Kirsten Tradowsky Star Ship Explorers
10″ x 10″
oil on board
The past is my playground. I find historical remnants and give them a new life in our contemporary world. I go to estate sales and move through rooms that one family occupied for decades, searching through piles of photographs of people I have never met. Walking the San Francisco city streets I see old theaters and buildings that glow under the residue of ever changing ads and construction. I am interested in how one place possesses many moods and the unseen gritty elements of the familiar imagery of life. Time manipulates a place and in turn makes it richer, painting these places and figures are my way of time travel.
Website: www.kirstentradowsky.com
Lucky Rapp le calme apres la tempete
8″h x 13″w x 2 1/2″d
mixed media – gesso, plaster, paint, resin on canvas
Play.
my work is a form of communication. it is like talking to someone without dialogue, until they ask. my work is playful on all sides. i usually use the front, sides, and back of the canvas. there is always something hidden. i see whimsical tilts in sometimes serious topics.
Pushing.
no rules, no guidelines, no boundaries, free thought. i try to have structure within the non- existing structure. organized chaos. i work with concepts and hyperextend them without laws and rules – no governing of the mind. ideas that are not institutionalized but rather free form with control, driven by intuition.
Imperfection.
i like the beauty in imperfection. i like to capture that moment with resin – freezing it in this deteriorating state. i am a perfectionist and to create imperfection is the work. making flaws and then accepting when there is imperfection within the imperfection. my art is a reflection of the world, ever changing and imperfect.
Website: www.luckylucko.com
Marc Ellen Hamel Yellow Waves
30″ x 22″
oil on birch panel
Making art, whether painting, collaging, or printing allows me to express, find, and represent myself and my worldview. I work primarily as an abstract oil painter–a slow and deliberate process–and as a printmaker making monotypes–a spontaneous and surprising activity. In both cases, I am making “something out of nothing” and in the process I explore my inner world and make it visible.
In the studio, I become absorbed in the interaction of colors, the physical feel and look of paint. As I apply the oily colors, make strokes, clarify areas, an internalized landscape surfaces and I work with that, going back and forth between the immediate physicality of the process and the tumbling archive of my personal place-memory. I bring out the world of the subconscious; it is at once a world I am making and one I am revisiting. The challenge is to get thinking out of the way so that the intuitive creative process can move on and make its discoveries.
Website: www.marcellenhamel.net
Shedrick Milton Untitled
16″ x 20″
Digital Print
I am twenty-two years old and have lived in San Francisco my whole life. I can’t say that I like it, but it’s very different and crazy in its own weird way and I wouldn’t change it for anything! I started doing photography at Fostering Art when I was fourteen years old. When I first started it was really hard and I didn’t have any patience at all. I didn’t think that I would enjoy taking pictures of all the things in the world, but I did. Now I’ve been doing photography for eight years and every year I get better and find out something different about myself. My goal in life is to further my knowledge of photography and pursue a side career with it. Fostering Art has made me who I am today.
Website: www.fosteringart.org
Jessie Peterson Untitled
16×20
Digital print
Jessie Peterson is 20 years old and from Ventura, California. She moved to San Francisco in 2009 for college. She’s a student at San Francisco State University, majoring in Psychology and Criminal Justice. She has always been intrigued by art, especially painting, but when she joined Fostering Art in December 2009, she discovered a new love for photography. She enjoys taking pictures of people in moments where they are busy in their everyday lives – not posed or with knowledge that they are being photographed. She also enjoys adventure and finding new places in the world to photograph. Fostering Art has allowed her to express herself and explore new parts of herself through her photography. In the future, she hopes to continue with photography, graduate from SF State and continue on to law or graduate school.
Website: www.fosteringart.org
Christina McPhee Venus 6
30″ x 22.5 ”
pigment, india ink and gel pen on paper
Christina McPhee’s artistic practice is centered in and around landscapes where human and natural assemblages meet and clash. McPhee works across a number of media, including time-based media, site-specific sound, networked media, drawing, painting, photomontage, and performance. A native of Los Angeles, she lives and works in California’s central coast. After arts and literature studies at Scripps College Claremont, she studied painting at Kansas City Art Institute (BFA) and Boston University School for the Arts (MFA). Ongoing projects include “The Pharmakon Library,” a series of graphic folios and “Carrizo Diaries,” an exploration of earthquake terrains as seismic memory and “Flaming Debt,” performance collages about debt. Her films have screened nationally and internationally and are currently being showed at Cinema by the Bay (San Francisco Film Society) and VIBA Buenos Aires. Solo exhibitions include Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries at American Unversity Museum, Washington DC, Cartes Center Espoo (FI) and Bildmuseet (SE). Her most recent film commission is “La Conchita mon amour” for Thresholds Artspace, Horsecross, Perth (SCT) and is a featured artists studio on Turbulence.org. She was a participating editor and artist in Documenta 12 Magazine Project (2007). Museum collections of her prints, paintings and drawings include Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Taylor Museum/Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Her new media and video work has been commissioned for Thresholds, Scotland and Turbulence.org (NY) and is in the collections of the Experimental Television Center (NY); Rhizome Artbase at the New Museum, Whitney Museum Artport, and the Rose Goldsen Collection of New Media Art at Cornell University, New York.
Ciel Bergman Untitled
I find it tragic to live in a culture where scientific imagination is applauded and artistic imagination is suspect, for they derive from the same search. Philosophically and politically, it is my opinion that one of the major tasks of the arts in the 21st Century is to relink culture and nature. Intellectually I reject puritanism, dogmas of any description, hegemonies and systems which suppress independent thought or dictate mass response and mass behavior. Intuitively, I feel too much has been discussed and written about painting in this century. There are those of us who need to paint and those of us who need to see paint and those of us who don’t care one way or another. The need to paint is in me, a life-force; a metabolic result of my being. It is an essential vent for the intensity of the awe (beauty) and terror (horror) of being alive. It is also, an ordering process whereby I might gift back to others, if I am true, a shared experience of the ecstasy of seeing. What drives my vision seems to be the need to locate a particular orientation, a ‘genetically felt’ space in which a simultaneous multiplicity of disparate realities coexist. And if I write that I am in search of an unknown – the deep feminine – I hope I will not be misunderstood. I feel my work may grow closer to silence and become more contemplative as I further mature.
Ciel’s work is featured in 11 major museums, including the Metropolitan in New York City.
Website: www.cielbergman.com
Rebekah Goldstein Untitled
11″ x 13.5″
Colored Pencil on Paper
Rebekah’s work explores the tension between painting and the decorative nature of abstraction. Her paintings evolve from her photographs and drawings of textiles and patterns, depicting a personal negotiation between the intimate and ambiguous.
Rebekah grew up in San Jose , California . She received a BA in painting from Sarah Lawrence College in 2004 and has lived and exhibited her work in New York , Tel Aviv, Chicago , and San Francisco . Rebekah is currently pursuing an MFA at California College of the Arts.
Website: www.rebekahevegoldstein.info
John Palmer Untitled
12″ x 14″
Watercolor
Born in South Africa, my first art education was at the Bill Ainslie school in Johannesburg. While in Medical School in Johannesburg I continue to study drawing in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Witwatersrand. After immigrating to Boston I continued working with Paul Stopforth and Ron Rizzi , both local artists who teach at the Museum School in Boston.
My paintings and the creative process in making them, function in parallel to my work as an analyst. I am always looking for the unintended ” spontaneous gesture” of mark making which may reveal images not yet seen along the lines of Bollas’s notion of a thought not yet known. This form of what I call, graphic free association informs me in a self- analytic manner and becomes part of an ongoing working through and remembering in ways that parallel the lifting of repression which is so often part of the analytic process. Of course, the painting is always created with the intention of being viewed so that this is not an isolated process but one that closely involves the imagined or known viewer. Images appear so long as the spontaneity of the work is maintained and the technical limitation of the materials are respected.
The watercolors tend to be filled with images and especially figures reminiscent of SAfrica where I grew up. The prayer paintings captured the visual aspect of the memory of the orthodox Jewish day school I attended. These paintings hung in the Hebrew College in Boston and were part of a symposium on understanding the visual element of Hebrew text. Sounds and calligraphy being essential to my memory of Judiasm which was imprinted on my mind through daily prayer before classes.
Website: www.jonathanpalmerart.com
John Sappington Forestville, Utensils – Untitled
13″ x 19″
Archival Ink Jet Print
John Sappington is an artist/photographer working primarily in digital photography and digital media. He graduated with a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute – both in photography. His art work draws from a range of influences, particularly street photography of the late 60s’ and 70s’ (Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand), as well as conceptual strategies and post-structuralist theory (Roland Barthes, Hollis Frampton ). Sappington teaches Digital Photography on a recurrent basis at the Santa Rosa Junior College and sporadically at the San Francisco Art Institute. Additionally he works as a technology consultant to arts non-profits, artists and small businesses.
Website: www.basearts.com
Karen Ganz Traveler #7
66″ x 35″
Drawing, ink and collage on paper
I make large scale, very physical oil paintings. The images in my work emerge from a process which begins with small-scale artist’ books in which I combine painted, invented images with ones that I lift through digital scanning . The images in my work are from old 1920′s cartoons, of a universal character, “the company-man”. I use these images and very gestural painting as metaphors for psychological states of mind. Attachment, questions of being an “individual” within “the group”,assimilation and role-playing interest me. I use a frankenstein-like approach to piece together figures/images and use multiple broken-up canvases to further the fragmentation of those images. This first came up in the heavy collage work of my drawings which I allowed to change the way that I approach my painting. My approach to painting also has been influenced by early films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton that I arrived at by way of Twyla Tharp and Samuel Beckett. I approach a show as a “staged” experience, and my job as that of choreographer of the work.
Website: www.kganz.com
Emily Payne Pin Wheel
22″ x 22″ (framed)
wire, book covers, trace, glue
Emily Payne grew up in Mill Valley, California and Amherst, Massachusetts. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College and her M.F.A. in Printmaking and Book Arts from San Francisco State University in 1999. She currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.
Payne uses gouache paint, ink, rag paper, pins, wire and parts of used books to produce two- and three-dimensional work. This sculpture is part of a series of pinwheels made out of wire, tracing paper, book covers and glue. Like a sculptural coloring book, the wire acts as a dimensional drawn line and the paper is used to color in the shapes and spaces in between the lines.
Website: www.emilypayneart.com
Ellen Salwen untitled (from the series “Precariousness”)
Digital Print
16″ x 20″
These two images were made in the early 1980’s. One at Candlestick Park and the other in Malibu. The process for me was always like a quiet meditative hunt. Relying on my intuitive response to something that would later become understood. Looking back, I now think I might have been flirting with “evenly hovering”. The purpose: to build a grouping of images that created a language using components that upon subsequent reflection supplied an affective experience that was sought and realized; to use the concrete world as a visual metaphor for my subjective reality.