Zina al-ShukriJillian Clark C. Wright DanielMik gaSpayalexiS D. grantMaggie haaSnathan haenleinnoah krell kiJa luCaSSaMual MellSarah thibaultViCtoria Wagner

introDuCtionS 2011

Introductions 2011September 8th -24th at root Division

For almost thirty years (1977-2004), the San Francisco Art Dealers Association (SFADA), sponsored a summer program called Introductions, in which many of the commercial galleries in downtown San Francisco would simultaneously showcase emerging artists of promise. For a combination of reasons, SFADA discontinued this program, and one of the most vital opportunities for emerging artists to gain exposure was no longer available.

The Introductions exhibition at Root Division was conceived in 2007 as a response that could help fill this void by supporting Bay Area emerging artists and providing them with one of the necessary but hard to find stepping stones to larger recognition and success. Acting as a link between the production & presentation of visual art, Root Division is in the unique position to provide such support. Both as a hub for hundreds of emerging artists via its Studios & Exhibitions Programs, and as a connector to the larger art community, our goal is to offer an entry point for artists as they develop their voices for greater participation in the important conversations of our time.

In its fifth year, the goal of Introductions remains the same– to showcase one dozen of the Bay Area’s most promising emerging artists, offering them exposure to the art community and beyond. This year we are thrilled to produce a catalog as a way to document and further contextualize the exhibition. Included in these pages you will find an essay by artist, educator, and writer, Jeremiah Barber, which presents the relevancy the artwork by these talented local artists has to the larger national discourse. Root Division is proud to debut this group of artists and foster their contribution to an ongoing exchange of ideas.

Michelle Mansour Executive Director

Jurors René de Guzman Senior Curator of Art, Oakland Museum of CaliforniaLinda Geary Artist; Professor of Painting & Graduate Fine Arts, CCAAndres Guerrero Owner, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco

C. Wright Daniel Untitled (forms degrade1), 2011

on the Surface of things: Introductions 2011 by Jeremiah barber

Work, day-in, day-out. Patience, and maybe more patience. Everything has its façade. Love is so easily lost. Don’t kiss-and-tell.

The themes of the summer are on the tips of our tongues, and they bounce around Introductions 2011, Root Division’s annual exhibition featuring a dozen emerging Bay Area artists. Juried by artist and educator Linda Geary, gallerist Andres Guerrero, and curator René de Guzman, the exhibition offers candid reflections of our zeitgeist, an abstract delivered by mappers, builders, painters, and thinkers. The diverse works in “Introductions 2011” carry on a dialogue of the neighborhood, of the political sphere, of the recession and of each other: that is to say, these works speak not only in solo, but to each other.

Zina al-Shukri Thaumaturgical Rocks, 2011

alexis grant brings the entropy that surrounds Root Division’s active neighborhood into her loosely rendered canvases in paintings of buildings that are a stone’s throw away. A rim shop shares real estate with a Mission-style chapel, and the Virgin Guadalupe with a “fixie” on a bike stand. Grant’s under-painted layers push through to the top , so that you can see the vinyl siding of an apartment through a palm tree and the palm tree through a fence.

Everything is flat, folded on the edges as though the buildings were made of paper. Samuel Mell’s paintings similarly function like maps. His series of garage doors oscillate between geometric abstraction and something recognizable, yet often ignored. With two or four colors in each composition, and a simple array of squares, rectangles, and stripes, Mell draws attention to the pedestrian creativity found in house decor.

Samuel MellGarage Doors, 2011Oil on 24 canvases41 x 75 in(8 x 10 in each)

alexis grantLeft Mission Police Station, 2011Oil on canvas36 x 60 inAbove Untitled, 2011Oil on canvas18.5 x 24 inI See in Color, 2011Oil on canvas22 x 36 in

Two large-scale drawing installations in the exhibition are indicative of the relationship Bay Area artists are finding between concept and form. Sarah thibault has sketched the facade of a grand chateau’s mantle into the central gallery wall using charcoal and graphite in her work There’s just nothing like French light (sun, moon, stars). A separate drawing on paper of a mirror hangs deceptively in the center. Two candlesticks protrude from the wall, twisted from aluminum foil and spray-painted copper. The mirror has the

same surface pattern as the plastered wall. The wealth referenced within is paper-thin.

Industrial chalk lines provide the only marks that make up Jillian Clark’s massive wall drawing that spans across a corner, filling half a room. The chalk lines run in perfect perpendicular angles with only a handful of light, joyful lines as anomalies that counteract the grid. The dust that fell from a thousand snapped lines during the making of East to West has been left on the floor; it fades from

Sarah thibaultThere’s just nothing like French light (sun, moon, stars), 2011Installation, mixed media144 x 72 in

Jillian ClarkEast to West, 2011Construction grade chalk & snapline tool150 x 340 in (approx.)

a stale purple to pastel blue and back to purple again on the far side. These installations will soon be cleaned and painted over, and their reference to histories within the walls they have inhabited will be their only trace.

Did more labor go into nathan haenlein’s drawings of car engines or into the engines themselves? At any distance, the answer is not clear as his photorealist drawings of car parts, factory assembly lines and gamblers are exquisitely rendered; varying perspectives reveal not the clunk of

a million pencil strokes but different degrees of the pressure of his line, layered like a solarized photograph. I suspect that for each year we grow further from dependence on fossil fuel and for each year that gets dragged into this recession, a year’s worth of meaning gets added to these drawings.

Patience. And waiting. A two-way mirror conceals Mik gaspay’s video of a giant spinning wheel in the installation Restart. Green, red purple and blue, we are familiar with these colors, moving in this sequence: Apple’s dreaded icon of waiting.

Mik gaspayRestart, 2011Framed two-way mirror, LCD monitor, video looped 1.06.6 minute24 x 24 in

nathan haenleinAbove Volt, 2009Graphite on paper14 x 11 in Left Toledo Trannie, 2009Graphite on paper21 x 30 in

Victoria WagnerRight Endless Stack, 2011Oil and wax on canvas over panel5 Pieces (6 x 6 in each)Below Geometry of the endless summer, 2011Spray paint and oil on Masonite4 pieces (15 x 15 in each)

Victoria Wagner’s abstractions also play patiently and intimately within a clear restraint. Tight interlocking colored triangles and squares are surrounded with thick, waxen black paint in softly lit compositions. They are pragmatic and intuitive. A stack of five paintings thick as bricks come closest to an outside reference, suggesting Sci-Fi regalia or futurist flags. Maggie haas’ What I Have and What I Do Not Want is a minimalist grid of cinderblock and

redwood. Haas subdivides the cinderblock squares and paints pastel color on the opposing surfaces of brick. In a separate series of small watercolors, Haas complements the visual codes of her sculptures and maquettes. Haas and Wagner work with surfaces that appear to be flat, yet find depth in their delicately textured constructions.

Amidst a dozen artists, only one offers the familiar opportunity to gaze into

Maggie haasWhat I Have and What I Do Not Want, 2011Redwood, encaustic, cement, graphite and ink45 x 72 in

Zina al-ShukriAbove left Colored People; The Sweet Heart Never Shuts up, 2011Gouache, charcoal and metallic pigments on paper30 x 20 inAbove right Colored People; Get the Fuckin’ Facts!, 2011Gouache, charcoal and metallic pigments on paper 30 x 20 inRight: installation shot

another’s eyes. Zina al-Shukri presents a series of portraits painted on tinted paper that brim with the vivid moment of silent communication. These are the kinds of paintings that fall into pure, abstract pleasure when seen from two inches away—in fact, hide an eye or a mouth from a portrait and it could easily become a waterfall or a collapsed quilt. The Iraqi-born Al-Shukri calls her portraits “collaborations” with her sitter, the kind of innovative approach that makes it possible for such an old form to feel so refreshingly new.

Every medium is represented here, but none seems too isolated to be influenced by any other. noah krell describes his video as a “performative-cinematic

hybrid”. To that pair I would add classical portraiture, because his video diptych The Oak Grove / Study for “Forty Two Years of Miscommunication and Joy” is as much a still examination of its subjects as a choreographed performance in time. Each screen shows a couple hugging: on the left a well-dressed young couple fight to remain together and apart in an oak grove, while on the right a comfortable though not fully dressed couple embrace each other in a well lived-in kitchen. When the elder couple kiss, neither can decide who should stop kissing first.

Loss is evident throughout the exhibition, and brought to the forefront in kija lucas’s photographs of unoccupied beds and pillows stripped of their cases.

noah krellThe Oak Grove / Study for “Forty Two Years of Miscommunication and Joy”, 20112 Channel HD video installationDimensions Variable

Framed by matte black, the white pillows have slow-spreading stains and glow with the green of mildew. The bedspread photographs are dramatically lit, beset with violent scratches, and focus on the twist of a bed sheet coiled like a tight fist. The emotion is pushed outside the frame, where it feels more ominous.

C. Wright Daniel intentionally wrinkled his cameraless prints. Working in silver gelatin, Daniel’s six print series untitled (forms degrade 1) is a mirror of a positive of a wrinkled page and its negative, alternately repeated in a smaller scale and with a softer degree of detail. Each print is then discreetly and intentionally bent along the same fold lines as in

the photograph. In this way Daniel creates a trompe l’oeil only to force it back into reality.

More than any other thread, the artists of Introductions 2011 examine tricks of the eye. Maybe it’s the fluctuating dollar. Maybe it’s the nature of relationships, or our hope to breathe life into something flat and fragile. Maybe it’s the layered juxtaposition of tradition and modernity within our neighborhoods. In any case, we want to know about the surface of things. We want to know our neighbors and we want to know what’s in our walls. We want our reality to be real and our falsehoods to be flimsy; only then can we enjoy the ride.

kija lucasRight: Unmade Bed No. 10, 2011Archival pigment print30 x 40 inBelow: Pillow No. 6, 2011Archival pigment print23 x 30 in

C. Wright Daniel Untitled (forms degrade1), 2011Silver gelatin2-20”x 24” 2 -16” x 20” 2-11”x14”

Exhibition Photography Chris Fraser. Catalog Design Carolina otero

root Division 3175 17th Street at South Van ness, SF t. 415 863 7668 www.rootdivision.org