icTus gallery

image: film still from “Premonition”  courtesy of artist Alice Könitz


ICTUS GALLERY PRESENTS

ANCIENT-FUTURE-SUPER-NATURAL

Exhibition runs:
May 5th, 2012 - June 15th, 2012

Opening Reception:
Saturday, May 5th, 2012 6PM -10PM

1769 15th St. (between Valencia & Guerrero)

San Francisco, CA, 94103

Gallery hours: Thursday- Saturday,

12pm-5pm and by appt.

IcTus Gallery is pleased to present Ancient-Future-Super-Natural, a multimedia group show that will prove to us that anything is possible in 2012!  Please join us on Saturday May 5th, from 6-10pm for the exhibition opening. This new show features work by Takehito Etani, Ben Herndon, Alice Könitz, Mei-ling Humphrey, Gregory Ito, Kyoung-ah Kang,  Edmundo de Marchena, Chris Novak, Melony Wofford Bravmann and a garden installation show by Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa.

In a similar spirit to the creation of the Antikythera mechanism, the world’s oldest known mechanical computer, these artists employ their far-sighted lenses to envision our future. Their inventions are that much more unique, because they utilize everyday objects such as yarn, plywood, Tupperware, and other utilitarian items to realize their visions. Takehito Etani masterminds the Third-Eye Project, inventing wearable devices that allow us to observe our own selves sensing the world (spiritual prosthetics). Alice Konitz reinvents the utopian vision of design’s ability to facilitate social change by constructing geometric forms out of cardboard and plastic. Mei-ling Humphrey’s embroidered hangings explore the continual passage of time and the practice of handiwork: she sees the physical stitch as an index of her body’s movement through time. Gregory Ito’s 2-dimensional paintings not only play with our visual perceptions, but they also integrate organic and celestial themes with a hypnotic use of iridescent color. Finally, Choi Jeong Hwa crafts entire environments out of simple household items, demonstrating his belief that ‘art’ itself will one day disappear and just be a common place occurrence that we all live within.

 

Posted at 12:55 AM



                                                                          Video Still, Jaffa Mangoes 2011

JAFFA MANGOES: History, Memory and Myth
March 2nd, 2012 – April 20th, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday March 2nd,  2012 6PM -10PM
Closing Reception: Friday April 20th, 2012  6PM-9PM


IcTus Gallery
1769 15th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110
Gallery hours: Wednesday- Saturday,
12:00pm-5:00pm and by appt.

IcTus Gallery is pleased to present Jaffa Mangoes: History, Memory and Myth,  an exhibition unraveling two orthogonal personal histories that intersected in Jaffa, one of the oldest port-cities in the world. Please join us on Friday, March 2nd from 6-10pm for the exhibition opening.

The two artists ––Palestinian artist Zeina Barakeh and Israeli artist Michal Gavish–– transform Ictus Gallery into an arena of investigation and dialogue about two very personal, loaded, yet antagonistic stories of exile. The exhibition is a product of a long, difficult, and multilayered journey of communication and work between Gavish and Barakeh, and is co-curated by Hanna Regev and Katya Min.

Gavish and Barakeh met in San Francisco and began conversations about Jaffa, where Zeina’s family originated before the establishment of the Israeli State in 1948, and near which Michal grew up. They began exploring the possibilities of bringing together two personal yet political narratives about Jaffa, narratives that kept colliding because of the larger unresolved and ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict. While their personal family histories run parallel in some aspects, their present situations are still adversarial. Their ambition to accomplish an art piece together, not necessarily to produce solutions, is a closer examination into the process of conflict-resolution.

Ictus Gallery features an emerging aesthetic of multi-dimensional realities and art forms occurring between and within places and people,the territories of artists, the revealing of things—the artists in transit, inside their work, and their worlds, bent on a subversive contemporary point of view.





Posted at 8:08 PM

Photo: C. Ree, Overhead 2011 Disrupture Multimedia project installations, featuring works by C. Ree, Heather Sparks and Jenifer K. Wofford January 7th, 2012 through February 18th, 2012 Opening Reception: Saturday January 7th, 2012 6PM -10PM Closing Reception: February 18th, 2012 6PM-9PM icTus Gallery is pleased to present Disrupture, a collection of multimedia installations by C. Ree, Heather Sparks and Jenifer Wofford.  Please join us on Saturday January 7th, from 6-10pm for the exhibition opening. In the wake of Arab Spring and its waves of revolt, and Occupy movements in every corner of the country, the topic of political disruption has hopefully entered our daily dialogue. The artists in Disrupture take the conversation further, disfiguring the very spaces in which we live, upsetting the cherished ritual of shopping and depicting the greatest ruptures of all: the explosive volcano. By inflecting everyday spaces with both specters of past trauma and a presence which resists the rational, C. Ree’s new installation work Overhead explores the monstrous underbelly of the heroic, and troubles the real into a space that is unexplainably urgent. She uses suspended ceiling components often found in mass produced spaces – both commercial and domestic – and incorporates dripping leaks from horror movies, fibrous tiles which sag over time, or mirrors which confuse vision and location. C. Ree filmed an accompanying video, Aimless Bullet, which documents a large-scale ceiling’s complete destruction, single-handedly sabotaged by an unknown figure. As a meditation on consumption and desire, Heather Sparks developed the Big Return Project, a collective performance with participants across the US and parts of Europe. Inspired by her experience within the fashion industry, which she says “de-mystified the lure of luxury brands”, Heather invited participants to shop and then return their purchases as performative actions, a binging and purging of a desire to consume. Documentation of actions, including a collective ‘workshop’ shopping experience, were uploaded and shared through social media, and were included in the performance series Capitalism is Over. The project continues, attracting new contributions and dialog. Moving from the disrupture of the material realm to one of the natural realm, Jenifer K Wofford focuses her sights on rendering volcano plumes in ink and acrylic works on paper. Part of a very new body of work begun this year, Wofford has been constructing a global history of volcanic eruption columns—or rather, the depiction of eruption columns, and the ways in which these have been documented or retold in centuries of media ranging from  imagined paintings and etchings of the AD 79 Mount Vesuvius catastrophe to hyper-contemporary photography and video of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption. In part a formal challenge to render the ephemerality of smoke and ash in a line-based drawing, Wofford’s Volcano project is also an enquiry into pressure, change, cataclysm and consequence, and a study of natural phenomena on a global scale, focusing on historic and recent eruptions in the Philippines, Iceland, Indonesia, Japan and Italy. For more info see press page…

Photo: C. Ree, Overhead 2011

Disrupture

Multimedia project installations, featuring works by

C. Ree, Heather Sparks and Jenifer K. Wofford

January 7th, 2012 through February 18th, 2012

Opening Reception: Saturday January 7th, 2012 6PM -10PM

Closing Reception: February 18th, 2012 6PM-9PM

icTus Gallery is pleased to present Disrupture, a collection of multimedia installations by C. Ree, Heather Sparks and Jenifer Wofford.  Please join us on Saturday January 7th, from 6-10pm for the exhibition opening.

In the wake of Arab Spring and its waves of revolt, and Occupy movements in every corner of the country, the topic of political disruption has hopefully entered our daily dialogue. The artists in Disrupture take the conversation further, disfiguring the very spaces in which we live, upsetting the cherished ritual of shopping and depicting the greatest ruptures of all: the explosive volcano.

By inflecting everyday spaces with both specters of past trauma and a presence which resists the rational, C. Ree’s new installation work Overhead explores the monstrous underbelly of the heroic, and troubles the real into a space that is unexplainably urgent. She uses suspended ceiling components often found in mass produced spaces – both commercial and domestic – and incorporates dripping leaks from horror movies, fibrous tiles which sag over time, or mirrors which confuse vision and location. C. Ree filmed an accompanying video, Aimless Bullet, which documents a large-scale ceiling’s complete destruction, single-handedly sabotaged by an unknown figure.

As a meditation on consumption and desire, Heather Sparks developed the Big Return Project, a collective performance with participants across the US and parts of Europe. Inspired by her experience within the fashion industry, which she says “de-mystified the lure of luxury brands”, Heather invited participants to shop and then return their purchases as performative actions, a binging and purging of a desire to consume. Documentation of actions, including a collective ‘workshop’ shopping experience, were uploaded and shared through social media, and were included in the performance series Capitalism is Over. The project continues, attracting new contributions and dialog.

Moving from the disrupture of the material realm to one of the natural realm, Jenifer K Wofford focuses her sights on rendering volcano plumes in ink and acrylic works on paper. Part of a very new body of work begun this year, Wofford has been constructing a global history of volcanic eruption columns—or rather, the depiction of eruption columns, and the ways in which these have been documented or retold in centuries of media ranging from  imagined paintings and etchings of the AD 79 Mount Vesuvius catastrophe to hyper-contemporary photography and video of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption. In part a formal challenge to render the ephemerality of smoke and ash in a line-based drawing, Wofford’s Volcano project is also an enquiry into pressure, change, cataclysm and consequence, and a study of natural phenomena on a global scale, focusing on historic and recent eruptions in the Philippines, Iceland, Indonesia, Japan and Italy.

For more info see press page…
Posted at 10:48 PM

October 6th - November 18th, 2011

IMMATERIAL 
Solo Art Project
Mary Fernando Conrad

Opening Reception: Thursday October 6th, 6 pm - 10pm
Closing Reception:  Friday November 18th. 6pm - 10pm

IcTus Gallery presents IMMATERIAL, new works by artist Mary Fernando Conrad, an installation consisting of:

1) Tableau of refuse; 2) Drawings of the unobserved;  3) Identities in a vacuum-sealed bags; 4) Exit signs to a better tomorrow

Mary Fernando Conrad’s work investigates social infrastructure through the use of vernacular materials such as neon signage, plastic and packaging.

What would have been incomprehensible marvels to past generations, we now absorb, process and ignore as we move ever faster through the culmination of this digital age. With each season the waves lap higher and the tides scatter these temporary edifices erected so purposefully a minute ago. It is the ultimate irony of living in a world where mass production dominates that what has become most disposable is our attention.

Mary Fernando Conrad reconnoiters the spaces between making and seeing, in the context of this tension between the signifiers of our systems and we who populate them. By focusing our attention on the meaning carried within even the everyday objects — mundane, glorious, shifting points of civilization — Conrad restores the gift of consciousness. A salve and a shield, tools to materialize the dreams ahead.

Posted at 11:10 AM


Image: “We Carry Each Other”, Jermaine Rogers

“Love and Anarchy,” a group art exhibition featuring works
by Cece Carpio, Kira Curtis, Fernando Marti, and Jermaine Rogers.

 
Ictus Gallery
July 23rd - September 1st, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday July 23rd, 6 pm - 10pm
Closing Reception: Thursday Sept. 1st, 6pm - 10pm
1769 15th St. @ Albion (Between Valencia and Guerrero)
San Francisco, CA, 94013
Gallery hours: Tuesday- Saturday 12pm-5pm and by appt.

Ictus Gallery presents an installation of indoor graffiti mural art, posters, paintings and prints celebrating all things that deviate, defy and yet carry each other.
 
We can define our days as we choose, and infuse the most fraught of situations with emotion. And out of that alchemy can come the transformation of a soul, a block, a city and beyond. In the works of Cece Carpio, Kira Curtis, Fernando Marti, and Jermaine Rogers, we see this kind of celebration of renegades, who resist the constructs of power but do so with all encompassing love that builds rather than tears down.
 
“Love and Anarchy” brings together four artists working in different mediums, each with their own unique and distinct styles, infusing and combining to create exciting visual, immersive narratives. “Love and Anarchy” explores these ideas through popular and accessible mediums including posters and mural graffiti. The works writing to ever present, universal themes of love and power.

Images of art works are here.

Posted at 11:35 AM 1 note

Ictus Gallery introduces Home in the World: An Apocalyptic Travelogue

A photo installation and exhibit by Bay Area photographer Joan Osato — featuring a new photographic series inspired and realized through the artist’s travels and travails, exploring our sense of place and displacement in the American West.

In Greek, the word Apocalypse means “lifting of the veil” or “revelation,” and is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception. 

The Apocalyptic Travelogue invites viewers to contemplate on the nature of destruction and beauty, and imagine their world in a post-apocalyptic future.


Also featuring installation works by David Craig,  wood, mixed media sculptor based in San Francisco

Ictus Gallery
April 23rd - June 16th, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday April 23rd, 6 pm - 10pm
Closing Reception: Thursday June 16th, 6pm - 10pm
1769 15th St. @ Albion (Between Valencia and Guerrero)
San Francisco, CA, 94013

Opening night program: Readings from Words in a New World curated by Michelle “Mush” Lee
Bay Area youth poets excavate, through language, a new world—one beyond good and evil, utopia and dystopia. They twist poems and stories into new forms and expressions of language, love, and survival. What emerges  are words of startling vulnerability and unflinching courage — chronicles of life after the Apocalypse.

Posted at 10:41 AM