San Francisco

October 20, 2015, 10:08am

Paintings For The Future: Shannon Finley at Jessica Silverman Gallery

If you get up close to Shannon Finley’s paintings, on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery through October 29, you’ll catch a glimpse of the warp and weft of the canvas beneath all that color. It’s there, visible along the very edges of the work where the stretcher bars made tight contact with Finley’s pallette knife and squeezed out all the paint. But from the distance of your monitor you may not even realize that the slick compositions are paintings at all -- they originate on Finley’s computer, all polygons and symmetry and speaking a kind of digital language. Take one step closer and they’re unmistakably beautiful paintings, as engrossing and aesthetically wrought as large beautiful paintings tend to be. One step closer still and they performatively reveal their material processes -- scrapes from the palette knife trace the artist’s path, and dried globules of paint point to a temporal kind of accumulation. And the support, that canvas I mentioned earlier, begins to allude to that postmodernist bent of turning painting inside out, of making paintings that reveal themselves via their own constitution. But that’s not quite what’s happening here. At least not exactly. - Matt Smith Chavez, San Francisco Contributor

Installation view of “Paintings For the Future.” 2015. Courtesy of Jessica Silverman Gallery and the artist.

October 19, 2011, 9:05am

Jay DeFeo at Hosfelt Gallery

In 1959 Jay DeFeo and her then-husband Wally Hedrick received a letter from Bruce Conner, inducting them into the Rat Bastard Protective Association, of which he was the President, and suggesting that they start paying dues. Other original members included Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Jess Collins. The group of about eight artists exhibited together in San Francisco throughout the 50s and 60s, meeting every couple of weeks at each other’s apartments and studios. They formed at a time when the Beat artists were gaining prominence in San Francisco, and began to be somewhat of a spectacle.

July 29, 2011, 10:38am

Jesse Thomas at Eleanor Harwood Gallery

We were excited to find coverage of Jesse Thomas’s exhibition at Eleanor Harwood Gallery on Fecal Face. Our staff also had the pleasure of seeing Jesse's work at the NEXT art fair in Chicago when he showed with Robert Bills Contemporary, so we know they are really great in person. Thomas, a St. Louis based artist, will be featured in the upcoming New American Paintings Midwest Issue, #95, due to hit newsstands on August 9^th.

May 03, 2011, 11:16am

In the Studio: Pamela Wilson-Ryckman

Pamela Wilson-Ryckman, Looter, 2010 | Watercolor on paper, 22.5 x 30 inches. Courtesy the artist.

I recently caught up with San Francisco-based artist Pamela Wilson-Ryckman in her studio—one of many housed in converted horse stables that still bear the high ceilings and large wooden barn doors of their original structure.