Reception Saturday, October 6th 6~9pm Artist talk Thursday, November 1st 6~8pm
The Great Highway Gallery is excited to present Mission Dirt Project, installation, ceramics and drawings by Ilana Crispi.
About the Project I am digging the dirt under my apartment in the Mission, turning it into ceramics, searching for deposits of gold and using it to grow tea to share with my neighbors. I am looking at the soil itself as a way to examine our local history, geology, and story of place.
Mission Creek – now buried – has deposited soil with a high clay content under my home. I investigate landscape – how we imagine and perceive our environment, and the physical material of place. What happens on the surface is constantly changing. Many different peoples have created homes here – the Ohlone and then missionaries and immigrants and now tech workers. My apartment has been here since before the 1906 earthquake. The dirt under the apartment hasn’t changed. To reach it I travel into what looks like an old mine shaft below the sidewalk. This is where the fuse boxes are. I have navigated this space with pick ax and shovel and mined the soil.
This is a kind of guerrilla land grab and share – I am looking at the value of the dirt itself and sharing what I find. The real estate here is some of the most expensive anywhere. I have processed the soil to create fired ceramics and grow native plants. I am testing the land – firing it, mixing it and questioning its meaning and ownership.
The Mission Dirt Project is supported by an Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.
About the Artist Ilana Crispi is a San Francisco based artist with an interdisciplinary practice. She mixes traditional ceramic arts with local histories and geologies, food, dirt, and junk materials. Her site-specific installations invite engagement and investigate ideas of perception and the ways in which we experience our environments. She has been the resident artist at the Rochester Folk Art Guild, Montalvo Arts Center, the de Young Museum, and Jiwar and Can Serrat in Spain. Her work has been shown at museums, galleries, and alternative sites nationally and internationally in Spain, Mexico and China. She has an MFA from Mills College and BA from Brown University. Ilana is an Assistant Professor of Art at San Francisco State University.
August 30th – September 29th
Thursday, August 30th, 6pm to 10pm Artist Talk: Saturday, September 8, 7pm
Pictured Mel Prest, David Rhodes, Nancy White
The Great Highway is excited for our next group exhibition of abstract painters that share reductive art practices.
The RNOP San Francisco event co-curated by San Francisco artist Jessica Snow and Dr Billy Gruner from West PI in Australia marks the entry point of a reknowned Australian/European program now joining with American artists. RNOP, or the Reductive Non Objective Project began one year ago, is now sponsoring its 10th international show. This event is an unmediated cultural engagement between select Bay Area, New York, Australia, and European artists. The stylistic language presented within specific locales is of tremendous interest to an international community of like-minded artists, collectors, curators, and all those who love abstract painting. RNOP brings artists together in various locations, connecting local coteries of contemporary reductive artists to an international circle. All the RNOP exhibitions are participating events in next year’s International Biennale of Non Objective Art in Grenoble, France.
Local artists Connie Goldman, Steuart Pittman, Mel Prest, Jessica Snow and Nancy White are participating in RNOP SF, as well as East Coast artists David Rhodes, Suzan Shutan, Cary Smith and Li Trincere. From Australia, Billy Gruner, Sarah Keighery and Kyle Jenkins, and from the Netherlands, Iemke van Dijk and Guido Winkler. Held at The Great Highway Gallery in San Francisco, the RNOP program looks at how and why artists connect through social media and exhibitions, engaging in a lively dialogue about art, and specifically creating a discourse around reductive non-objective painting. After San Francisco, a second event will be held in Cincinnati.
The Great Highway Gallery is excited to present Sunset Elementals, window installation and mixed media collage works by Dave Gardner and Tessa Hope Hasty.
Sunset Elements: to express essential characteristics of life and place. Distillations of both the universal and particular. Hand drawn, hand painted, and silkscreened. Cut up and put together.
Two artists from Santa Cruz blending designs, sharing views and interpretations of our surroundings from on site seeing, sketching, and scribbling while traveling through and being in the City and along the coast. Recognizing and acknowledging wild natural elements which surround and flow through the urban environment, what we consider real worlds amidst the human built world.
Two heads and two hearts, two sets of eyes and ideas expand the visions and possibilities. The whole feels greater than the sum of the parts. The urban world has its own magic. Especially San Fransisco! This City, surrounded by water from the bay through the Gate to the deep sea. The hills and vistas and parks and trees and neighborhoods and gardens and rich human culture and history. The dynamic weather and micro climates. Magic! Even more so when we see and feel the elements within and all around us which sustain this City and all life. Sun, soil, water, air, atmospherics, color, texture, beauty, always in endless transformation.
About the Artists
Tessa Hope Hasty Ocean and mountain woman, named at Hetch Hetchy, source of San Fransisco’s drinking water. Painter, wood worker, screen printer. Co-founder of and designer at Feral Lux, a way of life gone apparel enterprise. Feral Lux celebrates the spectrum of potential riches in any given moment. Tessa creatively flies under the radar in Bonny Doon, California.
Dave Gardner Artist, writer, surf fiend, skateboarder, crude musician. Inspired early by immersion in sea, sand, and sky, as well as soil and concrete. On a mission to translate much wild life into human language on scales sliding from post cards to the sides of buildings. Author and illustrator of The Adventures of the Salty Little Sliders. As interested in growing and eating food as anything else.
The Great Highway is a fine art gallery and working studio featuring contemporary works in all mediums. The gallery has a deep appreciation for images and ideas that explore where lands meet water.
Dave Gardner & Tessa Hope Hasty