In Formation:
Showing work at Berkeley Arts Passage through KALA Offsite, a series of public exhibitions curated by KALA Art Institute. Froebel toy sets, basketry constructed from printer's castoffs.
Through 1/18/13.

Cars Are Hard, Bodies Are Soft 

Nine months ago today I was riding my bicycle from the Balboa Park Bart Station to San Francisco State University to do some prep for a printmaking class I was teaching. It is a distance of just under a mile and is a route I've ridden dozens of times.  This day I changed my route and (in a moment of carelessness? confusion?  bad luck?) was struck by a car, landed in the street on my face,  shattered my front teeth and broke my jaw. I am mostly on the other end of this experience thanks to the support and love of my family and friends,  and the skill and commitment of many medical professionals. I want to share the experience here so that people I know can have an idea what I went through, sort through their own feelings and views about cyclists and drivers, and the importance of the choices we make about how we get around and the way in which it determines how we relate to the places we live.

In the morning I left my house in the Mission District of San Francisco for downtown Oakland to observe and support the Occupy action that day which was focussed on shutting down the Port of Oakland. I had some free time and figured it was finally time to show up.  I remember recognizing Rupert Garcia on the train, the great Chicano printmaker and activist and former SJSU Painting instructor (he led me on a tour of their program in the mid 2000's).  I was too late for the port action although I cycled around the port road to see the police barricade. Mostly I milled around with a moderately sized group at Oscar Grant Plaza and met my Studio mate Josh. I ran into a family friend who I was surprised to learn was an active member of the Occupy movement (She is a full-time paramedic and a single mom so next time you hear people say the Occupiers are lazy call bullshit.)  

Josh and I had lunch nearby and then I headed back to San Francisco on BART. I was wearing an old denim Carhart  jacket from my carpenter days, steel toe boots and a tweed cap, my longshoreman's drag I guess. I had my bike helmet with me but on the train had taken it off and strapped it to the front rack of my bike on the train. For whatever reason I did not wear it when I left the BART train. This day, also for some reason I will always regret, I decided to take the busier Ocean Ave. to SFSU instead of my usual route of Holloway, (a quieter quasi-bike boulevard). This is a complicated, busy urban space that borders a suburban part of the City. Ocean Avenue is a four lane street with Muni (San Francisco Municipal Railway) light rail (the K Ingelside) in the left lanes . My intention was to take a left from Ocean Blvd.  onto Victoria, a side street that dead ends into Ocean. As I approached the intersection in the right lane the light turned yellow. Cyclists will be familiar with the maneuver I then attempted, I slowed down and waited for the red-light for traffic in my direction, intending to use it to cross the street and complete a left turn. I've since heard it called "boxing the intersection". 

I crossed the intersection and turned to the left. I looked up at a walk signal that showed it was safe to cross, as I turned to my left it was too late, a car that was coming from behind me in the left lane was going through the intersection at  the very last second moving fast, as you'll do when you are beating a red. The driver may have been texting, it's possible their vision was obscured by a Muni shelter in the intervening space. I know she was running the red because I saw the walk signal and because another witness was stopped in thier car at the red light in the other direction. That driver heard me hit the street and described a sickening crunch, she thought I was dead and stayed in her car calming down the child in the backseat of her car.

I remember everything, spinning in the air, being thrown from my bike, hitting the ground and  getting up to see my teeth scattered in the middle of the street. I immediately got up and turned to see if the driver would flee, I saw their car pull over about 2 blocks distant(!?). Pedestrians come to my aid and guided me to the curb, lots of blood, someone gave me my tweed cap and told me to hold it to my mouth. I sat and watched while the light changed and cars drove over my teeth, I tried to get up and get them  and people where forcing me to sit back down. I looked at someone and said, "I guess I'm in shock". 

What followed is that surreal disruption of your normal reality, the chaotic theater of onlookers, police, fire engines and paramedics, with me in the lead role. I gave a statement to the police and remember the female driver on the periphery giving hers, "…I never saw him".  I was totally lucid, knew the President's name and the date, where I was gowing and where I was coming from. I was designated a trauma patient and rushed to San Francisco General Hospital, our county hospital, which in addition to providing primary care for scores of low-income and indigent people is one of the best trauma centers in the country.  The paramedics where awesome and sympathetic as was every health care worker I encountered that day, I am so grateful for the people that want to do that work. 

I arrived on a back board in a neck brace, with oxygen and IV fluids for the ride. At SFGH I was "Trauma Beta" and got to hop the line. In the ER I was once again the locus of frenzied, focussed activity. There seemed to be general relief at my lucid state (when I rattled off December 12, 2011 the doctor said "I don't think I would have got that"). They asked me if I wanted to let someone know where I was, "I guess I should let my wife know".

CT scans, neurology tests, intravenous painkillers, first morphine then Delaudid. A dental surgeon came and pulled out the remaining broken teeth and many bone fragments in my upper jaw. At one point he was on top of me yanking out the remains of my right incisor like he was pulling a nail, even with a truckload of Lidocaine and Delaudid that hurt. He stitched me up and I was shunted off to a corner of the the ER, floating on a warm river of embryonic fluid  when Sarah showed up. I was still in neck brace, and they had cleaned up none of the blood, real horror show. When Sarah saw me she inhaled sharply and held her hands to her mouth. She checked herself in that way you do, not wanting to disturb the injured party more (It didn't matter, I did not really care about anything at that point) and recounted the story of her friend Stacy, who lost her front teeth in a pogo stick accident (true story, it was at work and she got workman's comp) and had since got implants.

There are some things people will do for you that you can never repay, like Sarah spooning me in my hospital bed that first night. I was at General for three nights. Surgery on day two to wire my lower jaw (a lateral fracture had caused my lower front teeth to flap like an old door). While I knew I was lucky to be alive, The initial prognosis was not encouraging. I had hairline fractures in my sinuses. I might have permanent pain management issues. I may lose the bottom four teeth in addition to the top five. 

In the end my lower teeth healed remarkably well. I have had inserts installed in my upper jaw along with bone and tissue grafts. I probably will have to wear braces for a year before the final (five) teeth are installed. The past nine months have been a constant stream of calls to insurance companies, appointments with lawyers, doctor's appointments. Some people know the drill. I am very lucky to have not had a very medicalized life so it is fairly new to me. Adjusting to wearing dentures, or going in public with no front teeth has been challenging. Since I can't eat with my denture I tend to avoid social eating with people I don't know well. In restaurants I position myself to face a wall so that I don't have to feel self conscious. Pretty minor stuff but it helps me feel admiration for  people living with disabilities or disfigurement. I have pretty crappy insurance and the payout from the driver was a small fraction of the total bill. I am lucky to have generous relatives but I can see how people in a more vulnerable position would have a trouble bouncing back from something like this. 

Two years ago I ceased being a car owner, and get around on bike and public transit almost exclusively. This has mostly been a quality of life choice, I would rather experience my City  in this way than by driving through it. I also want to contribute to our society's evolution away from car-based transit. I don't want my story to scare people away from riding bikes, I still do, although more cautiously than before. 

I am writing this to fill people in on what this year has been like for my wife Sarah and I, the legal issues are settled so I don't need to be careful about what I say. Mostly I would like people to be careful on the roads. I am as guilty as anyone else at times but I am mostly talking to drivers, to stop cutting corners and taking chances, pay attention and SLOW down. The life you save could be my own.

Camp KALA 2012

I spent the last week teaching a group of 11 teenaged students about screen printing at KALA Art Institute in Berkeley. I structured the class around a DIY principle, of giving my students the tools to screen prints on their own. They stretched their own screens, taped, coated and exposed screens, creating their own positives by hand and using the paper stencil method. The immensely talented Cody Frost came and shared his work and working method with the students. They printed large editions considering the time frame and were able to master many of the basics of printing and registering multiple color screen prints. I owe much to the hardworking KALA Interns, Hailey, Lauren and Janelle who's help was critical to making the class a success. The students' final project was a Bestiary print exchange based upon Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings. Each student interpreted a passage describing a beast in their own way in a two color print utilizing a split fountain or duotone blend stroke.

 folio cover stamp and paper stencil by students

 The Eight Headed Serpent

 Chimera

 Leucrocotta

Centaur

Centering the Margin

Following are descriptions and images of the work and opening reception for Centering the Margin at Root Division on 3/10/12.

One of my main goals with Centering the Margin as the it evolved, has been to use the concept to draw parallels between works that may seem outwardly very different. When I first proposed this show to Root Division, my initial group of artists; friends, colleagues and Bay Area Artists who’s work I admire, was emphatically visual and almost all 2 dimensional works. With Root Division’s help a call for entries was initiated to which we received over 100 entries. It is perhaps a testament to Root Division’s profile that the process of culling a group of 10 to 11 artists from this pool was excruciating due to the universally high quality of the entrants. This process allowed me to flesh out and expand the concept with a diversity of practice and media in exciting and unexpected ways.

In Gravel Bank and Small Hill, part of her series of photographs named“We are all unique and everything is new.”, Susanna Corcoran makes us alive to physical phenomenon that go unnoticed mainly due to our alienation from the physical landscape. With the humble tools of milk and food coloring, Susanna’s un-manipulated photographs document her interaction with bodies of water, large and small, setting up disorientating juxtapositions of scale with ephemeral gestures redolent of analog film special effects. Their strangely harmonious yet disquieting presence in the landscape is, in the artists words, “intended to at once seduce, disorient, confuse and create a sense of floating, ambiguity and wonder.”

Michael Ryan uses the clear plastic of bubble packaging and plastic water bottles as a medium and subject. His soaring sculpture exalts this materials intended for an ephemeral function, containers meant to shuttle products from display to consumption and in so doing quotes abstract forms that seemed to be  borrowed from modernism.

Sarah Newton uses a kind of drawing technique associated with Renaissance drawing (drawing on toned ground with highlights and dark media) and later employed by 19th century American artists to depict a frontier that was transitioning to tourist landscape. Sarah employs this archaic drawing technique to depict the uniform landscaping and architecture of the ultimate interstitial space, the freeway rest stop. Her jarringly sublime depictions of this space is solidly at odds with the travelers experience of these spaces, as a nominal expression of public space but mostly a place for human and dog to address pressing bodily functions.

Anna Kell, in her paintings Johnson City Corner Scrap, and Faux Scrap, is acting on her obsession with the ubiquitous urban artifact of the discarded mattress. Our relationship to these objects is infused with our intimate awareness of their tactile properties. It is jarring to see an object that is party to our most private moments (the marriage bed, the death bed) abandoned by the side of the road, abject in its stained and usually damp state. Anna plays a visual sleight of hand with a confusion of trompe l'oeil and collage while playing upon the uncanny similarity between a painting support and a mattress.

My work included in exhibition recast vestigial artifacts and echoes of the technologies of reproduction, in this case the discarded color calibration squares from the margins of printed collateral and product packaging, as geometric abstraction. These woven paper works derive their structure from the sequence of process and spot colors found on this material, turning this indecipherable code into a visual order that continually falls apart into chaos.

With Centering the Margin Byron Peters takes his project two tears flow quick in succession to its first sanctioned venue. His tiny sculptures imitate a type of animal waste that is a common signal of pest infestation and normally discretely places these sculptures in public, private and commercial spaces such as “The Federal Reserve, SFO, United Airlines, picture frames returned to IKEA and other retailers, California College of the Arts, selected personal homes, and a wide variety of commercial settings”. He documents the reaction to these sculptures in such as increased sanitation and “temporary infrastructures.”, hoping to reach a breaking point in these systems. Although humor is inevitably bound up in this work, Byron’s intent is not pranksterish. He wishes instead to “invert...power relationships” and point up the dissonance between capitalism’s “denial of shit”* and the reality of an economy predicated upon a cycle of endless consumption and waste.

two tears flow quick in succession in situ

In her series, “Bookmarks” Lizzy Cross scans pages from books removing the text and extracting only the notes, drawings, highlights and underlining added by previous readers. She then layers the result in a digital print. For Lizzie the final piece “illustrates the dead end conversation the reader has with the book.” In a broader sense  these works stand for the experience for any audience of any creative work, signifying our attempt to bridge the twin solitary experiences of reading and writing to find a place of sincere communion with the author. 

For this show Eric Theise has adapted his 16 millimeter film "To No End Gathered" . The film documents an exposed wall in downtown San Francisco and the mesmerizing play of shadow and light on tattered wallpaper from long disused interior spaces revealed for the first time in decades. Such spaces are literally in between in the way of  human tissue.Ghost walls like this pop up from time to time in cities, a briefly giving  a glimpse into the past that is usually subsumed by the city’s constant need to evolve and repurpose itself. 

Devon Tsuno takes as the subject of his paintings the weed and trash strewn fences and empty lots of greater Los Angeles, his native city. Devon’s painting technique, a daring layering of stenciled acrylic and spray paint  provides a physical metaphor for the layered aged surfaces and overlapping uses of these disused urban spaces while his pallet evokes the distopian fever dream that is contemporary Los Angeles.

Brian Caraway gives Devon Tsuno the once over,  painter to painter.

In “Alternate Route Project” Jason Adams navigates peripheral architectural spaces using techniques derived from bouldering, a technical, low altitude permutation of rock climbing. This act and the accompanying manual are intended to activate areas within public spaces (in this case the Clemson University Campus) that are not intended for use. For Jason, these “quiet interventions” are significant for stimulating new dialogs between the architecture and its users, and serve as analogs for the act of stepping outside perceived boundaries and social norms that define the parameters of free speech in the public square. 

Alternate Route project at Root Division

Cara Tomlinson has excerpted her video piece Apophenia for the exhibition.. In this four channel looped video Cara builds structure and rhythm from the seemingly random and chaotic visual and auditory cues of everyday existence. By isolating these rhythms Cara disarms us into a realization of the sensory cacophony we cancel out just to get through our day. The power of this piece is to trigger in us an unavoidable sense of loss at that fact. 

"Apophenia" at Vimeo

 Robin Johnston’s work embodies the concept behind the show through her recording of natural processes that mark the passage of time but slip unnoticed. In “Two Weeks in July” Robin textile the records tidal activity of an eponymous period in 2009 in the Marin Headlands. “Undercurrent” records seismic activity in nearby Sausilito. Robin reifies this obscure data by translating it (in her time at Headlands) on a full sized loom, a task which, as I can attest from first hand experience, when performed within the unfinished walls of the Affiliate studios there, feels like it’s own natural phenomenon. 

Robin Johnston's textile pieces: (left), and Brian Carraway's painting (right).  

Jenny Salomon finds a way to incorporate physical surfaces from our surroundings directly in her work with her hybrid of rubbing and drawing. Jenny first transports her drawing to the site of her interest: a grave stone, a stucco wall or filigreed fence, and returns to the studio to further work the image in traditional drawing techniques. In so doing, Solomon has found a way to literally bring the world into her studio, or expand her studio to include it.

Brian Caraway (left) and Jenny Salomon (right)

Brian Caraway, in a work created especially for this exhibition, takes the hidden aspects of his primary medium, painting as subject by reworking a “failed” painting into an exploded view of its support. Brian generously invites the viewer into his process and behind the sacred flat plain of modernist painting, a tradition to which he surely feels a part.

Michael Hall uses the accouterment of film-based photography and specifically the snapshot, a physical artifact that has been ushered out by the digital as subject for his oil paintings. Infused with nostalgia for those of us of a certain age, the envelopes formerly used to contain snap shots recall the built in waiting period and sense of expectancy between the shutter click and a visit to the photo-mat, a period of time obliterated by the digital photograph.    

Michael Hall's paintings.

Keith Southern addresses the revolution in photography brought about by the ubiquitous camera phone. This technology has literally made everyone a photographer, even if the images generated never graduate from binary to physical form. Keith uses this truly ephemeral medium to catch fleeting moments of light in extremely banal settings, centering the object of his interest with a minimal amount of intentional framing. In so doing he embraces the unschooled nature of cell phone photography and short-circuits the preciousness of the photographic print. 

In "The events of the past few hours." Christine M. Peterson uses the carousel slide projector to investigate her interest in “visualizing the peripheral components of what we understand as image.”  with the use of subtly manipulated slides and manipulation of this machine’s “base” functionality. The carousel projector itself is a fraught object, either as a repository of nostalgia as Don Draper would have it, or as the bane of art lecturers, art history students and bored dinner guests of the last few generations. By removing image and focussing instead on subtle shifts in the blank image and artifacts of the carousel’s now arcane technology, Christine questions assumptions about the static nature of memory and reminds us of the fleeting nature of technologies we may presently take for granted.

Christine M. Peterson's "The events of the past few hours."

Chris Thorson creates a simulacrum of a space that can be found adjacent to any workplace, AA meeting, art studio or bar; the ad hoc smokers’ lounge. As Chris depicts it, this space is trash strewn and gritty, a physical rebuke to its user, that 21^st century social outlier, the smoker. A closer look will reveal that the materials used in Chris’s installation are hand crafted from fine art materials and hand-woven silk. While on one level she is making a sow’s ear from a silk purse, Chris is also acknowledging that one person’s abjection is another person’s respite.

Sarah Newton and Naomi Vanderkindren examining Chris Thorson's work

The Show is up until 3/24, go to the Root Division website for more info.
http://www.rootdivision.org/031012.html
 http://www.rootdivision.org

Window Treat

Installation of a new multi- layered woven paper piece at 24th and Treat Streets in San Francisco.

Through the end of April.