Gallery
Credit: All photos courtesy Aardvark Press, Lisa Jane Persky and the Artist
The Austin Burch Gallery
The Center has mounted over 70 book arts related exhibitions since its inception in 1996, ranging from w collections or group works to individual retrospectives featuring local, national and international book artists in our Austin Burch gallery.
Named for our co-founders Mary Austin and Kathleen Burch, this 1400 square foot exhibition space is adjacent to our print and bindery studios, creating the perfect environment for visitors to see both works in progress and fully realized art work.
We have also presented exhibitions at off-site venues including the Commonwealth Club, ODC Dance Theatre at Project Artaud and the Marin Community Center.
Exhibition Opportunities:
Proposals are accepted on an ongoing basis. Unsolicited proposals will not be returned without a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Review can take up to 12 weeks. Artists and organizations interested in exhibition opportunities at SFCB can send proposals to:
Director
SFCB
300 De Haro Street Ste. 334
San Francisco, CA 94103
Currently Showing in the Austin Burch Gallery:
LOS ANGELES LOTERIA: AN EXPLORATION OF IDENTITY
May 7 - Sept 19, 2010
Opening Reception: Fri, May 7, 6-8 pm.
Traditionally, Loteria is a game of chance played with 54 cards that represent significant Icons in Mexican culture. Aardvark Letterpress Co-owner Cary Ocon and designer/artist Rick von Dehl had been refining an idea for a letterpressed Los Angeles version of the game of Loteria for two years. For Aardvark, the idea was to ask artists to select and interpret some part of the Los Angeles experience in their own style within the design frame and layout von Dehl created for each card. Ocon talked some of the artists who came in for other printing purposes into creating cards but it was slow going, being that he was in the midst of running an already demanding printing business.
In March 2008, Lisa Jane Persky began working with Ocon as co-curator. Within days they had gathered up Dan McCleary, Sammy Harkham, Andre Miripolsky, Ed Wexler, Greg Colson, artists with strong ties to Los Angeles, and the artists brought artists and the game was truly on. In this spirit of collaboration, Ocon and Persky refined and developed the full scope of Los Angeles Loteria, forming it around the Aardvark Letterpress business model: a crossroads of Los Angeles, a family place, a model of democracy, a melting pot. With that in mind Aardvark and artists began to create a gift for their city, a fine art edition like no other, and priced to be accessible to new collectors.
Loteria Series I is a signed and numbered edition of 100 each of 18 19 ¾ x 13 inch works on Cranes Lettra 220 with the Aardvark Letterpress ‘chop’. Currently the prints are priced at 375. ea. and 6,250. for the suite of 18 (which includes a bonus 19th card). Available at www.aardvarkletterpressfinearteditions.com .
List of Artists (alphabetical): Greg Colson, Richard Duardo, Angel Gonzalez, Daniel Gonzalez, Sammy Harkham, Karen Kimmel, Claudia Laub, Dave Lefner, Mel Lim, Marc Lumer, Dan McCleary, Andre Miripolsky, Cristina Padron, Somsara Rielly, Casey Ryder, Rick von Dehl, Ed Wexler, Ernesto Yerena.
Exhibition includes the First image of Aardvark's Loteria Series II, a powerful impression by scratchboard artist and former cinematographer, David Trulli.
Upcoming:
AMY FRANCHESCHINI + MICHAEL SWAINE: 2010 IMPRINT ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
Oct 15, 2010 to Jan 16, 2011
Opening Reception: Oct. 15, 6-8 pm
The exhibition will focus on the process, production and finished work created by our 2010 artist in residence. Amy Franceschini (born 1970, in Patterson, California) is a contemporary American artist and designer. Her practice spans a broad range of media including drawing, sculpture, design, net art, public art and gardening. Franceschini founded Futurefarmers in 1995 as a way to bring together multidisciplinary artists. Through Futurefarmers she has collaborated with a number of artists, including Sascha Merg, Josh On. She teaches courses at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute. Frequent themes in Franceschini's work are gardening, public space, technology, and social change.
Amy Franceschini's work often takes a visual approach to articulating perceived conflicts between humans and nature, and the individual to a community. She works both as an artist as well as a designer. In 2005 she was part of the "SAFE: Design takes on risk" exhibition at MoMA, showing the work Homeland Security Blanket (made with Michael Swaine). In 2006 she participated in the SECA Art Award exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has also exhibited at the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Instanbul Turkey, ZKM, Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe Germany,Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California and Gallery 16 in San Francisco, California. Futurefarmers was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.
Michael Swaine is an inventor and designer working in many media. Michael has collaborated with Futurefarmers since 1997. He is dedicated to working in the community, his "Mending Library" Generosity Project involves him pushing an old fashioned ice cream style cart on wheels with a treadle-operated sewing machine on it through the streets of San Francisco. He teaches at CCA and is currently working on his MA in Design at UC Berkeley.
Past:
RESTLESS DUST: A GHOST WALK WITH DARWIN
January 15 2010 through Earth Day, April 22, 2010
This exhibition explores the making of “Restless Dust,” created by Gail Wight during her one-year Imprint residency at the Center in 2009. The exhibition also features previous works by Wight. Gail Wight has spent more than twenty years infusing playful irreverence into scientific investigation. Working primarily with installation, computer, text, and performance, Wight investigates issues concerning biology, the history of science, and technology.
Providing context for her current project displayed here, the recently released SFCB IMPRINT publication Restless Dust, are two early works in the exhibition: In Meaning of Minuscule 2006—an interactive Plexiglas sculpture of an enormously enlarged microscope—viewers scroll through images magnified at different scales, displayed on the microscope’s stage, that reconstruct the history of technologies of magnification; in Cabinet of Curiosities 2001, an interactive CD encased in a wooden cabinet that is based on 17th century precursors to natural history museums, each object in this cabinet of curiosities leads to a small time-based meditation on the nature of evolutionary science.
A former sculptor who incorporates her fabricating skills into her work, Wight holds an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute where she was a Javits Fellow, and a BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. Wight has exhibited internationally, including venues such as the Natural History Museum of London and Cornerhouse, Manchester (England), Ars Electronica (Austria), Exit Art (New York), Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan, WI) and the Physics Room (New Zealand). She has worked for a research project on cognition at MIT, in the Exploratorium's Performance Program, and has held residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, at Capp Street Project, the Exploratorium, the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center, and Headlands Center for the Arts.
After earning a Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, Wight taught at Mills College. Currently, as an Associate professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Art Practice at Stanford, she teaches classes in emerging media and experimental media art, which provides the opportunity to work with scientists.
Her ongoing dialogue with scientists has allowed her to “theorize in a poetic way.” In that spirit, Wight was invited to participate in the Center’s IMPRINT residency program, and has spent the past year creating a dialogue in three dimensional book form with Charles Darwin. Restless Dust is a limited edition of 50 signed and numbered artist books, each housed in a wooden box containing a multi-media installation.
Wight's text invites Charles Darwin's ghost to sail to San Francisco and wander with her through the greater Bay Area terrain. The resulting sculptural book celebrates the unique species of the San Francisco Bay Area, presenting the nervous system of an animal chosen for the way its system reflects in a significant way, either through contrast or similarity, the world of human emotion. The book examines ways in which Darwin's legacy has impacted contemporary Bay Area culture and acknowledges the fragile and endangered state of many of our local flora and fauna caused by environmental degradation. The project’s illuminated birds, hand-bound letterpress-printed artist’s book, and screen-printed box lid make this among our most ambitious and unique residency publication to date. The body type is completely set by hand using metal type for letterpress printing. Images carved in linoleum are also printed on a letterpress.