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.
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 Gallery is happy to present Zoloft in the Fog, installation, paintings, ceramics and print editions by Leo Bersamina.
About the Artist
Leo Bersamina was born in San Francisco, California and grew up surfing and fishing on the coast, just south of the city. Early on, Bersamina began studying art and design in Santa Cruz, California. Later he attended San Francisco State University to finish his BA with an emphasis in Studio Art. He received an MFA in Painting at Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut.
Upon graduation from Yale, Bersamina lived in New York City until he returned to California to teach Studio Art at UC Berkeley. Along with his studio practice, Bersamina has also taught Studio Art at Yale, Stanford, Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, Santa Rosa Junior College, and Diablo Valley College (where he currently is a tenured instructor). Bersamina continues to exhibit nationally and internationally, and currently resides just north of San Francisco. Leo is showing courtesy of Anglim Gilbert Gallery.
Artist Statement
For this show I have collaborated with ceramicist Karl McDade to create sculptural ceramic works that are made to feel good in your hands, invite you to touch and hold, and to use in your life. The work is supposed to put a smile on your face and to show the process of its creation. It is work that samples the Northern California landscape and lifestyle, while having roots in modernist forms and pattern.
Possible Side Effects
Happiness, smiling, mindfulness, kindess, civility, good nights sleep, thoughts of helping others, overall relaxed mood or a decrease in reading news.
About the Gallery
The Great Highway is a fine art gallery located in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset district. The gallery was founded by John Lindsey, a long time resident of the city with a deep appreciation for images and ideas that explore the intersection of land and water in contemporary work. The Great Highway Gallery’s mission is to seek, analyze, support, and promote the work of a diverse group of artists who seek sincere authenticity, challenge conventional thinking, amuse us, and push the boundaries of today’s creative media. To learn more about the gallery, visit www.thegreathighway.com.
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
