Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:33 Written by Rachel Ralph
SAN FRANCISCO --- The Shooting Gallery opened both Madness by Yumiko Kayukawa (Seattle) and Bastion by Aaron Nagel (Oakland) on June 8th with Kayukawa in the main gallery and Nagel in the project space.
Kayukawa's work is very interesting, combining a deliberate flatness with immense detail, all perfectly constructed on their canvas supports. She was also there during the opening, approaching visitors and initiating conversations with them, and was a very refreshing and inviting presence. However, I was more attracted to the paintings of Aaron Nagel. They are not only beautiful, realistic portraits but with the inclusion of several small blue dots, the compositions become more complicated and move from basic nudes to a more personal vision of both spirituality and sensuality. These are not the fashion models seen in the front of White Walls, these are real women, and their depiction is executed perfectly, and the blue dots add a distinctive touch.
Words and photos: Rachel Ralph - rachel(at)fecalface.com
Aaron Nagel, Urchin, Oil on Panel, 20x30"
Aaron Nagel, Bastion, Oil on Panel, 51x40"
Yumiko Kayukawa, KYOUKI (Madness), Acrylic and Ink on Canvas, 22x30"
Yumiko Kayukawa, TEREYA (Shyness), Acrylic and Ink on Canvas, 20x16"
ROCHESTER, NY --- Portland based Ryan Bubnis emailed over some images of his current show Black And Blue with Lucas Irwin running through June at 1975 Gallery in Rochester. Ryan Bubnis and Lucas Irwin work through a series of new drawings, paintings and sculpture. This exhibition explores themes of restraint, resilience, friendship, collaboration and mark-making. objects, paper, wood, canvas, aerosol, acrylics, cel vinyl, Papier-Mâché, graphite and India ink. He draws inspiration from life, love, graffiti, folk and outsider art from a variety of cultures.
Friday, 21 June 2013 12:00 Written by Rachel Ralph
Guerrero Gallery opened another great show with their June Group Show this last Saturday night. With work from Frohawk Two Feathers (a personal favorite), Ryan Travis Christian, Alejandro Diaz-Ayala and many others, the upbeat show brought a breath of fresh air in tune with the start of summer.
Justin Hager also occupied the project space, showing his hilarious and simple paintings with one liners that just about anyone could appreciate. People seemed to be laughing, looking at work, and really enjoying themselves, a positive sign of the summer months to come.
Words & Photos: Rachel Ralph - rachel(at)fecalface.com
Ryan Travis Christian, Wheeze In, Wheeze Out, 2013, Graphite on paper, 22" x 30".
Terry Powers, Untitled 3, 2012, Oil, spray paint, and wall texture, 48" x 60".
Rye Purvis
Justin Hager, Buffalo Bill Cosby, 2013, Acrylic and pen on canvas, 12" x 12".
Friday, 21 June 2013 08:33 Written by Rachel Ralph
SAN FRANCISCO -- Now, after a life changing experience during his residency in Japan, the culmination of years of art making for John Felix Arnold III can be seen in the 147 Minna Street windows of the SFMoMA as part of the SFMoMa's Artists Gallery. This makes him the only artist currently showing at the physical location of the museum.
Words & Photos: Rachel Ralph - rachel(at)fecalface.com
Felix uses the windows to his full advantage, creating epic scenes in his world of Unstoppable Tomorrow. Complete with dirt scattered along the bottom of them, the works show his renewed love of process and soulful art making, as well as his technical and compositional skills on a grand, new scale. The details of his line work emerge from and hide behind clouds of polyurethane and wood stain on the 8 foot tall panels and while viewing them, you can really enter this world for yourself. Also his minimal use of found object, installation style framing is a direct conversation with his past, larger installation works, yet is subtle and refined enough to allow the viewer to be enveloped by the paintings themselves.
111 Minna held an opening reception for the work last Saturday, and the crowd created the perfect intimate environment complete with performances by Jaysonik, G.U.T.S. and Felix himself. The work will be up for the next three months and definitely deserve a look if you’re in the Bay Area this summer. You can view Felix's other works at his newly re-launched website www.felixthethirdrock.com.
Thursday, 20 June 2013 13:36 Written by Van Edwards
We are happy to report that Los Angeles based Sylvia Ji will be opening Interwoven at San Francisco's FFDG on Friday July 12th (7-10pm). More details/ press release about the show on Monday.
The work below is "Mission Otomi" 30"x30" acrylic on wood panel by Sylvia Ji.
Preview inquires, email: info(at)ffdg.net
Sylvia Ji coming to San Francisco's FFDG on July 12th.
Thursday, 20 June 2013 11:01 Written by Rachel Ralph
SAN FRANCISCO --- I was fortunate to beat the crowds to the openings of Greg Gossel's (Minneapolis, MN) Head Over Heels and David Marc Grant's (SF) My Magic Will Bring them Back last Saturday night at White Walls, allowing me to actually see and get photos of the work during the opening.
Like most of the other visitors, it was a quick trip through Head Over Heels, as the pieces all look almost exactly the same, and felt like contrived graffiti in the pristine space. However, entering My Magic Will Bring Them Back, visitors entered an environment, and spent more time with the work. Each piece contains immense detail and the installation helped to tie it all together and created a fun world for visitors to interact with it. Grant was also there talking with visitors, enhancing the inviting atmosphere of the small project space and the crowd seemed to respond by gathering in the small room, even though it was a tight squeeze. The show definitely deserves a visit, and I hope next month, there will be something other than Gossel's hot chicks in the main gallery of the space.
Words & Photos: Rachel Ralph - rachel(at)fecalface.com
Greg Gossel, Head Over Heels 1, Mixed-media on Canvas, 48x72", Photo in piece by Bryan Adams
Greg Gossel, Cheap Sunglasses, Mixed-media on Canvas, 72x48", Photo in piece by Neave Bozorgi
David Marc Grant
David Marc Grant, Fictitious Structure #14, Acrylic on panel, 20 x 16"
Wednesday, 19 June 2013 10:14 Written by Rachel Ralph
SAN FRANCISCO --- Local painter Ian Kimmerly opened his newest show Continuous Wave at Dolby Chadwick on Thursday night, and these are some of the best paintings I've seen in a while.
The blurry crowds which occupy the deepest space within the painting look like they were printed, rather than painted, onto the canvas, but upon closer inspection, I found that the entire work was paint. Through abstract figures and brushstrokes, accompanied by very precise swatches of color, his work allows viewers to comprehend its construction while also losing themselves within it. It took everything in me not to touch the paintings, as texture of them is unbearably alluring, but I was very satisfied with just looking as well. Although you'll probably miss the sophisticated crowd who was present at the opening, this show is definitely worth a visit before it closes on July 6th.
Words & photos: Rachel Ralph - rachel(at)fecalface.com
Mike Aho of the Austin based ((sounder)), who we've featured over the years, has just released this great Madonna cover which was recorded at Okay Mountain.
Ok, so we "know" there are no Brown Recluses in California, but shit, it looked like one to us... Found in the folk's house in Marin on the bathroom floor on Saturday. Argh.
Oops. Looks like our drunk cabby's vodka bottle slipped out... Think he needed a cab more than we did. Bummer.
Friday, 14 June 2013 12:20 Written by Rachel Ralph
Spoke Art opened The Black Robe on Thursday night, with the work of Barron Storey, Mike Dringenberg and Keita Morimoto, and was curated by Eidolon Fine Arts.
Each artist made work in response to the thousand year-old poetry of Ono No Komachi, a female poet who worked with concepts of truth, longing, lust, and transience. The poems were displayed above each work, and although they were hard to read, provided a sense of context to the show. Instead of grouping each artists’ work together, they were interspersed with one another throughout the gallery, which solidified the conceptual basis for the show. The diversity of the works, which range from ink to graphite to dye and watercolor was refreshing and the medium specificity of each allowed for clear delineation as to which artist created what.
Photos: Rachel Ralph - rachel(at)fecalface.com
Keita Morimoto, Isolation, Acrylic and oil on panel
Barron Storey, The Question, Scratchboard, acrlyic, ink, acetate, archival print on canvas
I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...
I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.
It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.
Hit me up if you have any ECommerce related questions. - trippe.io
I'm not sure how many people are lucky enough to have The San Francisco Giants 3 World Series trophies put on display at their work for the company's employees to enjoy during their lunch break, but that's what happened the other day at Deluxe. So great.
SF skateboarding icons Jake Phelps, Mickey Reyes, and Tommy Guerrero with the 3 SF Giants World Series Trophies
When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.
Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading
"Six Degrees" opens tonight, Friday Jan 16th (7-10pm) at FFDG in San Francisco. ~Group show featuring: Brett Amory, John Felix Arnold III, Mario Ayala, Mariel Bayona, Ryan Beavers, Jud Bergeron, Chris Burch, Ryan De La Hoz, Martin Machado, Jess Mudgett, Meryl Pataky, Lucien Shapiro, Mike Shine, Minka Sicklinger, Nicomi Nix Turner, and Alex Ziv.
"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on
As we work on our changes, we're leaving Squarespace and coming back to the old server. Updates are en route.
The content that was on the site between May '14 and today is history... Whatever, wasn't interesting anyway. All the good stuff from the last 10 years is here anyway.
Opening tonight, Friday May 23rd (7-10pm) at Park Life in the Inner Richmond (220 Clement St) is Again Home Again featuring works from the duo Jacob Mcgraw-Mikelson & Rachell Sumpter who split time living in Sacramento and a tiny island at the top of Pudget Sound with their children.
Jacob Magraw will be showing embroidery pieces on cloth along with painted, gouache works on paper --- Rachell Sumpter paints scenes of colored splendor dropped into scenes of desolate wilderness. ~show details
NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?
The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.
Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON
Los Angeles based Alison Blickle who showed here in San Francisco at Eleanor Harwood last year (PHOTOS) recently showed new paintings in New York at Kravets Wehby Gallery. Lovely works.
We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...
If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.
Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.
Nate Milton emailed over this great short Gator Skater which is a follow-up to his Dog Skateboard he emailed to us back in 2011... Any relation to this Gator Skater?
Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.
In a filmmaker's thinking, we wish more videos were done in this style. Too much editing and music with a lacking in actual content. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.
FFDG is pleased to announce an exclusive online show with San Francisco based Ferris Plock opening on Friday, April 25th (12pm Pacific Time) featuring 5 new medium sized acrylic paintings on wood.
Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.
San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.
Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.
Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.
The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.
With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding
I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle
While walking our way across San Francisco on Saturday we swung through the opening receptions for Kirk Maxson and Alexis Mackenzie at Eleanor Harwood Gallery in the Mission.
Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.
Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.
For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.
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