Category Archives: Art & Development

Art & Development

Lending Library opening

Thanks to everyone who came out to the opening of Lending Library at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery. It was really nice to see so many friendly faces of artists, art lovers, and book lovers browsing the references with so much curiosity.

Congrats to the fellow artists and especially to curator Dena Beard, whose concept and hard work resulted in a lively showing of very different references…

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Art & Development

Press Junket #2: 5/28 Adobe Books, 6/5 Camron-Stanford House

lending library

5/28: Lending Library opens at Adobe Books, SF

Tomorrow night, you’re invited to shimmy your way into Adobe Books’ Backroom Gallery, where I, along with 6 other artists, are exhibiting our research materials and studio relics at the behest of curator Dena Beard.

This is part two Dena’s Lending Library project, and it features

tools, materials, and resources from artists Amy Franceschini, Colter Jacobsen, Kevin Killian, Tom Marioni, Emily Prince, Stephanie Syjuco, and Christine Wong Yap.

It’s a fantastic honor to be included with such a dynamic group of artists. Congrats to Amy Franceshini, who was recently awarded a Guggenhein Fellowship, and Colter Jacobsen, who was just short-listed for the SECA Award!

Lending Library
May 28–July 2, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, May 28, 2010, 7-9 pm
Adobe Books Backroom Gallery
3166 – 16th Street (b/Valencia and Guerrero), San Francisco, CA 94103

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June 5: The Great Balloon Giveaway, at Camon-Stanford House, Lake Merritt (Oakland)

The Great Balloon Giveaway, artist's rendering

Next Saturday afternoon, you’re invited to The Great Balloon Giveaway, a social sculpture and public project presented by Invisible Venue and the Mills College Art Museum.

This work is inspired by imagery from the recent Oscar-winning animated film “Up” and re-contextualizes the political histories of the house through the free distribution of 1,000 helium balloons to passersby, with volunteer youth assistance from Chinatown community organization City of Oakland’s Lincoln Square Recreation Center. The Great Balloon Giveaway is made possible with the support of FLINC.org and Trader Joe’s.

Saturday, June 5, 12-3 pm
The Great Balloon Giveaway
Camron-Stanford House, Lake Merritt, 1418 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA

The Great Balloon Giveaway is one of three projects that comprise Here and Now, a series of installations in three historic buildings dating from the early inception of the State of California that also includes site-specific projects by Elaine Buckholtz and Floor Vahn.

Get the details on Here and Now, curated by Christian L. Frock in various locations around Oakland, CA. And join us at the closing reception: Saturday, June 26, 8-10 pm at Mills Hall!

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Art & Development, Community

Meanwhile, Thameside…

If I were Bugs Bunny, I’d burrow my way to London today, and re-surface Thameside just in front of the Tate Modern. After dusting myself off and gliding past stunned tourists, I’d visit No Soul For Sale, A Festival of Independents:

The festival will bring together over 70 of the world’s most exciting independent art spaces, non-profit organizations and artists’ collectives, from Shanghai to Rio de Janeiro, to take over the iconic Turbine Hall with an eclectic mix of cutting-edge arts events, performances, music and film on 14-16 May 2010.

Alongside venerable alt spaces like Artist’s Space (NYC) are groups like Arrow Factory (Beijing), cneai (a French org devoted to artist’s multiples), Green Papaya Art Projects (who hosted my work, along with that by Stephanie Syjuco, Mike Arcega, Reanne Estrada, and Megan Wilson in Galleon Trade international art exchange in Manila in 2007) and The Royal Standard (a Liverpool-based collective, whose past directors include Laurence Payot, who participated in This & That International Mail Art Swap).

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After that, I’d jump onto a Tate ferry to visit the Douglas Gordon exhibition at Tate Britain (thru May 23).

In 2009, [Gordon] was commissioned to create a site-specific work at Tate Britain, to be installed in the Octagon and alongside Art and the Sublime, a display of historic sublime works in the adjacent gallery. These spaces are remarkable for their austere, neo-classical grandeur, with barrel-vaulted ceilings and a central dome designed to make the gallery a ‘temple of art’. Gordon’s response was to utilize and animate the architecture itself with a complex yet cohesive installation of over eighty text-based works entitled Pretty much every word written, spoken, heard, overheard from 1989… (2010).

On one level, the effect seems to articulate Gordon’s idea of art operating as ‘a dialogue between artist and viewer’, hence many of the texts address us directly, employing ‘I’, ‘You’ and ‘We’. On another, it underlines the artist’s fascination with language and its potential for ambiguity, obscurity and multiple meanings.

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Art & Development

Irrationally Exuberant

My first proper solo show, Irrational Exuberance (Asst. Colors), opens tomorrow (Friday) from 7-10 pm.

Join me at Sight School, an artist-run storefront directed by Michelle Blade, located at 5651 San Pablo Street at Powell/Stanford in Oakland.

I’ve been making art for this show for months. The ideas behind the works have been germinating for a year or more. I’ve spent every day this week preparing the gallery, installing the art, reminding myself to breathe, and giving thanks for friends and family.

I’ve never run a marathon before, but I imagine that there are similarities to the process of getting ready for this show. I’ve been singularly focused on it for so long that it’s hard to believe that the opening’s here already.

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Art & Development

Unlimited/Unrealised/UnactualizedPromise/Potentials

Tomorrow night (Thursday, May 6), We have as much time as it takes opens at the Wattis. My text and light installation, Unlimited Promise, will make its superterranean San Francisco debut.

In June, one of my ideas for an art project will be on display in an exhibition called Unrealised Potentials at Cornerhouse in Manchester, UK.

So this morning, I was tickled to read this interview with David Shenk (“Why genius isn’t in the genes,” by Robin McKie, Guardian.co.uk, May 2, 2010), which ends with the phrase, “unactualized potential.”

Shenk, the author of The Genius in All of Us (Icon), advances the idea that genes get too much credit for genius and talent. Instead, we ought pay more attention to personality and psychology. According to Shenk, attitudes like drive, motivation and resilience are important factors:

For example, they looked at how [professional] violists practise. To the untrained eye and ear, it seems obvious: they all do a great deal of practising – hours, hours and hours. But if you look very carefully at those who end up being the best, you discover – by doing intensive tracking of them – that they do practise more, and better, than those in the class below them.

That is a theme that extends to all achievements. There is a quantitative and qualitative difference in the practice undertaken by the super-greats – say in basketball – and the mere greats. They work hard at being great. It isn’t bestowed at birth.

I read this as an affirmation of what I learned about professional practices in the arts — to be successful and sustain a lifelong career, artists have to have a sense of agency; that what one does matters, that one’s destiny as an artist is not limited to being in the right time at the right place, being friendly with the right people, or making the trendiest/most outrageous art.

Instead, first, one makes the art that one wants to be making; then one plans and partners with others strategically to find success, however it is personally defined. As Shenk said, it’s valuable to “work hard at being great.”

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Art & Development

Coffee cups, and military strategy

I am often told that my art work is about design, which surprises me. I rarely think about design as I’m making my work, and further, I couldn’t make work in a design-free vacuum. Design is the matrix of material forms in our lives. Typography is the very medium of visual-textual communication. As one would apply formal and conceptual considerations to materials, so too should typography be thoughtfully selected. Materials provide visual, textual, material content, as well as design meaning.

The importance of design ought be self-evident. This week, the New York Times provided positive and negative reminders to appreciate design.


“Leslie Buck, Designer of Iconic Coffee Cup, Dies at 87”
Margalit Fox NYTimes.com, April 29, 2010


“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint”
Elisabeth Bumiller, NYTimes.com, April 26, 2010
Above: An epic fail of an infographic. (Unless the point was to convey “quagmire.”)

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