ictus projects

IcTus Gallery Presents “Rituals of Water,” a solo exhibit by Rodney Ewing January 12...

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:33:00 -0800

IcTus Gallery Presents “Rituals of Water,” a solo exhibit by Rodney Ewing

January 12 through March 1st, 2013

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 12^th, 6pm- 10pm

Closing Artist Talk: Friday, March 1^st, 7pm- 9pm

IcTus Gallery is pleased to announce the “Rituals of Water,” a solo exhibition of the works of Rodney Ewing, co-curated by Hanna Regev.

In “Rituals of Water”, Ewing examines the role of water as an allegorical agent of disruption and change in the history of people of African descent. Water as motif figures greatly in the African Diaspora, in the wake of experiences that include abductions, transport onto slave ships, and immersion into an alien culture via baptism that removes traces of past beliefs and traditions. Water has also served as a weapon to scatter activists during the Civil Rights Movement, and as a reckoning and catastrophe for the mostly poor and African American communities of New Orleans living on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River during Hurricane Katrina.

Ewing renders the centuries long sweep of this historical timeline of water and the African Diaspora. Large-scale drawing and installations are captured in four thematic sections: Transition (Middle Passage), Transformation (Baptism), Resistance (Civil Rights Movement), and Dispersal (Hurricane Katrina). With this construct, Ewing has produced a record of how even a basic, mundane element is transformed by a people’s history into a transcendent and at times malevolent force.

Rodney Ewing is an artist working out of San Francisco California. His drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and events. With his work he is pursuing a narrative that requires us to be present and intimate.

Rodney Ewing’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions including “Tech Tools of the Trade: Contemporary Media Art” (de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, 2009) “Art Dubai”, (Frey Norris Gallery) “Public Safety, (Frey Norris Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2008) “Code Switching”,(Red House Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2007), “Who’s Afraid of San Francisco (FreyNorris Gallery 2006), Lisa Dent Gallery (San Francisco, CA 2005), and Cartography (Johnsonese Gallery, Chicago, IL 2005)

IcTus Gallery in collaboration with The Feminist Economics Department (FED) presents… BEAUTY...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 21:19:00 -0700

IcTus Gallery in collaboration with The Feminist Economics Department (FED) presents…

BEAUTY SALON

November 10^th – December 28th, 2012
Gallery hours: Thursday - Saturday 12pm- 5pm

Opening Saturday November 10^th, 6 – 10pm

IcTus Gallery, 1769 15th Street. San Francisco CA 94103

This fall, the Mission’s IcTus Gallery will be converted into a salon where the public will be welcomed to receive conceptual beauty treatments that respond to the invisible suffering borne out of fiscal inequity and economic unfairness.

The Feminist Economics Department (FED) is the physical manifestation of the hope for a different, non-monetary value system for labor. Projects undertaken by the department endeavor to show deep support for workers who experiment with ways to provide mutual support without the exchange of money. BEAUTY SALON is an intervention into the industry that inflicts high priced violence on the body in pursuit of beauty and replaces this ‘service’ with rituals that honor truth as beautiful.

BEAUTY SALON will use the physical and discursive connection of a ‘makeover’ as a way to deal with the buried shame experienced by those who feel abandoned or abused by contemporary economics. In the intimate environment of the salon, the Feminist Economics Department will host local artists in short-term residencies as ‘Beauticians,’ offering the public beauty treatments, which will offer new ways to ‘confront inequity’.

Appointments are welcome but not required. To make an appointment, or if you are interested in becoming a FED beautician, letters of inquiry may be sent to FeministEconomicsDepartment@gmail.com

BEAUTY SALON’s Senior Beautician, Cassie Thornton, graduated from California College of the Arts with an MFA in Social Practice. Her long-term interest in economics and the unconscious is once again coupled with her unrivalled manicure skills. She has recently returned to the Bay Area from New York City, where her recent practices have included vocal orchestration of financial graphs, collective bank touching, and personal debt visualization services. Over the years, her work has been widely presented in both cities; including at The Flux Factory, Elizabeth Foundation Project Space, The Kitchen, and MoMA in the East, and SoEX, Wattis Institute, Small Press Traffic, and SF MoMA in the West. She is a proud member of Strike-Debt in NYC, and is Artist in Residence at the Labor Archives at San Francisco State University beginning this fall. www.cassiethornton.com, www.debt-visualizations.tumblr.com, www.physical-debt.tumblr.com www.physical-audit.tumblr.com.

For more information, please contact IcTus curator, Katya Min at katya@ictusgallery.com

Ictus Gallery presents Assembly Line by Li Xiaofei September 15th - October 25th, 2012 Opening...

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 23:10:00 -0700

Ictus Gallery presents Assembly Line by Li Xiaofei

September 15th - October 25th, 2012

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 15, 2012 6pm-10pm

IcTus Gallery

1769 15th Street. San Francisco CA 94103

Gallery hours: Thursday - Saturday 12pm- 5pm

www.ictusgallery.com

The product of several years of work and over 50 factory visits Li Xiaofei’s “Assembly Line” series presents a multifaceted exploration of life in the land of manufacturing. The work combines interview-style videos with workers and factory foremen intercut with luscious scenes of factory interiors, spinning wheels, turning cranks and flashing lights.

The show will feature a number of the interview-style videos, plus more atmospheric video works based on the theme of industrial landscapes.

This body of work explores a number of interlocking themes including the relationship between labor and management, between man and machine, between the factory and the individual and the relationship between the individual and society. At the same time it offers us a privileged view into spaces which we would rarely visit, opening a window into the lives of China’s 100 million strong manufacturing labour force.

Li Xiaofei is a multimedia artist living and working in Shanghai whose works have been widely shown, most recently at SFMOMA.

Co-coordinated by Justin Hoover, Katya Min and Julio Cesar Morales

IcTus Gallery Presents “Transfiguration: Uncovering the Hidden” a photo installation...

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 08:56:38 -0700

IcTus Gallery Presents “Transfiguration: Uncovering the Hidden”

a photo installation by Bay Area photographer Pak Han

Exhibition runs:

July 7th, 2012 - August 17th, 2012

Opening Reception:

Saturday, July 7th, 2012 6PM -10PM

1769 15th St. (between Valencia & Guerrero)

San Francisco, CA, 94103

Gallery hours: Wednesday-Saturday

12pm-5pm and by appt.

icTus Gallery presents Transfiguration: Uncovering the Hidden, a metaphorical and introspective exploration of our contradictory relationship with nature through dreamscapes and visual concepts.

As layers of ritualistic modernity are stripped away - our complacency, comfort and power - what is really left behind? Through sound, performance and a series of visually striking photographs, photographer Pak Han incites an awareness in the viewer of a profound contradiction buried beneath our forged environment. This multi-sensory experience highlights the contrasts between what we are and what we assure ourselves we can be. By depicting the interplay between the Body and the Natural and/or Man-made, Han knudges the viewer towards contemplating his own relationship to his environments.

In July of 2011, Pak Han began his photo project Transfiguration. With the support and collaboration of celebrated choreographer Anna Halprin, dancer/musician Dohee Lee and properties and garment designer, Keriann Egeland, Han brings the project to reality. This series of black & white conceptual photographs will be exhibited for the first time in July 2012 at the Ictus Gallery in San Francisco.

After more than a decade of painting expressionistic abstract works in mixed media, artist Pak Han seriously began exploring photography in 2008 while traveling in Japan. He was entranced by the vast potential for creative expression through this wondrous medium and immediately focused his energy documenting everyday people in candid situations at public locales, such as the urban streets of Tokyo. The dynamic cultural life of Tokyo and its fascinating people became the primary interest for his personal work during his frequent trips to Japan in 2009. One of the Tokyo photos subsequently earned Pak Han a silver award from the juried 2010 international photography competition sponsored by The Japan Times and Fujifilm. A selection, including the award-winning photo was showcased at a group exhibition in Tokyo that same year.The distinctive style of Pak Han is characterized by artful and cinematic perspective. When photo documenting theatre performance pieces, Pak Han takes on a role much like a cinematographer, meticulously framing and setting up shots to capture dramatic images with depth, and colour that complement the mood of a story or theme. For Pak Han’s other photography work, he prefers to work outside the studio setting, using natural light and without the use of a tripod. Many have described Pak Han’s photos as gritty, intimate and even sentimental.

His unique visual aesthetics and approach to photo documentation attracts some of the top talents in theatre and dance communities to Pak Han’s work. Since 2009, Pak Han has actively collaborated with both the established and small performance companies that produce some the finest experimental, avant-garde, works in the country.

Pak Han’s photographs have been printed in numerous publications, including the cover of American Theatre Magazine and national newspapers such as The New York Times. From the portrait of a legendary movie concept artist Ralph McQuarrie, to the gravity defying imagery of the Korean American hip-hop artist/producer Kero One, to the street photo of a schoolgirl walking home with her father in Tokyo, Pak Han’s wide range of photography work has reached different parts of the world.

image: film still from “Premonition” courtesy of artist Alice KönitzICTUS GALLERY...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:55:38 -0700

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.

Video Still, Jaffa Mangoes...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 20:08:53 -0800

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.

Photo: C. Ree, Overhead 2011 Disrupture Multimedia project...

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:48:00 -0800

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…

October 6th - November 18th, 2011 IMMATERIAL Solo Art ProjectMary Fernando ConradOpening...

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 11:10:00 -0700

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.

Image: “We Carry Each Other”, Jermaine Rogers “Love and Anarchy,” a group art...

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 11:35:00 -0700

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.

Ictus Gallery introduces Home in the World: An Apocalyptic TravelogueA photo installation and...

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:41:00 -0700

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.