Artists:
Deric Carner
Amanda Curreri
Liam Everett
Pablo Guardiola
Cliff Hengst
Scott Hewicker
James Sterling Pitt
Susan O’Malley
Josh Pieper
Josh Podoll
Lucy Pullen
Gwenael Rattke
Erik Scollon
Chad Stayrook
Kirk Stoller
Dan Tierney
Alex Zecca
About the show;
Borrowing the words of Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, who recently curated an exhibition at Romer Young Gallery, Living Room is an exhibition that stumbles into ‘broken lines of connectivity between two or more artworks. Arrives at a sense of group-show-ness that has no patience for the filler of themed-ness. Goes from one thing to the next—turning an idea over and over, flipping and tripping it through time until it forms a continuous, coded narrative without characters—just relations.”
Slowly collecting a piece from each exhibition at Romer Young Gallery, our living room has become a natural, private extension of the gallery. Our own private watering hole. The gallery is one watering hole, a social gathering place where friends and individuals come to experience the work, and commune in the company of others. These shows have a public performance to them. Work is thoughtfully installed, and the experience of the viewer carefully considered. The watering hole that is our home, is an organic, ever growing one. Work typically finds its place wherever there is space, in whatever available corner or pocket we can find…on the wall, on the bookshelf, between the plants, in the bathroom…Each space, a perfect place. There is no curation to how the work is installed. It comes together organically, growing slowly and steadily with us. Starting on the right, moving to the left, then vertically. Growing like ivy. Pieces that might not ordinarily be seen together, side by side, get to live together and there grow lines of wonderfully unexpected connectivity. A group show without theme. From one thing to the next. Interrupted by the plant. Commingling with the books.
It would be impossible to recreate the intimate nature of our home, beyond the walls of our home. So much of the magic that we feel in our living room has to do with the history of the works, and the way they have come into our lives. They are embedded with stories, deep attachment, and a great amount of generosity. We have been spoiled by these artists, and much of what we now have in our collection was gifted to us. Each piece acts as a transport, a reminder of the exhibition from the gallery, but also stands as a reminder of the personal connection to each artist and the relationship that we share with each.
So, rather than just transplant the work of our living room, to the space of the gallery, we’re transplanting the artists that we live with, to the space of the gallery. Many are works are by artists with whom we work with at the gallery; and some are pieces from artists that we have worked with elsewhere. We pulled works that parallel our collection, some from the artists most recent works and other from their early years, and installed everything together, without much deliberation as to why and where, much as we have in our living room.
Artist Bios:
DERIC CARNER an artist and publication designer interested in a spectral forms and speculative narratives. Carner has exhibited at Romer Young Gallery (2008, 2010), Centre Pompidou (2010), Artists Space (2009), Geisai Miami (2008), Witte de With Rotterdam (2006), CAC Vilnius (2005), and Kunstverein Malkasten Duesseldorf (2005). His work has been featured in publications by Revolver Books (Frankfurt, 2005-2006); ZYZZYVA (SF, Fall 2008); SUM Magazine (Copenhagen, Spring 2008); and is included in the KIOSK archive at the Kunstbibliothek Berlin (2009).
AMANDA CURRERI is an interdisciplinary artist working in San Francisco, CA. Recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation fellowship in 2009, her artwork has been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, ArtForum.com, FlashArt Online, The SF Weekly, and The Portland Phoenix, among others. She is the co-editor and co-founder of an (ir)regular artist publication, Color&Color, which aims to tactically connect artists with new audiences and expanded dialogue through the serial print medium of small books. Curreri holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts, a BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a BA from Tufts University in Sociology and Peace & Justice Studies.
LIAM EVERETT currently lives and works in San Francisco. Everett spent the past 10 years based New York. He currently has a solo exhibition at the Paul Kasmin Gallery Project Space, New York. His work has also been featured at White Columns, 303 Gallery and Canada Gallery in NYC. He has exhibited internationally in Germany, France and the Netherlands. Also known for his performance based work Everett performed a piece at ArtBasel 2009, entitled “On The Wall”. Everett has participated as an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, USA, Ateliers de la Ville, L’Union, France, Künstlerhaus Bremen, Bremen, Germany and Astérides, Ateliers d’Artistes Friche Belle-de-Mai, Marseille, France. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Romer Young Gallery in May 2011, as well as group shows at the Wattis Contemporary Art Center and White Columns.
PABLO GUARDIOLA lives and works in San Francisco. Guardiola’s work references the poetic language found in everyday objects and the power of context in the creation of meaning. Through photographic and sculptural metaphors, Guardiola gives new meaning to objects. Guardiola was born in Puerto Rico. He completed a B.A. in European History at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan and an MFA in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. He has exhibited his work at New Langton Arts, Little Tree Gallery, Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco and at the San Juan Museum of Contemporary Art in Puerto Rico, among many others. He was most recently published in FRESCOS, 50 Artistas Puertoriqueños Menores De 35 (50 Puerto Rican Artists Under 35).
SUSAN O’MALLEY is a San Francisco based artist and curator. She uses simple and recognizable tools of engagement—offering a Pep Talk, distributing flyers in a neighborhood’s mailbox, hanging inspirational posters—to offer entry into an understood, and sometimes humorous, interaction of everyday life. O’Malley received her BA from Stanford University in 1999, and her MFA from California College of the Arts with a focus in Social Practice. She has participated in programs and exhibitions at Romer Young Gallery, Southern Exposure, Hardware Store Gallery, CCA, Mission 17, Curiosity Shoppe, The Lab, Headlands, and the SJICA.
San Francisco based artist JOSHUA PIEPER makes direct and often humorous statements through his multi-media works. Born in St. Paul, MN, Pieper received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin, and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. His work has been exhibited at Rosamund Felsen Gallery,Santa Monica, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, New Langton, the San Francisco Arts Commission and Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco.
JAMES STERLING PITT, born in New York in December 1977, is a San Francisco based artist. Pitt received his BFA from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 2000 and his MFA from Mills College in 2003. Pitt’s work explores the representation of senses or feelings in the form of the objects that trigger them as a mode of archive and communication. Pitt utilizes his work to recall lost memories, and give permanence to new ones. Recent exhibitions include “The On and On,” a solo installation at the ATA Window Gallery; “Hyperspaces,” a group exhibition at Parklife, and “Front + Center: Weather Streams,” a group exhibition at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Upcoming exhibitions include “The See All Around Us,” a two-person exhibition with Sean McFarland at Sight School in March, and a solo exhibition with Romer Young Gallery in October 2010. James’ work has been exhibited nationally at The Lab, San Francisco, CA, Blankspace, Oakland, CA, The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, and Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque, NM. James was a recipient of a 2000 Vera Noland Award, a 2002 Trefethen Merit Award, and a 2005 Djerassi Foundation Artist Residency. He also received a 2006 Fellowship Artist Award from the Djerassi Foundation.
JOSH PODOLL was born in Seattle, WA. He currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Podoll received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 2002, and his BFA from the Maharishi International University. Recent exhibitions include Bakers Dozen, at the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance CA; curated by Max Presneill, as well as solo exhibitions at Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles, and Feature Inc., New York.
LUCY PULLEN is a visual artist based in New York City and Victoria B.C., Canada. Her work has been exhibited at Murray Guy Gallery in NYC; Platform Gallery in Seattle, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, Luckman Gallery in Los Angeles, Art Metropole, Jessica Bradley Art & Projects and SL Simpson Gallery in Toronto, Optica in MontrÈal and the Eye Level Gallery in Halifax Nova Scotia. Pullen conducted independent projects as artist in residence at the Outpost for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles CA (2006); Bemis Center for the Arts in Omaha Nebraska (2001), Stramur Art Commune in Iceland (1998) and Struts in Sackville New Brunswick (1997). She received her MFA ’01 from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, and a BFA ’93 from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax. She is pursuing a PhD in Media and Communication with the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee Switzerland and is currently a tenured Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
French born artist and Berlin resident GWENAËL RATTKE works in collage, photography and xerox graphics. Rattke worked with collage for most of his teenage years producing DIY fanzines, flyers and graphics in the Berlin punk community. Rattke began his queer punk zine, Easily Grossed Out, in the early 1990’s. Issues were initially published from Rennes, France, and then later from the U.S.A. The zine featured interviews with bands such as Christ on a Crutch and Capitalist Casualties. Rattke’s collages works borrow from the visual codes of the 1960’s and 1970’s; the works are intricate, ornamental and excessive, and present “an imagined past fire with beauty and sexual freedom.” Rattke’s work has been exhibited at Galerie Knoth & Krueger, Exile PRojects and Arratia Beer, Berlin, Skol, Montreal (2002); YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto, (2001), and Romer Young Gallery San Francisco. He Graduated in Communication Studies (Film) from Concordia University, Montreal, in 1997. Rattke lives in West Berlin.
ERIK SCOLLON is an artist and writer based in Oakland, California. In 2008 he was selected to participate in YBCA’s Bay Area Now 5, and his work has been seen in venues as diverse as art galleries, craft fairs, museum shows, design blogs and gay biker bars. He recived an MFA in ceramics and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies, both from California College of the Arts. Along with Amanda Curreri, he is the co-editor and co-founder of an (ir)regular artist publication, Color&Color, which aims to tactically connect artists with new audiences and expanded dialogue through the serial print medium of small books.
New York based artist CHAD STAYROOK received his B.F.A. in Sculpture from Ohio University and his M.F.A. in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. Stayrook has exhibited extensively throughout the US in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. and internationally in the UK, Netherlands, and South Korea. Stayrook has participated as an artist in residence at the Tin Shop Studio in Breckenridge CO, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning’s Studio LLC program in Queens, NY, and will soon embark on an expedition to the arctic circle with 17 other artists and scientists. Stayrook is also an independent curator and a founding member of the Bandwagon artist collective.
KIRK STOLLER was born in Oregon in 1960 and was raised on a small farm outside of Portland. He received his BA in French Language from Portland State in 1988 and his MFA from UC Berkeley in 2004. Connection and support are consistent themes throughout his work. Stoller builds relationships between the various incorporated items based on formal issues such as shape, color, and pattern, while also taking into account the evidence of past actions contained in many of the parts. He enjoys the small narratives that are created when things are placed on or near one another. Stoller’s work has been exhibited in various galleries around the United States, and was a studio resident at the Headlands Art Center from 2004 – 2007, as well as at the MacDowell Art Colony in 2008.
SCOTT HEWICKER
Scott’s work has been shown at Jack Hanley Gallery, Gallery 16, University Art Museum Berkeley, YBCA, ICA Philadelphia, Deitch Projects and Galleri Christina Wilson in Denmark. He plays guitar and keyboards for the bands Troll, The Alps, and Aero-Mic’d.
CLIFF HENGST
Cliff’s work has been shown at Ratio 3, New Langton Arts, YBCA, Gallery 16, Galleri Uta Pardun in Cologne. He is currently collaborating with curator Lawrence Rinder on an exhibition at Fluent-Collaborative in Austin, Texas, opening June 15. He plays drums and keyboards for the bands Troll and Aero-Mic’d.
Please join us for the final performance for Space Cake Featuring Thomas Campbell and Kyle Field. The Mattson 2 will be performing Louis Andriessen’s Worker’s Union and Tommy Guerrero, Monte Vallier performing a double-bass freakout. (8-10pm).
Please join us for another installment of Space Cake featuring the work of Thomas Campbell and Kyle Field…This Thurs is the release of Black Grass, the new record from Little Wings. Live performance. 7-10pm Thurs night.
Line-up of events forSpace CakeFeaturing the work of Thomas Campbelland Kyle Field –
Schedule of Performances for the Month of Feb and March:
These:
Feb. 17th — Little wings, Rustangs, Range of light Wilderness – covers night
Feb. 24th — Mumlers variety show and Tomorrow’s Tulips.
March 3rd — Little Wings Record Release Party for “Black Grass” plus performances by Sandy’s and Jefferey Manson
March 10th — The Mattson 2 perform — Louis Andriessen’s “workers union” among other compositions, plus Tommy Guerrero and Monte Vallier perform there double bass freak out
Space Cake– A multi-dimensional show featuring the work of Kyle Field and Thomas Campbell.
The show will consist of a month-long gallery transformation that will include installations, workshops, music performance and overall happening.
The opening reception will be Thursday February 17th, 2011. 7pm – 10pm. The show will run through March 27th, 2011.
Musical Performance by Little Wings on opening night.
Kyle Field and Thomas Campbell will be working in and evolving the gallery space, transforming the area into a workspace and an art installation. Gallery visitors will have the opportunity to see the space evolve over the month long duration where Field and Campbell will be working on a semi-regular basis while staging performances (poetry, music, performance, workshops, and more..) on Thursdays throughout the month with other events to be announced as well.
An outline and specific dates and times of happenings will be released closer to the opening date.
About the artists:
Thomas Campbell is a self-taught painter, sculpture, photographer, and filmmaker. He splits his time between his painting/sculpture/stuff making studio in Bonny Doon, California and traversing the globe making films. Campbell has mounted solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, Tokyo, Denmark, The Netherlands, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Morocco. Campbell is also creative director for a small, independent record label based in Santa Cruz, Galaxia. He is represented by Gregory Lind Gallery in SF and V1 in Copenhagen.
Kyle Field has been drawing for his whole life. He intends to keep drawing, making forts or costumes or dolls. Kyle shows with Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in Los Angeles and has shown in Paris, Germany, New York. Kyle is the front man for Little Wings.
The Holiday Season is here again and we’re once again doubling our retail space for the month of December. That means twice the amount of Park Life goods as usual. We’ve stocked the store
with more of everything including design and art books, design objects, tees, art, prints,stationary, home-wares, cameras, watches, gifts and everything in between.
Our Holiday hours are also in effect starting in December… opening earlier and staying open later.
Also, please join us on Friday December 17th from 6-9 pm for a Clement St. Holiday Shopping night. We’ll be offering 10% discount on all purchases. We’ll also be serving beverages and snacks… and free gift wrapping! Other businesses on Clement St. that will be participating include Seedstore, Polka Dot, Kookle, Urban Color, and Keisha Studio.
Just catching our breath after a crazy weekend at the Printed Mattter’s NY Artbook Fair at PS1. Huge success all around. Tons of people. We’ll post more images in a few days.
(image of the Park Life space courtesy of Austin
Mcmanaman)
..and special thanks to everyone who pitched in and made our NY trip something to remember..Paul Wackers, Chris Ballantyne, Tucker Nichols, Tauba Auerbach, Sadie Barnette, Louis Schmidt, Marcus Lin, Marina Luz, Austin Macmanus, our SF peeps; John Hershend, Breezy and Needles and Pens, and especially Dan Carlson without whom we couldnt have put it together.
We’ll be offering Editions, Books, Prints and Original Works from artists including:
Shaun Odell, Chris ballantyne, Tucker Nichols, Tauba Auerbach, Barry Mcgee, Clare Rojas, Chris Johanson, Leslie Shows, Keegan McHargue, Andrew Schoultz, Dave Shubert, Simon Evans, Margaret Kilgallen, Paul Wackers, Orion Shepard, David Shrigley and more..
Come by and say hi. Park Life’s space is on the first floor right around the corner from Printed Matter’s space.
Opening Reception Friday, October 22, 2010. 7 – 10PM
Unnatural Plans, an exhibition of new paintings from Masako Miki and Steven Lopez, is an exploration of the artist’s cultural identities and the influence that communities play in shaping these identities and the resulting narratives that define their work. These narratives manifest in paintings where intricate patterns and contradicting spatial elements such as flatness and illusion suggest a disoriented context, where dichotomy becomes integrated with visual reality. The visual images represented in these paintings, highlighted by bright and contrasting colors, reflect the vibrant cultures, landscapes, and natural world in a celebration of the cultural and natural diversity of California.
Masako Miki is a native of Japan and now lives and works in Berkeley. She has exhibited throughout the Bay Area. Recently she was a residency artist at the Contemporary Artists Center in Troy, New York, and a nominee for the 2010 SECA award. She also received an Individual Artist Award from The Santo Foundation this summer. She received her MFA from San Jose State University.
Steven Vasquez Lopez, a native Californian, has had several gallery exhibitions and was awarded the 2006 Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship in Fine Arts from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the William Dole Memorial Scholarship, and the Abrams Prize. Steven holds a BA in Art Studio from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Park Life Gallery
220 Clement St.
SF CA 94118
415.386.7275
Opening Reception Friday, June 11th 2010. 7 – 10 pm.
This exhibition will showcase work by emerging and established artists who deal with semiotics and whose use of type and language is a reoccurring part of their artistic vernacular. The work in this exhibition will both conceptually driven, purely abstract, or may use type expressionistically.
The Artists:
Stephanie Brooks
Dana Dart Mclean
Michael Dumontier
Karen Flatow
Neil Farber
Ed Fella
Tom Friel
Jeff Gabel
Jason Jagel
Steve Lambert
Bob Linder
Tucker Nichols
Nigel Peake
Mike Perry
Jason Polan
William Powhida
Nathaniel Russell
Michael Scoggins
Josh Shaddock
David Shrigley
Zoe Strauss
Wendy White
A group show featuring the artwork of Charlie Callahan, Jeff Canham, David Muller, Jeff Manson, and Serena Mitnik-Miller.
Opening Reception Friday, May 7, 2010
May 7 – June 6, 2010
Habitat displays residue collected, constructed, remembered and imagined by five artists whose lifestyles weave carefully chosen elements conceptualized in an idealistic environment. Through painting, drawing, and sculpture the work seeks to join imagined landscapes with details of day-to-day neighborhood living and the allure of the natural world.
The Artists:
Charlie Callahan’s infatuation is with the global diversity of sea urchin exoskeletons, once loosing their protective needles naturally resemble mandalas. He paint’s and reconstructs primitive ocean forms like starfish as examples of cymatic evolution or results of cosmic and interference frequencies seemingly invisible to us. Charlie currently works from his studio in Petaluma.
Serena Mitnik-Miller executes her painting with watercolor on paper, employing transparent, repetitive shapes in vivid colors that reference nature specific to habitats at the edge of the sea. Mitnik-Miller associates these colors and geometries with organic vocabulary and palette, most importantly its complex dynamic. The paintings become increasingly disorienting with layered internal space and vortex like sensibility shifting the image beyond the paper. Serena works in many mediums, including photography, printmaking and sculpture. Serena currently lives and works near the ocean in San Francisco, where she runs her own venture, General Store. You can try Best furniture paint sprayer for keep furniture decorated and long lasting.
Jeffrey Manson works in multiple disciplines including sculpture, drawing and light projection. He is primarily interested in the ephemeral architecture of driftwood shacks and the colorful characters that inhabit them around the beaches of his Northern California home. He has collaborated with many rock bands and shown work at Smokey’s Tangle, Mollusk Surf shop and the Farmer and Cook Gallery.
David Muller lives at Ocean Beach and divides his time between making a home with his wife and baby daughter, running a small restaurant, and filling in the cracks with art, nature and music. His visual art depicts real and imagined glimpses of personal nostalgia including sacred objects, familiar landscape, utopian escapism and abandoned architecture. These images are woven together by the implied narrative of the places where purpose and dreams collide.
Jeff Canham’s colorful, typographic compositions showcase his skills as a fine artist, graphic designer and traditional sign painter. From art directing Surfer Magazine to learning the traditional craft of sign painting at New Bohemia Signs, his juxtaposition of old and new methods have evolved to form the backbone of his work today. Jeff currently resides in San Francisco, California
Please send press inquires to info@parklifestore.com.
Clare Rojas has published a series of prints (Seven different Aquatint Etchings) with Paulson Press that are available at Park Life. We are taking preorders now and the prints will be ready in late April. Please contact jamie@parklifestore.com for more information..images and pricing.
Images from the Opening of Bro Palace at Park Life that featured a set by the best band in SF, Thee Oh Sees. See more images HERE and HERE. Thanks again everyone who came out.
Park Life is pleased to announce our inaugural show for the New Year, featuring the work of Mary Iverson.The show will consist of smaller mixed media pieces on wood and larger oil paintings on canvas.The show will open on Friday, January 22nd and will run through February
Mary Iverson initially studied as a plein air painter focusing on wildlife at the Port of Seattle.Gradually the focus of her work began to gravitate towards the geometric and colorful aspects of shipping containers and the shipping industry as a whole.
In Iverson’s current body of work, she has appropriated beautiful nature scenes as backgrounds for her compositions.In some of the work she has taken pages directly from environmental magazines.This “stealing” of images from magazines is the artist’s response to how industry takes natural resources for their gain.In these compositions Iverson places perspective lines and containers directly on top of these beautiful scenes of nature.At first glance the viewer is taken in by these lovely landscapes.Even the containers add beauty to the scenes with their colorful and geometric forms.But when you look deeper into the work you realize that there is nothing beautiful about the direct invasion of industry and its related and damaging detritus.You then begin to question the impact of large scale commerce to our environment and ultimately ourselves. Check these out grid-nigeria .
You must visit at spiritofthesea for upcoming latest shows updates.
Mary Iverson is based in Seattle Washington.Most recently she was part of the exhibit “Representing Abstraction” at The Museum of Northwest Art.Along with her museum and gallery work she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Skagit Valley College.This exhibit marks her first showing in San Francisco.
Park Life presents HYPERSPACES, a group exhibition of new works by Sean Mcfarland, Paul Wackers, David Kasprzak, Orion Shepherd, and James Sterling Pitt.
HYPERSPACES is a collection of new work from five artists attempting to live and work in an ever-changing environment and consciousness, a constant state of flux. This work illustrates and catalogues the theoretical and physical spaces that these artists and society, as a whole, manufactures to feel safe, comfortable, and productive. Whether it is a studio or an unexplainable corner of the mind, these spaces function as centers of refuge and creativity, and as laboratories for research into an existence that is potentially larger than three dimensions.
PARK LIFE
220 Clement Street,
September 4–October 11
In this exhibition, a trio of artists express their sensitivities to ecological and social disasters in solo wall murals and collaborative paintings—all offering fantastical, critical views of American landscapes colorfully ravaged by unidentified catastrophes. Andrew Schoultz, who has previously made paintings, sculptures, and installations with a political edge, here bumps visually into Lari Pittman’s territory with two walls featuring glitter-dusted brick and wood patterns as well as images of viscous, dripping candles. An apocalypse is rendered in repeating and rippling curves that form energy fields, while toppled trees and obelisks that recall skyscrapers communicate 9/11 nightmares of culture on the brink.
Ballantyne’s view of disaster is more placid in his wall painting of blocky multistory buildings partially submerged in calmly rippling blue water—a stoic version of J. G. Ballard’s dystopian 1962 novel, The Drowned World. The artist also incorporates the gallery’s architecture—a hanging pipe cleanly pierces one of his buildings, fittingly enhancing the tone of controlled chaos. A more whimsical, Saturday-morning-cartoon style inflects Mark Mulroney’s Blue Velvet–esque suburban vision: His mural depicts a modest yard with blocky hedges and rickety fence plagued by a garden pest in the form of blood-red Sue Williams–like spurts that do peculiar things with daisies. The artists merge their related sensibilities in three discrete collaborative paintings that congeal into a more hopeful whole. Installed in the middle of the wall works, the smaller pieces resemble cutaway views, portals to landscapes where the fallout seems heavy yet not irreparable.
You Are So Balanced; I Don’t Want to Complicate Things.”
New works by Christopher Russell
Chris Russell’s paintings explore his perception of and connection with the natural world and his interests in a spirituality that is connected to the cycles of nature, an infinitely complex yet entirely tangible world. He examines alternative outdoor lifestyles that appropriate ideas from indigenous cultures and infuse them with an emerging consciousness of ecology. While struggling to embrace a tradition of nature-based spirituality, he recognizes the incongruity of his generation appropriating native beliefs. Through images of wilderness his work tries to communicate a reverence for nature, one tempered by notions of disconnection and disillusionment. Working within the old genre of landscape painting he suggests that our human connection to nature is increasingly important in the contemporary world. The landscapes created are not as much about reproducing places as they are about the process of creating a painting that ultimately reveals something new.
Christopher was born in Boulder Colorado in 1983. He studied painting at California College of the Arts where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with “High Distinction” in painting and drawing from CCA in the spring of 2006. He currently lives and works in the East Bay as part of the artists’ collective Paper Mill Studios.
Park Life is pleased to announce our next art exhibition featuring the work of Alexis Anne Mackenzie. This show marks Mackenzie’s first solo exhibition at Park Life and will feature all new work.
Alexis Mackenzie’s dreamlike collages intertwine the style of early 1900’s Dadaist Max Ernst with a strong botanical element to create strangely powerful scenarios. Benign elements such as flowers, human and animal figures, and other assorted Victoriana graft together symbiotically in tableaux which seem to deal simultaneously with both evolution and entropy. The resulting images pay homage to the Surrealist importance of the subconscious, where the meaning is left deliberately ambiguous.
Alexis Mackenzie was born and raised in the Midwest before moving to Vermont at the age of 16. After high school she traveled to Italy and Greece to study art history and fine arts, before attending Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she earned her BFA. After graduating, she moved to San Francisco where she currently resides. Her collage work has been featured in galleries and publications around the world.
Curated by Hallway Projects, this exhibition continues its stated aim of collaborating with both artists and participants in a series of exhibits, happenings, and exchanges.
– A complete list of words in alphabetical order; Arranged Assemblage Boundaries Chance Collage Color Contradictions Cutting Form Formal Geometry Installation Light Material Medium Method Mundane Monumental Practice Painting Placement Plane Process Reinvent Relationship Remnants Sculptural
Shape Shift Space Sound Tone Whole
Chris Corales lives and works in San Francisco and has exhibited collages
and installations at galleries including A.O.V, SF Arts Commission Gallery,
Four Walls, Gregory Lind Gallery, New Langton Arts, and Paulson Press.
Recent solo exhibitions have included Adobe Books Back Room Gallery and
Ross Mirkarimi’s office in San Francisco’s City Hall. Corales
has also shown in Los Angeles, Chicago, Vancouver, and Lisbon
Andrea Myers lives and works in Chicago. Myers received her MFA in Fiber
and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in
2006. She has been awarded fellowships through the League Club of Chicago,
The Institute of Chicago, and SAIC. Andrea Myers has exhibited artwork
at galleries including, Stephen Zevitas Gallery, Lisa Boyle, Evanston
Art Center, and Kuhn Gallery.
Matthew Rich lives in Boston, teaches art at Northeastern University and has exhibited
his cut and assembled paintings at galleries, including a recent solo
exhibit at devening projects + editions, group exhibits at Hallway Projects,
LaMontagne Gallery, Suburban, Fleisher.Ollman Gallery, Samson Projects,
Proof Gallery, Project Row Houses, and The Sharon Arts Center.
Brion Nuda Rosch lives and works in San Francisco and has exhibited paintings, collage
and assemblage at galleries, including a recent residency at Southern
Exposure, and solo exhibitions at Allston Skirt, 301 Bocana Gallery, and
group exhibitions at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Harold
Art Center, Samson Projects, Eleanor Harwood Gallery, and Triple Base
Gallery.
Liz Walsh lives and works in San Francisco and earned her MFA in Painting
from the California College of the Arts 2003. She was also awarded the
MFA Headlands Studio Award and has participating in residencies at Cooper
Union and recently at the Many-Mini Project in Berlin. Solo and Group
Exhibitions include installations at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Adobe Books,
Hallway Projects, Mimi Barr, and Gather. Walsh has shown her work in San
Francisco, New York, Japan, Berlin and Seattle.
Park Life
220 Clement St
SF CA 94118
415.386.PARK (7275)
Attention Southern California art enthusiasts , Brendan
Monroe will be signing copies of his newly released book
at Richard Heller Gallery located in Santa Monica. We will also have copies of the Limited Edition Book (edition of 55) available for purchase. Please contact us for more info regarding the signing or to reserve a special edition.
Move:18 – Listen with Your Ears and Eyes Wide Open, This Time
Curated by Rich Jacobs
This art show promises to bring the viewer a little closer to that sound in their own head that won’t stop going, even when it is quiet, wait – is it ever really quiet? The show is an attempt by curator Rich Jacobs, to bring a lot of different influences together, and show people that are open to it, that sound, noise and even music can all be neighbors. They don’t have to get along, but they can be next to one another, at least for a month on the walls at Park Life. There will be plenty of things to see, hear, experience, and even learn from in this show; sculptural works, flat drawings, paintings, and photographs will sit on the walls next to sound pieces and home-made instruments, made specifically for this exhibition.
Featuring..
tana sprague(lisomm)
billy sprague (galena) with travis wyche
eric white
cody hudson
james gallagher
richard mcguire (liquid liquid)
chris shary (descendents art)
bernie mcginn (sideshow)
jason polan
cynthia Connolly (dischord)
dave king (crass logo)
ian johnson
chris duncan
jordin isip
alex kopps
andrew scott
bill daniel
v.vale (re/search)
brian flynn
carl dunn
tim kerr (big boys, poison 13, monkeywrench, lord high fixers, total sound group,etc…)
pat graham (dischord)
jeff canham and luke bartels
calef brown (solo)
sonny kay (angel hair,vss,gsl,millions of dead comps. etc..)
gabe voiles (powerdresser)
chrissy piper
jfre robot coad (physics & aspects of physics)
phil franklyn (sunburned hand of the man, and borscht)
yuri shibuya
bill kouglas (sudden infant, family battle snake,etc) uk
andy ward (evergreen, antioch arrow, gravity , etc..)
hiroshi kimura (silkworm artist)
dora drimalas
fritz welch
bert quieroz (double o, manifesto)
matthew badja
david applegate
koen holtkamp
mike sutfin (charles bronson,killers, etc…)
garry davis (custom and carpet floor)
rodger bridges
kyle ranson (pale horse)
jeff manson (solo)
james brown (holoy, bluebird)
pat delaney (pollution)
and more…
Opening reception Friday, March 20, 2009.
7 to 11 pm.
Please join us for a Brendan Monroe Book Signing and Reception at Park Life on Thursday March 12, 2009.
The special Limited Edition Book (edition of 50) will be available to purchase.
Brendan will also have original works of art available for sale.
7pm.
Please contact us for more info or to reserve a special edition.
Drawing Club – Paintings and Drawings by 7 CCA Graduates Opens Friday, January 23, 2009
Bryson Gill
Chi Birmingham
Casey Watson
Isaac Lin
Jay Nelson
Kyle Mock
Peter Scherrer
Rachel Kaye
Park Life’s first show of 2009, Drawing Club, presents a group of artists that met and formed a tight-knit community while studying at California College of Arts and Crafts, now California College of the Arts (CCA).
The year was 2004, San Francisco, California. In the Mission District on Sunday mornings, Bryson Gill, Chi Birmingham, Casey Watson, Isaac Lin, Jay Nelson, Kyle Mock, Peter Scherrer and Rachel Kaye would gather in a sun drenched living room. They gathered for a day of doodling and collaborating on each others drawings. Pencils, pens, paper, brushes and other various drawing materials were sprawled out on the floor. No one was the sole author of a specific work, nothing was precious, and no work was for sale. Drawing would last all day with bouts of conversation, jokes and often focused silence. People brought books, movies and music to share as inspiration. This was a budding time for these young artists. In the evening, often there would be a potluck style feast to recoup, reflect and unwind from the day. Much like the drawings that were made, the dinner would parallel the ideas of collaborating and sharing. Sometimes amounting to over 30 works during the session, drawings would be laid out on the floor and wall. Narratives, connections, and comments would be made while pointing at one piece or another.
Matthew Palladino Opening Reception – Friday 13th, 7pm – 10pm June 13th – July 13th
Matthew Palladino’s paintings allude to influences by early Mission School artists; colorful, flat, almost folky. From there his work diverges. His subject matter is raw, sexual, and violent; inspired by current media events and the rough edges of society. His shockingly honest portraits of American life expose all-too-real events in his ongoing narrative that tie his current works together. You may have seen his art published in different sites already as well, like for example at Art and Interior.
Bio: Matthew Palladino is 22 years old. He was born and raised in San Francisco. He enrolled then dropped out of CCA. He loves the City where he was born. The artist will be in attendance.
Courtesy of John Trippe at Fecalface.com
