Daniel Tousignant Tree of Life
Oil on Canvas
40” x 30”
Raised on a dairy farm in Minnesota, Tousignant started painting at the age of five. The unique spirit and energy of every scene he paints captures the subtleties of color and light. Daniel’s work never fails to bring delight and wonder to its viewers. “I love recalling collective memories of peaceful landscapes, creating environments with open, expansive, clear horizons – an old tree, a vista of pastureland, and the distant billowing clouds of my lazy youth.”
His Botanicals refract light so beautifully that they become a natural medium for the luminous way that he sees and portrays his subjects. The pure, pigmented colors are layered and blended on custom-made black lacquered wood panels.
In a review, Barcelona’s Metropolitan Magazine described Tousignant’s art as follows:
“Looking at the work of San Francisco artist Daniel Tousignant is like staring at a freeze frame of the best dream you’ve ever had, and the effect is a sudden wash of chest-clutching happiness. The beauty evoked by his landscape is so intense that it elevates them into the realm of abstraction, even though on the surface they’re utterly representative. There is some living depth, all the more fascinating for its hiddenness, breathing behind every leafy branch. The artist says that trees reflect the beauty and vulnerability of all living things. Maybe this vulnerability is what we see just under the surface of his canvasses, and what elicits such a visceral reaction to his work.”
Marcelle Marais Bearing Witness
ink, charcoal and bleach on paper
Marcelle was born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa immigrating to the United States when she was 18. Finding her feet in San Francisco, she graduated with a BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010. Her most recent works are inspired by generational transmissions of memories, those imagined and those permanently malleable. Marcelle currently lives and works in San Francisco.
Jared Leake Allston Footbridge Reclamation Project
Phototransfer, Oil on Canvas
11×17
Jared Leake is an artist originally from Connecticut where he studied the arts in Boston, Massachusetts. His work focuses on current events in the world and personal happenings on a daily basis. Jared’s interactions and discussions with new people inspire his work as he seeks to find meaning in the course of every day life. How these interactions get interpreted on canvas are what drives the artist’s curiosity to create new and innovative works of art. Jared’s mixed media paintings incorporate the use of phototransfer techniques, multiple layers of oil paint and a variety of textures including acetate, tracing paper and tissue paper. His current work focuses on his recent move to San Francisco, California.
Website: www.jaredleake.com
Kristina Quinones Intent
Acrylic Poured on Panel
36″ x 12″
Kristina Quinones’ paintings are an exploration of control and uncertainty. Quinones believes that in her work, just as in life, there exists a relationship between beings. While the initial control is necessary for the relationship to begin taking it’s form, it is the surrendering of control and the acceptance of uncertainty that indicates that a meaningful interaction has taken place. Kristina Quinones received her bachelor’s degree in Printmaking from the University of Connecticut in 2001 then moved to California. In 2005 she received her Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. Recently she received the Affiliate Award from the Headlands Center for the Arts, in Sausalito and currently has her studio there. Quinones has exhibited in group shows throughout the United States and is working on a new series called “interactions.”
Website: www.kristinaq.com
Ivan Bridges Annie
Watercolor and Acrylic on paper stretched over panel
Ivan Bridges is an artist currently living and working in San Francisco, he has recently graduated with a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and studied abroad at the Chelsea College of Art in London.
I love walking around at night thinking to myself as I look up at all the lights on inside the rooms I pass, maybe south of market or on Polk street, thinking to myself as I see the high ceilings and shadows cast what possibilities all these spaces have. I keep imagining different lives I’d live in each one of these open windows I pass in China town, the clothes hanging out the window, I imagine a room with a subject, a painting, a camera, a typewriter, I see it all.
Website: ivanbridges.facebook.com
Linda Geary Untraceable
12″ x 12″
Watercolor on paper
Linda Geary’s recent solo exhibitions are New Paintings in 2011 at 101 California in San Francisco, Inside Out in 2010 at Rena Bransten Gallery , and 13 Watercolors in 2009 Rose Burlingham in New York City. A catalog accompanied her show Inside Out, with an essay by Leigh Markopoulos, and it was also reviewed in the SF Chronicle by Kenneth Baker and Squarecylinder.com by David M. Roth. She was a resident at Art Omi International artists residency in Omi, New York in 2007, and the recipient of the Elizabeth Foundation Grant and the Pollock-Krasner Award. She is currently Associate Professor and Assistant Chair of Painting at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Website: lindageary.com
Michael McConnell Average Mr. Fox
11″ x 9″
Acrylic on wood
Michael McConnell was born in Michigan, where he used to watch squirrels from the front window. He studied art at the Columbus College of Art and Design, focusing in printmaking. After graduating from CCAD he packed up a U-Haul and drove across country to the Bay Area, where he currently lives in San Francisco. In the past 12 years he hasn’t found a good reason to leave. Making art is how Michael makes sense of the world and his forgotten childhood. Observing his own anxieties and awkwardness he creates visual narratives that examine loneliness, responsibility, and choice. In his work the innocence and vulnerability of children and animals is constrained. The stories unfold in the space between memory and nostalgia, and focus on the tension between youth and maturity. Michael is represented by Braunstein/Quay Gallery in San Francisco, and has shown nationally in Nashville, Santa Fe and New York City to name a few. He just returned from a magical residency in Noyers, France.
Website: poopingrabbit.com
Leah Rosenberg there was a time
13.5″ x 19 ”
acrylic on panel
Whether obviously or invisibly, my work contains the time of its making. Each piece is a concentration of many “paintings” (a series of consecutively painted actions). My process combines systems of accrual with a personal, broad-based exploration of color as a means of exploring how our experiences and memories literally pile up. I allow and encourage the build-up of paint to act in a three dimensional manner, at times doing away with the support altogether.
Many of my sculptures consist entirely of thin sheets of acrylic paint, poured out into trays from which they are peeled after drying. Stacked, the edges of these delicate yet flexible sheets of paint take on the appearance of the pages of old books curled with water or heat. The material defines the form of the piece. In my two dimensional works, layers of paint function as a way of visually marking the passage of time, suggesting a calendar or journal as they simultaneously assert the medium’s inherent materiality. As each successive color covers all but a band of the previous one, slight irregularities of application become amplified. A painting, in a painting, in a painting. More is concealed than revealed.
Incremental layers of paint are applied as part of my daily routine: as I go to or return from work, or in the moments between making dinner and eating it, or before going to bed. I select colors based on personal systems, sometimes referring to the text of a book that I am reading or the lyrics of a song, reflecting shared meals, or bits of conversations overheard. In a way, what I make coincides with my conception of existence– that we are made up of concretions and layers of experiences: sorrows, joys, pains, loves, fears, hopes. In my work, all of these come together, in a record of highly personal experience that is intended for all to share even as much of it remains hidden from view, sealed within the process of its own making.
Website: www.leahrosenberg.com
Vagn Petersen Urban Towers #4
36″X36″
Acrylic with thickener applied with knives on canvas
Originally from Toronto, Vagn Petersen has lived in the United States since 1993, shifting from Texas to Vermont and finally settling in San Francisco in 1999. Enchanted by the ever changing urban landscape of the City, Petersen’s passion for painting was renewed by the sentiment and imagery of Bay Area landmarks. Exploring art with an impressionist lens, he thickens and layers acrylic paint with palette knives- sculpting the canvas into a textured shock of color, perspective and movement. Petersen has shown at Perch in San Francisco, Convert in Berkeley and has enjoyed two successful single artist shows (both in San Francisco). In addition, he has been an invited contributor to auctions for several local Bay Area charities including the AIDS Legal Referral Panel (ALRP), SF AIDS Foundation (AIDS Lifecycle). Petersen has long credited his 3rd grade teacher with his first real introduction to art; remembering her role in his life, Vagn volunteers as a painting instructor for local second grade students.
Website: www.vagnart.com
Mark Taylor Complicated
I rob from the graveyard of pop culture and splice together new creations (screen prints, sculptures, videos and collages) that feed off the history of cherished objects. I excavate, reuse and reanimate pop artifacts in service of a personal narrative. Set inside an increasingly virtual, digital universe cluttered with the remains of material culture, my work explores how possessions can also possess.
Sarah Thibault Vase with flowers
8″x10″
oil, spray paint and graphite powder on canvas
Through painting, drawing and sculpture, Sarah Thibault combines her interests in the spectacle of commerce, ideas surrounding the aesthetics of power and the hedonism of being a painter. Through a representation of French motifs and styles, she investigates the boundaries of novelty, individuality and commercial appeal within the tradition of painting.
Born1980, Minneapolis, MN. Sarah graduated with her MFA from the California College of the Arts in spring of 2011. She has participated in group shows at galleries in Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Paris and San Francisco. In 2011, she has exhibited at As Is Gallery, Unspeakable Projects, Mark Wolfe Contemporary and Root Division’s Introductions 2011 exhibition. She is also showing work at Jack Hanley in New York. This fall she will be attending a month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Sarah currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA.
Website: www.sarahthibault.com
Stephanie Jane Halmos Boys Can Fly
30″ x 40″
Ink Jet Print
Stephanie Jane Halmos was born and raised in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Her New York based art practice incorporates photography, video, performance and installation.
Halmos has a BFA from Miami University (2006), and is currently an MFA candidate at the California College of the Arts (2012). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Homesick at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Oxnard, CA), Hemispheres at the Lana Santorelli Gallery (New York, NY), The Magnificent Seven at the Wattis Institute of Art (San Francisco, CA) Strange Beauty at The Center for Fine Art Photography (Denver, CO) and the publication and exhibition for The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography at the Chelsea Art Museum (New York, NY), among many others.
Website: www.StephanieJaneHalmos.com
Nomi Klein Sisters
30″x40″
Oil on Canvas
Nomi was born in Israel on a farm and grew up on a Kibbutz. As a young teen, she learned machine design, and served in the Israeli army as a technical machine design in the Artillery. She studied oil painting at Bezalel Academy of Art & Design in Jerusalem. Window design sculpture. In 1977 Nomi moved with her family to New York City, where she was awarded the Merit scholarship at the famed Art Students League and exhibited her work extensively in Soho galleries. She studies ceramic, casting and molding at Parson School and design.
In 1987, Nomi moved to San Diego, California. She worked out of her studio in Mexico. Her work showcased in galleries across San Diego, Los Angeles, and Rosarito, Mexico. During that time she crafted the largest, ‘life-sized’ chess sets for commercial public space installations and gardens. Currently Nomi lives in the San Francisco Richmond district where she transformed a 1913 bungalow to a lofty structure that includes an art studio.
Website: www.nomiklein.com
Inez Storer Voyage
29” x 33”
Monoprint (edition of 3)
Physically my work is about the layering of paint. The subject matter swings between a desire to tell stories using the figure and/or other data as a metaphor to give a somewhat ambiguous meaning to the paintings. There is a lexicon of imagery, collage and the on-going process of revealing history, a sort of peeling away of information. I use a combination of elements…words, painted details, the figure, in some sort of relationship to the various symbols that usually are located around the figure and placed in a theatrical backdrop. These elements do not necessarily stand on their “ground”…they often “float’ in precarious positions…like tight-rope walkers. I find these metaphors can often reflect our own sometimes precarious and unsettled lives.
I use paint as a way of telling my “stories’. As an artist, I have the ultimate freedom to make choices, to create new anecdotes…a visual raconteur. The flip side to that is how to visually make clear this narrative without loading it with too much information. It is best that viewer be able to find his or her own connections. This can be a bridging of space between what is and what might be. I use collage as a way of “diving into the box of materials” and sorting out what works in the context of the work in a visual and narrative way. The choices go between the sometimes sentimental to a possible darker side of the story. I cull from historical aspects of life’s events. I am the organizer, mixing and choosing what to put down on the surface. Since I am my own “history”, I can choose at will what to paint. One of the central themes in my current work is from a Russian photograph that I saw of a General holding a doll in his arms. That seemed such a dichotomy to the roll of a military type and very confusing. When someone asks me to describe my work, the simplest answer is sort of “magic realism”.
Website: www.inezstorer.com
Michael Russell Untitled #4
19.5″ x 16″
Ink on Paper
Michael Russell is from Southern California, and a fourth year Fine Art major at UCLA. His current practice revolves around minimalist drawings, and mixed media sculptural work which both investigate ideas surrounding spirituality, and the concept of faith more generally. In all of his work, he sets out to explore how lengthy sessions of concentration, focused on developing patterns through repetition and controlled mark making, leads to a retreat from the physical world into more of a spiritual realm, and suggest a harmony between his past and current belief systems.
Website: www.mikerussellart.com
Maia Cybelle Carpenter Film Stills from “The Shape of the Gaze”
8.5″x11″
C Print
Maïa Cybelle Carpenter is a moving-image artist and curator from NY and France, currently residing in San Francisco. She has a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University (1997) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2001). She is currently the President of the Board of Directors of Canyon Cinema (http://canyoncinema.com/) and on the Advisory Board of Lunafest (http://www.lunafest.org/), whose proceeds go towards the Breast Cancer Fund.
Her films and videos have been exhibited internationally including, Ars Electronica Linz, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Pacific Film Archives, Ontario Cinematheque, Anthology Film Archives, Exit Art Gallery NY, Directors Guild of America, The British Film Institute, The Berlinale, The Taiwan Cinematheque, and PBS Television. Her films are included in several private collections in North America and her work is distributed by Canyon Cinema (USA), Collectif Jeune Cinéma (France) and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (Canada).
Artist Statement:
I position my work against the narrative expectations of moving-image media. Through explorations of the material specificity of film and video, I seek to produce new dialogues with philosophical and current cultural approaches to visual form. Taking identity politics beyond overt polemics, my work engages its audience in multi-layered examinations of identity through spatial experiences.
As an artist, the practice of curating allows me to build a body of research around theoretical problems that I consider in my own work and to mobilize a community of other artists who also wrestle with these questions.
Website: www.mccarpenter.net
Tamar Cohen Galina & Youri
9.5″ x 12″
Silkscreen on vintage book page
Tamar Cohen is a New York-born and-based artist whose collages reside at the intersection of high and low culture. She is inspired equally by the sublime and the banal; by Kurt Schwitters and Fred Flintstone; by polka dots and all shades of the color green. An obsessive collector of paper ephemera, Cohen loves candy packaging from around the world, Indian fireworks labels, vintage children’s textbooks, dictionaries and comics from the 1960s. Cohen uses them to create silk-screened abstractions that according to the New York Times “Stand out for their color and beauty”. Her work has been shown at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery, the Islip Museum of Art, Kris Graves Projects, and the flat files at Pierogi 2000.
Website: www.tamarcohen.com
Darren Waterston Reverberation
40.5” x 28.5”
Pigment print with hand coloring on Innova 310gsm
DARREN WATERSTON was born in California in 1965 and received his BFA at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. He continued his training in Germany studying painting at the Academie der Kunst in Berlin and the Fachhochschule fur Kunst in Munster. He has previously been the recipient of the Richard C. Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in Umbertide, Italy, where he was an artist in residence in 2005. Waterston lives and works in New York City.
Waterston’s paintings, watercolors and murals have been exhibited internationally and are included in many permanent collections, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, CA, the Oakland Museum of California, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, the Seattle Art Museum, WA, and the Portland Art Museum, OR.
Website: www.darrenwaterston.com
Bean Gilsdorf Hunger
18.5″ x 17.5″
Archival ink jet print, collage, acrylic, and vinyl on paper
Bean Gilsdorf’s work explores American identity through images culled from mass-market history books. By appropriating readily available pictures and translating them into sculpture, collage, or video, she explores the boundary between the archived public narrative and one that is wholly imagined. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and in England, Italy, China, and South Africa. Gilsdorf holds a B.A. in literature from Simon’s Rock College, an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Colorado, and an M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts, where she was awarded a Full Merit Scholarship. She is currently a 2011-2012 Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito.
Website: www.beangilsdorf.com
Jeremy Novy Three of a Different Kind
22.5 x 10.75
Spray Paint & Found Wood
For the past ten years, Jeremy Novy has utilized stenciled street art to explore social and political issues. Novy has an associate’s degree in graphic design and a BFA in photography from Pecks School of the Arts, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Novy has two intentions for his stencils: first, he creates public works that make his city a better place to live by bringing a bit of the arts to everyone, regardless of income or background. Seeing problems such as abandoned telephone booths and boarded up buildings, he creates artful solutions by overlaying stenciled posters onto the disused objects giving them new life.
His second intention is to bring gay imagery into the homophobic subculture of street artists by covering hateful and distasteful graffiti in our communities. Novy wants the gay street artist community to flourish and not be bullied or afraid to express themselves with their artwork. Novy states that “street art itself is a dominantly male heterosexual community; being out of the closet is not accepted. Gay street artists have been assaulted, their art supplies stolen or damaged, and their works covered up.” He would like to see everyone’s artwork—not just the heterosexual males who dominates the street art subculture—have an opportunity to be seen and appreciated. His unique stencils of legendary drag queens, gay pulp and local talent and Coi fish have been spotted all over town and were responsible for netting him a showcase at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He was also flown to Milwaukee to stencil the Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer mansion.
Jeremy’s stencils have benefited non-profit foundations, advocacy organizations, and community service programs, and have been featured in books, magazines, newspapers, museums, private collections and in film.
Website: www.facebook.com/jeremy.novy
Reid Yalom Dancing Ladders, Vietnam
16″ X 20″
Toned Gelatin Silver Print
REID SAMUEL YALOM is a Northern California photographer, whose work has been widely published and exhibited. He began taking pictures as a teenager. He studied photography at both Bowdoin College and then at Stanford University under the direction of Leo Holub, where he graduated with a degree in Philosophy in 1978. He continued his education with a degree in Inter-national Relations at the Monterey Institute in 1983. In 1989, Reid Studied large format photography at University of California with noted photographer Mark Citret. Reid became Mark Citret’s photo assistant for the next 5 years and with his tutelage honed his fine art, black and white printing skills.
The trajectory of my career demonstrates my commitment to the use of photography as an expressive artistic medium. During the past 20 years, as I continuously created artistic images, I have tried my hand at many fields within the photographic world, including architectural, product, corporate, editorial, portraiture, and even weddings. I have enjoyed them all and assimilated something from each of them. Additionally, in the past 10 years, I have been able to incorporate both the philosophical and cultural issues of my academic within my work.
Donald Mitchell untitled
11×15
ink on paper
Donald Mitchell’s early work consisted primarily of obsessively crosshatched fields of lines that covered the page and hid any trace of an underlying image. Several years ago, Donald Mitchell started to reveal the faces and forms that he had buried on the page. Mitchell’s prolific work is now filled with figures in motion and repose, and his trademark has become a tightly composed, graphically sophisticated page of crowded figures. Donald Mitchell is the subject of an artist’s monograph, edited by Cheryl Rivers and published by Creative Growth in October 2004, with contributions by Tom diMaria, Lucienne Piery, Frank Maresca and Lyle Rexer, and Colin Rhodes. Donald exhibited his work in 2007 at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, and ABCD, Paris.
Website: www.creativegrowth.org
Lisa Bartleson Hold On
14 x 28 x 2 inches (diptych)
Resin mixed media
Bartleson’s canvases are said to be “records of the meditative act of painting, meditations for the viewer to contemplate and engage.”
For the Artist, creating art is a means to express emotion – to gather the chaos in the world and channel it into a tranquil work that challenges (commands) the viewer to be patient and attentive. The work is intended to influence the viewer’s frame of mind – the soothing aspect of the work then becomes contagious. She uses a reductive vocabulary of form and color to create work that infused with light. The nuanced surfaces of her paintings are at once intense and calming, moving and still. The paintings offer the viewer a space to shed the soot of their surrounding and experience a realm of purity.
Website: lisabartleson.com
Timothy Cummings Tamed Wild Man
16 1/8″ x 9″
lithographic monoprint with hand coloring
Timothy Cummings was raised in Albuquerque, NM and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1993. A self-taught painter, Cummings renders exquisitely crafted narrative and portrait paintings on panel that defy his lack of formal training. The subjects in his work are often children and adolescents trapped in adult worlds and struggling with issues of sexuality and sexual orientation.
Cummings’ work has been included in exhibitions throughout the United States, including the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ; San Francisco State University, CA; The Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami, FL; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; LACE Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA. His work is represented in the public collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; the di Rosa Collection, Napa, CA; and 21c Museum, Louisville, KT. Exhibitions of it have been reviewed in Artweek, Art Papers, Flash Art, and Details. In New York his career is represented by Nancy Hoffman Gallery, and in San Francisco since 1994, by Catharine Clark Gallery.
Website: www.cclarkgallery.com
Julie Montgomery Lyceum
24″ x 18″
Acrylic on canvas
Betty Brown, Ph.D. and Art Critic writes: “Julie Montgomery creates elegant images of trees and sky and sea that seem to shimmer beneath her meditative gaze. Then she inscribes gentle, elusive texts over them, whispered phrases of human presence responding to the landscape. Beneath the erased, obscured, and evocative texts, Montgomery’s ethereal forms emerge as diffused veils of jewel-like color. Adumbral jade green, lusty garnet red, or regal jasper brown, they recall the treasures hidden deep within the planet’s core and seem to imply that what we see here above the horizon is merely an emanation of the earth’s interior light.”
Julie B. Montgomery lives and works as a fine artist in Carpinteria, California. Her pieces can be found in private collections worldwide, national television, films, magazines and corporate collections. In the past year she has received first place from juror, Charles Hespe, and has been featured in Santa Barbara Magazine, Santa Barbara News Press, Venata Magazine, and Re-Nest. Her abstract, earth toned paintings have a peaceful, contemplative quality, while suggesting landscapes, water and figures.
Stephanie Weber New Angle K
29 “x 36″
acrylic and oil on aluminum panel
My paintings are an exploration of emotion and logic. I explore texture and color as they are delimited by the blocks and bands that form each painting. I produce a logical, linear structure while I simultaneously seek to strike an emotional chord with texture, light and color. I’m intrigued with the tension developed between the concrete and the intangible – what you can touch and what you can imagine.
The aluminum panels I work with impose an interesting challenge. They add possibilities of light and shimmer. I experience an ongoing dialogue between the sensuousness of painting, the cool industrial feel of the metal and intellectual decisions that present themselves. I see color as an agent of transformation. The interaction of space, movement, and color within the geometric form is key for me.
My desire as a painter is to hold the tension and balance between structure, reason, and intuition – the architect in me and the dancer in me – and to give form to what I cannot name. With paint and substance, I’m trying to build a place where unexpected associations and resonance can occur. The essence of life, its richness, beauty and chaos informs my painting, inspiring me to express the vitality of nature and the rich chaos of the urban.
Website: www.stephanieweberart.com
Rachelle Tolwin 2012
14.5″x18.25″
gouache on paper
My recent work has been a playful, introspective journey inspired by my spiritual practice. I have been exploring power of symbols (particularly mayan-influenced) and weaving a mystical landscape into colorful works on paper.
Website: www.rachellecohen.com
Henri Silberman Brooklyn Bridge Fog
20X24
Photo/Photo Rag Baryta
Henri Silberman was born in Paris, grew up in Brooklyn and has been photographing cities and nature since he was in high school.
“I bought my first camera when I was 16. It was a Mamiya Sekor 1000 TL 35 mm. I paid $225 for it and didn’t have the change to get home on the subway. I haven’t stopped shooting since. Now, I work in medium and large format.”
Cities with all their contradictions have been a stimulus for Silberman’s visual representation of the urban landscape.
“Wherever I am, it’s the crowd, a gesture, the pace, the culture and the architecture. What keeps me going as a photographer? I work every day; shooting, editing and re-shooting; learning as I go; ideally creating photos that surprise me, that have an emotional resonance.”
Silberman’s photographs have been exhibited and published internationally. His work is represented in corporate collections and has been used in movies and television productions.
His book Stone Bench in an Empty Park was published by Orchard Books in 2000.
Website: henrisilberman.com/photo.php
Daniel Nicoletta Harvey Milk, circa 1977
Photograph
My career as a San Francisco based freelance photographer began in 1975 as an intern to Crawford Barton, who was then the staff photographer for Advocate Magazine. I also worked in Harvey Milk’s camera store in the heart of the burgeoning lesbian gay bisexual transgender mecca in the Castro district and I was also involved in Milk’s victorious election to public office as one of the first openly gay elected officials in the world. Crawford and Harvey and many others along the way instilled in me a great love of photography as a tool for recording history in the making. My photographic work maps my enduring romance with San Francisco and its’s people, especially the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities.
After I opened my studio in 1990, I began a series of portraits of acquaintances and celebrities from the LGBT community. The studio became a vibrant crossroads for the community during the ten years my doors were open. During those years my emphasis on portraiture took root. I became intrigued by what occurs when the sitter’s environment is minimized in a studio context where collaborators simply rely upon what the sitter is wearing and the nuances of expression and body language to distill a mutual sense of purpose. It is a privilege and a joy to be the conduit for those moments when a sitter’s soul reveals itself for all to see in a photograph.
Website: www.dannynicoletta.com
Tomas Nakada Weave
14″ x 12″
oil, acrylic on wood
I consider myself an abstract painter but there is a definite reference to microbiology in my work. It reflects my interest in science. Initially, I used the question of genetic influences on human behavior as a theme and I explored this with imagery based on cell structure and chromosomes.
As my ideas have evolved, a personal iconic motif has developed. The forms have changed from a series of blobs and dots to resemble severed human heads and skulls that float, mask-like in the landscape. While I see them as ambiguous and open-ended, it is obvious that a response to the atrocities of war has seeped into my work.
Painting, for me, is about asking basic life questions such as identity and purpose. Although sometime the problems of the world are so overwhelming that I feel powerless to do anything but go to my studio and paint.
Website: www.tomasnakada.org
Maria Park Acrystal 5
9 1/4″ x 8 1/2″
acrylic and transfer on acrylite
Maria Park’s work, which ranges from serially-based paintings to site-specific installations that combine studio-produced and manufactured objects, explores the cultural and political implications of natural and artificial presence within the ordinations of a technologically driven society. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally at venues such as the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Seoul National University Museum of Art, and is the recipient of awards including the MFA Grant Award from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award. Currently, she resides in Ithaca, NY where she is an assistant professor in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University. She is represented by Margaret Thatcher Projects in New York and Toomey Tourell Fine Art in San Francisco.
Website: www.mariapark.net
Irene Hendrick Out on a Limb
29″ x 23″
Limited Edition Print
I was born and grew up in a London neighborhood lit only by gaslight and still damaged by the WWII bombings. Looking back, growing up without electricity played a significant role in my development as an artist. With no radio or television, we sat around the fire listening to stories of war-time experiences told by my mother and I imagined the characters as they went about their daily lives.
In beginning the painting, I choose each subject carefully, weaving the past into various dimensions of the present. I let the characters fade into the scene as I build up the images with several washes, erasing and adding as I come to terms with specific ideas, memories or stories. In some pieces, I celebrate unity and protection, in others courage and style. I take my images from historical and family photographs, isolating a fragment of the whole, then adding new objects to complete the narrative. In essence, my paintings are about timeless hope, courage, and friendship.
My aim is to make the viewer wonder what is going on, look beyond the paint and add his or her own emotional or intellectual texture.
Website: www.irenehendrick.com
Jason Hanasik Thom in Bed, 2011
16×24
Digital C-Print
Jason Hanasik has an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA and a BFA Summa Cum Laude from the State University of New York at Purchase. He advises students in the graduate program in Fine Arts at California College of the Arts, is an instructor at the ASUC Art Studio at the University of California at Berkeley and has served as a representative for SUNY-Purchase College at the West Coast National Portfolio Day. Hanasik’s work has been exhibited widely and published in various journals and publications. As a lecturer, Hanasik has delivered talks on his work and/or other artist’s artistic practice at SFMoMA, various colleges and universities nationwide, and during the Society for Photographic Education’s West Conference in 2008. In 2011, the Magenta Foundation selected him as one of the US winners for their Flash Forward Emerging Artist Exchange.
The photograph in the auction is apart of an ongoing project called “His past was always waiting for him in the future.”
Website: www.jasonhanasik.com
Sally Elesby Door in Threes
33″ x 46″
pen, ink and acrylic paint on paper
Elesby’s work was recently featured in Art Practical. Her work is included in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Tucson Museum of Art, and Creative Artists Association in Beverly Hill, CA.
Elesby lives and works in Oakland, CA. She has shown in national and inernational venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Smart Museum in Chicago; and at Steirischer Herbst in Graz, Austria. She has had solo exhibitions at Weatherspoon Museum of Art at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro; INOVA at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; and Caren Golden Gallery in New York.