Fiamma Montezemolo
Border Alchemies
March 17 – April 4, 2012
Opening reception, Saturday,  March 17. 8pm-11pm

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Queen’s Nails Projects presents Border Alchemies, Fiamma Montezemolo’s first solo exhibition in San Francisco.  Working on various media (video, light boxes, objects and sound), Montezemolo is presenting Border Alchemies as one large-scale installation.  Using as a departure point the principles of alchemy, the installation seeks to deconstruct racialized iconographies of national identity and exclusion—such as the border fence between the United States and Mexico and traditional territorial world and space mapping—and transforms them into new symbolic compounds that contradict the opposition between national and foreign, self and other. Her artistic practice is informed by an inter-disciplinary and cross-genre approach, with an acute focus on cross-cultural referents.  The trans-disciplinary aspects of Montezemolo’s work are better understood if we take into account her academic background in anthropology and ethnography.  Still working with the same theoretical and methodological models, her art practice never feels academic. Through the language of post-minimalism her work is a reflection on borderlands and border zones, both on specific geopolitical levels, as well as in more introspective and experiential ones.

Born in Rome, Fiamma Montezemolo is both a Cultural Anthropologist (Ph.D, University Orientale of Naples) and a visual artist (MFA, SFAI). She is currently teaching at UC Berkeley  (Art Practice) and California College of the Arts (Critical Studies). She is the co-author of “Here is Tijuana” (Blackdog Publishing 2006) with Rene’ Peralta and Heriberto Yepez. She is co-editing with Josh Kun the book “Tijuana dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border” for Duke Press University (2012). As an established scholar in border and urban studies, she has patiently designed rigorous and long-term ethnographic-artistic interventions at the Tijuana-San Diego border where she has also resided and taught for many years.  Currently she is based in San Francisco, CA.

Guy Overfelt & Andrew McClintock
Assed Out and the Mini Dramas

February 10th – March 10th, 2012
Opening Reception February 10th, 6-9pm
Pool tournaments and music every Friday and Saturday

Queen’s Nails Projects
3191 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

A sculptural installation from Guy Overfelt and Andrew McClintock that transforms Queen’s Nails into an experimental pool hall with live music curated by Tyson Vogel of Two Gallants and a special appearance by Bay Area legendary conceptual artist Paul Kos staging his 1972 performance “Pool Hustle”

“This project, like much conceptual art…what you describe is not the sort of collaborative project that can be intelligently written about, even briefly, without seeing…”

-Paul Karlstrom, Former West Coast Regional Director of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art

Music Program for Fridays and Saturdays:

Feb 10th: DJ Softserve and DJ Avan

Feb 17th: Death Cheetah

Feb 18th: David and Joanna, Desert Relay, Fever Dream

Feb 25th: Asada Messfah (CD Release Party as well)

March 2nd: Waters

March 3rd: Future Twin

March 9th and 10th: TBA as of now

Sponsored in part by Pabst Blue Ribbon and Blue Angel Vodka

Guy Overfelt’s work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums including the Oakland Museum of California; Guangzhou Triennial, China; St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada; The Havana Biennial, Cuba; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, and White Columns, New York City. His work has been acquired by the Berkeley Museum Collection and the JPMorgan Chase Collection, as well as private collections. His work has been reviewed and featured in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, The New York Times, Art Net, Art Papers, Index Magazine, Paper Magazine, Time Out, Kobe Japan, Time Out, New York, Boing Boing, SF Guardian, Surface Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as other publications and catalogs. His work was featured in the documentary film ‘Burning Rubber’ which recently aired on Bravo. He received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 1994 and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1996. He lives and works in San Francisco and Bolinas, California.

Andrew McClintock is the co founder, director, and curator of Ever Gold Gallery which opened in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco in January 2009 which has gained international recognition in publications like the New York Times and Art Forum. In 2010 McClintock also co founded the San Francisco Arts Quarterly (SFAQ) where he now servers as Publisher and Managing Editor. SFAQ has become the Bay Area main arts magazine in a short two-year span and is distributed on a national level. McClintock received a BFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 but has recently moved away from treating photography as an art form and has expanded into mixed media, video, and performance art. McClintock has also received numerous grants for his work in the art world and more recently graduated from Tom Marioni’s conceptual bar tending school. McClintock is also an independent curator and writer.

http://assedoutandtheminidramas.com

Cheap Trick Part 2: Jonah Susskind and Zefrey Throwell

October 22nd – November 5th, 2011

Opening Reception Saturday October 22nd 8pm-11pm
Gallery Hours are Friday and Saturday 1-6pm or by appointment

Queen’s Nails Projects
3191 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

Queen’s Nails Projects is pleased to present Cheap Trick, an exhibition in two parts of artists that employ methods of illusion, social intervention and the practical joke as subversive art strategies. Often executed using humor, the works in Cheap Trick provoke the viewer to examine hierarchies in contemporary visual culture, examining the associations that come with various mediums as well as art world personas. There are many dichotomies that exist within the exhibition: the art is both ironic and literal, real and fake, deceptive and truthful. The work ushers us into a realm where nothing should be taken at face value and we embrace that the joke is on us.

Cheap Trick Part 2 (October 22nd– November 5th) presents the work of Oakland based Jonah Susskind and New York based Zefrey Throwell.

Jonah Susskind is an Artist probably known best for his paintings, sculptures, and performances that use trickery and irony as a medium. He makes works that recontextualize the art of tromp l’oeil within today’s art world politique. His paintings of plywood and 2 x 4’s sit on the floor like discarded scrap. They oscillate between various degrees of phoniness and effortlessly transgress the fine lines between painting and sculpture. Likewise, his performances cleverly question their own authenticity, blurring the lines between performance and reality, reminding us that these definitions depend greatly on who their audiences are. His projects run a wide gamut of modes, materials and complexities, all of them seeking to proudly overstate their understated realities through a unique language of ironic illusion and quiet foolishness.

Zefrey Throwell is an artist living and working in New York City. Investigating honest communication, in all its varied plumage, is his aim. Working with video, radio, painting and people he is exploring the connecting points and underpinnings of social discourse. He is a member of three collectives: THROWHITE, Red76 and Cameracartell. In addition he co-directs a gallery called Engineer’s Office Gallery in the heart of Rockefeller Center, www.engineersofficegallery.com

Throwell works with Gallery 138 in New York and is a regular contributing member to Art International Radio and was recently included in the 2007 and 2009 Venice Biennale, has had recent performances at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2010), Queens Museum of Art (2010), the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2009), Studio Museum in New York (2009) and projects at Werkstatt der Kulturen in Berlin (2010) and Photo Miami (2009). He has work in the Museum of Modern Art collection as well as the Hall collection.

Cheap Trick Part 1: Claim to Fame

SARA & ANDRÉ pranked JENS HOFFMANN and HOU HANRU and failed with LARRY RINDER and RENNY PRITIKIN

October 1^st – October 15^th, 2011

Opening Reception Saturday October 1st, 8pm-11pm

Queen’s Nails Projects
3191 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

Queen’s Nails Projects is pleased to present Cheap Trick, an exhibition in two parts of artists that employ methods of illusion, social intervention and the practical joke as subversive art strategies. Often executed using humor, the works in Cheap Trick provoke the viewer to examine hierarchies in contemporary visual culture, examining the associations that come with various mediums as well as art world personas. There are many dichotomies that exist within the exhibition: the art is both ironic and literal, real and fake, deceptive and truthful. The work ushers us into a realm where nothing should be taken at face value and we embrace that the joke is on us.

Cheap Trick Part 1 (October 1^st – October 15^th) presents the United States debut of the Lisbon based art collective Claim to Fame (Sara & André).

The first time that Sara & André presented themselves as an artistic duo to a Portuguese audience, they pretended to be celebrities followed by paparazzi everywhere they went. This happened in 2005 in the context of a young artist award. Since then, they have been questioning the position of the artist, the processes of legitimacy and achievement of fame in the contemporary art world, as well as the concepts of authorship and collaboration.

For their debut in the United States they decided to take another risky short cut and become acquainted with important local curators by pranking them. Usually there exists a certain degree of intimacy between the pranksters and those who get pranked (for instance, coworkers, friends or family). Sara & André forged that intimacy, therefore adding a subversive subtext to their already insolent acts. A prank is not necessarily meant to be an act of revenge or gratuitous vandalism. It can also be an expression of recognition or even a call for attention. Although not regarded as poetic or artistic acts, pranks constitute an art form and genre in itself.

Sara & André were born in 1980 and 1979, in Lisbon, where they live and work. They studied, respectively, Scene Design at the School of Theatre and Cinema in Lisbon, and Visual Arts at the School of Art and Design, Caldas da Rainha. They have exhibited regularly since the mid-2000s. The following solo shows are of special note: “Sara & André” (PÊSSEGOpráSEMANA, Porto, 2007), ”Sara & André Foundation” (Rosalux, Berlin, Germany, 2007), “Sara & André” (3+1 Contemporary Art, Lisbon, 2008), “Claim to Fame” (PLMJ Foundation, Lisbon, 2010), “Delicious” (3+1 Contemporary Art, Lisbon, 2010) and “Sara & André” (Inflight, Hobart, Australia, 2010). They have also created projects for the Project Room of Lisbon‘s fair “Arte Lisboa” (2008) and for Madrid’s art fair “Just Mad”, Madrid, Spain, (2010), as well as for alternative exhibition spaces such as SmallBox28 and Espaço3 in Lisbon. They participated in the third edition of the event “Anteciparte” (Páteo da Galé, Lisbon, 2006) and in several group shows, of which the following stand out: ”Trabalhar Cansa” (Arte Contempo, Lisbon, 2007), “The Critic’s Choice” (Plataforma Revolver, Lisbon, 2009), “The Beauty of the Mistake” (Lx Factory, Lisbon, 2009), “Cinematic” (Threshold Art Space, Perth, Scotland, 2009), “A Museum is to Art, what a great Translator is to a Writer” (Baginski Gallery, Lisbon, 2010), “The Philosophy of Money “(Museu da Cidade, Lisbon, 2010) and “Not Yet” (Barber Shop, Lisbon, 2011).

SF Tropical

August 13- September 3, 2011(Part 2)

Opening Reception, Saturday August 13, 8-11pm//Free and open to the public

Special Music Performance:

Juan Luna-Avin and Josh Pieper on Opening Reception, Sat Aug 13

ChuCha Santamaría y Usted on Closing Reception, Sat Sep 3

As fog hovers over the bay, we lament the loss of summer. Naturally, we physiologically expect warm sunny days, and why not? A tropical San Francisco summer might be nice. By default the tropics are a construction, both by geography and by culture, equally defined by authentic characteristics as well by fantasy, commerce and desire. The tropical, as adjective, sets itself to the constant challenge of balancing its multiple realities and the expectations placed upon its self. Like many other contradictions it faces the very fact that in every cliché there is always some truth close to the stereotype.

The exhibition SF Tropical attempts to explore these realities and work as a hub while playing off stereotypes that will produce two group exhibitions and a series of one-off events during the summer in San Francisco at Queens Nails Projects.

SF Tropical Pt 2:

Facundo Argañaraz, Sofía Cordoba, George Kuchar, Eamon Ore-Giron (DJ Lengua),

Tim Sullivan and Chris Corrente, Jason Mena, Haden Nicholl and Jenifer K Wofford

About the Work:

Facundo Argañaraz focuses on works on paper and paintings including, Zodiac and Grid Room that utilize anachronistic elements and discarded images not for their nostalgic value but as remains of 20th century utopias on the act of making. Mostly comprised of found photographs, photocopies, and pages from vintage books depicting modern designs and/or environments, Argañaraz’s imagery as a mark-making tool, already packed and charged with pictorial formal elements. The core forms serve only to organize visual fields into dynamic, constructed compositions that hold a structural relation to the surface they organize. Sofía Córdova most recent project Baby, Remember My Name, Córdova has created a series of music videos to accompany a concept album made under the pseudonym ChuCha Santamaría y Usted. These works draw from the conventions and pictorial language of mainstream music videos, while creating a narrative surrounding specific issues of the Caribbean diaspora and identity politics. ChuCha Santamaría y Usted have created a site-specific installation based on the recording of their new vinyl record.

Eamon Ore-Giron (DJ Lengua) presents an listening station that focuses on his amazing new vinyl record release, Cruzando that combines infectious mix of cumbia, electronic and break beats that explodes boundaries between culture and music. George Kuchar premiers his new Weather Diaries video, in which Kuchar observes weather and food from dreary motel rooms in Oklahoma, revealing alienation and loneliness in the rural American landscape that also resonates with unexpected poetry.

What is Art? LIVE! Is San Francisco’s premiere art-themed television program hosted by Tim Sullivan and Chris Corrente featuring a regular gang of random misfits. For SF Tropical, The What is Art? LIVE! Gang invites you to join them on their summer vacation island tour! This episode will feature live guests, as well as, foreign correspondents covering the global art scene including: Jenalee Harmon covering culture night in Reykjavík, Iceland, Laura Kim interviewing resident artists at the National museum of contemporary art in Seoul. Jason Mena’s Looking Up (2008) took place over the Bacardi Artisan Fair during the peak hour of the event when a plane displaying a banner with the message Todo es mentira (It’s all lies) flew over the Bacardi Rum distillery located in Cataño, Puerto Rico. The flight lasted approximately 30 minutes over a crowd surpassing 17,000 people. The outcome of the project is a series of postcards that will also function as a limited edition take away during the run of the exhibition. Haden Nicholl is presenting a series of drawings and paintings that juxtaposes elements of beauty and danger in nature. The tropical sunset is chosen for it’s resplendent color and sublime magnificence, while the element of peril is present in the form of a variety of insect vectors that are the causes of an array of painful and deadly tropical diseases. Jenifer Wofford is showcasing a set of beautiful drawings and paintings based on the tropical fruit, Durian famous for “smells like shit, but tastes like heaven” bad reputation. The green fruit-like geometric forms of stylized durians (Southeast Asian fruits known for their spiky exterior, fleshy interior, and perversely pungent aroma). Function as a sort of vas hermeticum: a sealed form suggesting an overseas contract worker’s tropical roots, his/her conspicuity in an institutionalized, homogenized environment, a vessel for containment and transference, and a sort of ominous self-protection.

About the Artists:

Facundo Argañaraz was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied illustration and painting from a very young age and later earned a degree in Law and Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. After traveling worldwide for more than two and a half years without a pause, he moved to California to pursue a career as a painter and visual artist. He has exhibited nationally and internationally including recent exhibitions at Queen’s Nails Projects, San Francisco; Untitled Pop Up Gallery, Buenos Aires; David Cunningham Projects, San Francisco; The LAB, San Francisco; MCCLA, San Francisco.

Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico, Sofía Córdova received her BFA from St. John’s University in Queens, NY in 2006, and her MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2010. She also completed the one-year certificate program at the International Center for Photography in New York in 2006. Currently, Córdova teaches at the California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in California and New York.

George Kuchar is one of the legends of independent filmmaking. Beginning as a teenager in the 1950s with his twin brother Mike, Kuchar directed movies which upended Hollywood melodramas into small-scale epics, noted for their creative low-budget effects, over-the-top plots, eye-popping performances by their cast of friends, and titles like Sins of the Fleshapoids, Color Me Shameless and Lust for Ecstasy. Kuchar’s classic film Hold Me While I’m Naked is beloved by several generations of fans and filmmakers, and was voted one of the 100 best films of the 20th century by the critics of the Village Voice. In the mid-1980s, Kuchar turned to video making, and created what is possibly the largest single collection (160) of video diaries. This ongoing chronicle of the artist’s life is called “unique in film history” by the scholar Gene Youngblood. In Kuchar’s video universe, nothing is safe from the camera expanding his oeuvre to exploiting his morbid interests and notorious insecurities with his token razor-sharp sense of humor in classics like The Mongreloid and The Weather Diaries.

Eamon Ore-Giron is an artist and musician residing in Los Angeles. His artwork uses a range of media including paintings, video, sculpture, and printed media to make conceptual projects that address possible ways that sub-cultural phenomenon and music morphs and adapts as it moves between languages, cultures, and political systems. Ore-Giron is also one of the original colleagues of the so-called Mission School in San Francisco during the mid-1990′s and is also the founding member of the experimental audio-performance group OJO. His music under the moniker DJ Lengua has gained global praise and success fusing Cumbia with electronic and abstract beats with two vinyl LP’s released on Unicornio Records.His artwork, music and performances have been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Deitch Projects, New York, UCLA Hammer Museum, Museo Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, Peres Projects, Los Angeles, Queens Nails Annex, San Francisco, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, Los Angeles County Art Museum, Los Angeles, and Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, San Francisco.

Jason Mena was born in New York City and raised in Puerto Rico. His work entails a multi-faceted approach to contemporaneity that, drawn from conceptualism and minimalism, reveals the complexities and contradictions of art and society, leading to a profound criticism of the constant simulation of culture, the speed of urbanization and the untimely decay of our social and political climate. He has a B.A. from Escuela de Artes Plasticas de San Juan (Puerto Rico). He had shown his work in Puerto Rico, Spain, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Mexico, among other places.

Haden Nicholl is a Colorado born, San Francisco based artist. He has a B.A. in psychology with an anthropology minor, as well as a B.F.A. from the University of Denver. He also earned an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work conceptually deals with psycho/social interactions, coping mechanisms and the relationship between sociology and nature. His art practice draws a great deal of inspiration from firsthand experience working as a counselor in a psychiatric facility for adolescents at San Francisco General Hospital.

What is Art? LIVE! Tim Sullivan is a multimedia artist working in video, photography, performance and installation. Sullivan has spent the last five years completing a series of works exploring the myths and stereotypes of California as informed by television, film, music and literature. He has had solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Singapore, Ireland and Poland as well as being featured in numerous group exhibitions including the 2006 California Biennial. Chris Corrente is an interdisciplinary artist working across the mediums of video, performance, staged photography, and music. A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute new genre’s program, his work runs the gamut of human emotions and experiences, ranging from aggressively dark and psychologically challenging, to absurdist and piss-laugh funny.

Jenifer K Wofford is a Filipina-American artist and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, and Malaysia. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and her MFA from UC Berkeley. Her work has been exhibited in the Bay Area at the Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, Richmond Art Center, and Kearny Street Workshop, nationally at New Image Art (Los Angeles), Nora Eccles Harrison Museum (Salt Lake City), thirtynine hotel (Honolulu), and internationally at Future Prospects (Philippines), Galerie Blanche (France), and Osage Gallery Kwun Tong (Hong Kong).

SF Tropical

July 16- August 6, 2011 (Part 1)

Opening Reception July 16, 9pm-12am//Free and open to the public

As fog hovers over the bay, we lament the loss of summer. Naturally, we physiologically expect warm sunny days, and why not? A tropical San Francisco summer might be nice. By default the tropics are a construction, both by geography and by culture, equally defined by authentic characteristics as well by fantasy, commerce and desire. The tropical, as adjective, sets itself to the constant challenge of balancing its multiple realities and the expectations placed upon its self. Like many other contradictions it faces the very fact that in every cliché there is always some truth close to the stereotype.

The exhibition SF Tropical attempts to explore these realities and work as a hub while playing off stereotypes that will produce two group exhibitions and a series of one-off events during the summer in San Francisco at Queens Nails Projects.

SF Tropical Pt 1 videos:

Miguel Calderón, Sofía Cordoba, Mads Lynnerup, George Kuchar, and Carlos Ruiz-Valarino.

Special Music Performance:

DJ Lengua a.k.a. Eamon Ore-Giron and Sonido Franko

About the Videos:

Miguel Calderon’s Best Seller offers a reflection on the tropical paradise of Acapulco today, a product of close observation and conducted carefully, joined by images of tourists basking of covers of some of the books “best sellers” and fragments audio-books that addresses issues of related to tourism and class. Sofía Córdova most recent project Baby, Remember My Name, Córdova has created a series of music videos to accompany a concept album made under the pseudonym ChuCha Santamaría y Usted. These works draw from the conventions and pictorial language of mainstream music videos, while creating a narrative surrounding specific issues of the Caribbean diaspora and identity politics. ChuCha Santamaría y Usted is premiering their new video “Fanta”. George Kuchar premiers his new Weather Diaries video, in which Kuchar observes weather and food from dreary motel rooms in Oklahoma, revealing alienation and loneliness in the rural American landscape that also resonates with unexpected poetry. Mads Lynnerup’s artwork consistently responds to politics and everyday life, for Tropical he is screening his cunning video Hat, that was created in Havana as a performative street action that mirrors contemporary Cuban life.Valarino Ruiz-Valarino is one of the most well known conceptual photographers in Puerto Rico his work is influenced by constructed photography approach to image making. His 2010 video Generating Paradise offers an unexpected view of a Puerto Rican landscape, beautifully mixing tropical textures that lead into a hallucinatory static image and transforming the typical island image into a black hole.

About the Artists:

Miguel Calderón is a Mexican artist, filmmaker, and writer, he has worked in paint, photography, video and installations. Within his art practice Calderón attempts to explore contemporary Mexican culture from a globalized perspective and from a point of view that simultaneously underlines the intense dialogue with its canonical predecessors that characterizes it and the international landscape to which it also belongs. His work also been shown at Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum in Mexico City, Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City, the Museum of Natural History in Mexico City, 2004 São Paulo Biennale, Queens Nails Annex, Guggenheim Museum, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, The P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City, Sharjah Biennale, Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, Yokahama Triennial and the 2006 Busan Biennale, and he had a film commissioned for the Freize Art Fair in London and Centre Pompidou in Paris.

George Kuchar is one of the legends of independent filmmaking. Beginning as a teenager in the 1950s with his twin brother Mike, Kuchar directed movies which upended Hollywood melodramas into small-scale epics, noted for their creative low-budget effects, over-the-top plots, eye-popping performances by their cast of friends, and titles like Sins of the Fleshapoids, Color Me Shameless and Lust for Ecstasy. Kuchar’s classic film Hold Me While I’m Naked is beloved by several generations of fans and filmmakers, and was voted one of the 100 best films of the 20th century by the critics of the Village Voice. In the mid-1980s, Kuchar turned to video making, and created what is possibly the largest single collection (160) of video diaries. This ongoing chronicle of the artist’s life is called “unique in film history” by the scholar Gene Youngblood. In Kuchar’s video universe, nothing is safe from the camera expanding his oeuvre to exploiting his morbid interests and notorious insecurities with his token razor-sharp sense of humor in classics like The Mongreloid and The Weather Diaries.

Mads Lynnerup was born in Copenhagen, Denmark (1976) & lives in New York and Copenhagen. 2008 he graduated with an MFA from Columbia University, NY and has shown his work at SFMOMA; The Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; P.S. 1, NY; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. In 2008 he was rewarded a Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, An Eureka Fellowship and Artadia Award (2005). Mads has had residencies at Socrates Sculpture Park and EMPAC, Troy, NY (2009), at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Stanford University, CA (2006). And his work has been reviewed in NY Times, Flash Art, ArtForum, Contemporary and Sculpture Magazine.

Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico, Sofía Córdova received her BFA from St. John’s University in Queens, NY in 2006, and her MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2010. She also completed the one-year certificate program at the International Center for Photography in New York in 2006. Currently, Córdova teaches at the California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in California and New York.

Carlos Ruiz-Valarino was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1967, where he currently resides. He studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Work various media including photography and video. His work has been featured in publications such as Art Nexus, RD Magazine Arts and Art and Auction, among others. Her most recent shows include: The Trienal Poligr·áfica de San Juan, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Juan, PR, 27th International Biennial of Ljubljana, Slovenia, 9th Zemos 98Audio Visual Festival, Seville, Spain and the Biennale for Electronic Art Perth, Australia.

Eamon Ore-Giron is an artist and musician residing in Los Angeles. His artwork uses a range of media including paintings, video, sculpture, and printed media to make conceptual projects that address possible ways that sub-cultural phenomenon and music morphs and adapts as it moves between languages, cultures, and political systems. Ore-Giron is also one of the original colleagues of the so-called Mission School in San Francisco during the mid-1990′s and is also the founding member of the experimental audio-performance group OJO. His music under the moniker DJ Lengua has gained global praise and success fusing Cumbia with electronic and abstract beats with two vinyl LP’s released on Unicornio Records.His artwork, music and performances have been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Deitch Projects, New York, UCLA Hammer Museum, Museo Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, Peres Projects, Los Angeles, Queens Nails Annex, San Francisco, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, Los Angeles County Art Museum, Los Angeles, and Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, San Francisco.

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Open Exchange: Facundo Argañaraz and André Eamiello

June 18 – July 1, 2011

Open Studios
June 18 and 25, 1 – 6pm
Closing Reception July 1, 8 – 11pm

Queens Nails Projects
3191 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

For the month of June, Bay Area artists Facundo Argañaraz and André Eamiello transform Queens Nails Projects into an evolving studio-style environment. During their residence, both artists will utilize the gallery as workspace and conduct a series of open studios in which audiences are invited to participate on artworks that will be displayed at the exhibition’s closing reception. The project aims to break traditional boundaries between studio and exhibition practice while allowing direct access to the artist’s investigations.

Front Room:

André Eamiello

Fantasy Camp

André Eamiello works on Fantasy Camp, an open exchange of ideas

exploring physical anthropology, workshops based in thermodynamic variations and personal narrative. Resulting in the creation of spontaneous outcomes that may take the form of performances, sculptures, works on paper or video. The artist is taking appointments for story and film events on Thursdays, arts and science on Fridays and therapy and nature on Sundays. Eamiello attended the San Francisco Art Institute and received a BFA from Painting and New Genres programs in 2006, his work is influenced by landscape architecture, biology and anthropology. His site-specific installations, drawings and sculptures have been exhibited in Bay Area venues such Baer Ridgway, Southern Exposure, Intersection for the Arts and Queens Nails Annex, this is his first solo show.

Upcoming events:

Music by Guitar Wizards of The Future, Sat, June 18, 9pm

Music by Jean Yaste in “Dark Materials” with friends, Fri, June 24, 9pm

Contact the artist directly at eamiello@gmail.com

Follow Fantasy Camp at http://fantasycamp.tumblr.com/

Back Room:

Facundo Argañaraz

Good Taste

Facundo Argañaraz focuses on a new work, titled Good Taste, which will result in a limited edition book in a similar format of a 7″ vinyl record. The evolution of the work will be determined by his own source materials, combined with collaborative pieces made with gallery visitors. Facundo Argañaraz was born in Buenos Aires Argentina in 1975. He studied illustration and painting since a very young age and later earned a degree in Law and Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. After traveling worldwide for more than two and a half years without pause, he moved to California to pursue a career as a painter and visual artist. His work has been shown locally and internationally including a solo show at Queens Nails Project in early 2011.

Contact the artist directly at argafacu@gmail.com

A BOX HAS VOLUME : Mönchengladbach 1968 – 1978

www.aboxhasvolume.wordpress.com

Saturday May 28 2011

4-7pm

Queen’s Nails Projects / queensnailsprojects.com /

3191 Mission St San Francisco, CA 94110

A BOX HAS VOLUME : Mönchengladbach 1968 – 1978 is a one night event taking place at Queen’s Nails Projects in San Francisco where Valencia meets Mission from 4-7pm on Saturday May 28th. The event presents ephemeral material from the City Museum of Mönchengladbach under the Directorship of curator Johannes Cladders. The evening will take the form of an exhibition and a short conversation with curators, Amanda Mayo and Daniella Murphy explaining the unique materials and position in Art History.

Artists included in the exhibition: Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht & Robert Filliou, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Jonas Hafner, Jasper Johns, Jannis Kounellis, Panamarenko, Gerhard Richter, and Lawrence Weiner.

For more information e-mail Amanda Mayo amayo810@cca.edu or visit aboxhasvolume.wordpress.com

The Truth is

Carolina Silva

April 22 – May 21, 2011

Opening Reception April 22, 8-11pm//Free and open to the public

Queens Nails Projects, 3191 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94110

Gallery Hours Friday and Saturday 1-6pm or by appointment.

The Truth is around the corner. Waiting for your arrival, it speculates if you will be able to communicate. Don’t expect it to be unilateral; it is an invitation to take a detour, to explore it as a mystery. If you can’t communicate it’s fine, maybe that’s better. The important thing to keep in mind is that it will require at least two for its manifestation; a witness is always needed.

Queens Nails Projects is pleased to present The Truth is, Carolina Silva’s first solo exhibition in San Francisco. In this exhibition, Silva presents a series of drawings, video pieces and installation work. All together the work brings up the equation of “the Truth” as a relation of binaries and doubles. Silva’s work oscillates between presence and absence, light and darkness, both literally and allegorically. There is no direct hierarchy, what is seen is as important as what is hidden, and both are treated as an imaginary exercise.

Carolina Silva was born in Spain. Currently she lives and works in Seattle, WA. She completed an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005 and participated in the Artist Research Program at the Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan. She has exhibited her work at Lawrimore Project in Seattle, at Galería Travesía Cuatro and la Casa Encendida, both in Madrid, at La Conservera, Murcia, Spain, among many others. This summer she will present her project Air Below Ground at the Sculpture Park in the Seattle Art Museum.

The Man who Plants Scenarios: Zhou Tao

March 18- March 31, 2011

Opening Reception March 18th, 8-11pm//Free and open to the public

Queens Nails Projects, 3191 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94110

Gallery Hours Firday and Saturday 1-6pm or by appointment.

Queens Nails Projects is pleased to announce The Man Who Plants Scenarios, the first West Coast solo exhibition of Zhou Tao, guest curated by Xiaoyu Weng, on view March 18 – April 8, 2011. This project is part of Queens Nails: (QNX) an exchange program with local, national and international art spaces and independent curators and artists. Zhou Tao’s project will be on part of the exhibition, SUPPORT>SYSTEM at Luckman Art Gallery in Los Angeles from April 9-May 21st.

For his first solo show in the West Coast, Zhou will present the world-premier of three single channel videos: South Stone (2010-2011), Time in New York (2009), One Day (2010), and a multiple channel video installation Power Here (2008), along with a series of screenplay photographs based on South Stone. In his work, Zhou brings forward what he calls the “folding scenario” or “zone with folds,” where different spaces collapse into each other. Through often subtle and humorous interactions with people, things, actions and situations, Zhou invites us to experience the multiple trajectories of reality. For him, the use of video is not a deliberate choice of artistic language or medium; instead, the operation of the camera is a way of being that blends itself with everyday life.

For over five months, Zhou situated himself in an underdeveloped village surrounded by the high skyscrapers in the city of Guangzhou to produce his most recent work South Stone (2010-2011). Interweaving footage of the landscape of the village, the residents, the animals and his seemly illogical interventions in each place, South Stone indicates the equally incoherent and absurd nature of social reality. Fluctuating between a documentary and fiction, the film functions as a catalyst to facilitate the construction of alternative connections between time and the emergence of imaginative space.

The relationship between the representations of time and space is explored in the video entitled Time in New York (2009). In this work, Zhou attached himself to a roll of thread to trace his everyday activities in the apartment he stayed in while visiting the city. Throughout time, the thread materialized his every movement between bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom. Through repetitions and rhythms, a social time is produced and reproduced within the physically limited space.

Zhou does not treat space as a means of classification or taxonomy. In other words, they are not a set of locations that can be easily identified. In the multi-channel video Power Here (2008), the artist placed electrical appliances in public areas and powered them with public electricity. As a household lamp lights up simultaneously with a street lamp, the line between the different spaces is poetically blurred. Similarly, in One Day (2010), the artist staged a day of domestic life in a home improvement store. The sequence of the dislocated actions embodied the contradictions in the nature of space.

Zhou’s practice alchemizes ordinary surroundings into a theatre where he superimposes and interchanges the background and the stage, the viewer and the actor, the fact and the story line, and the documentation and the representation. His camera is not simply a recording apparatus but an extension of existence that requires active participations. The images his camera produces are not just detached spectacles, they are the agents that reveal the theatrical details suffused in mundane life.

Zhou Tao was born in 1976 in Changsha, China resides in Guangzhou, China. His work has been exhibited at The International Center of Photography, New York, (2010); MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2010); 7th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai (2008); Guangzhou Station: Special Exhibition of Contemporary Art of Guangdong, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, (2007); China Power Station Part II, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2007); 24 HR Art, NT Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney (2007); Cubic Image: Art Beijing (2007); Platform China, Beijing
 (2006); La rivoluzione siamo noi, Isola d’Arte, Milano
 (2006); Accumulation-Canton Express Next Stop, Tang Contemporary Art Center, Beijing
 (2006); Gambling, Para / Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2005); Archaeology of the Future: The 2nd Triennial of Chinese Art, Nanjing Museum, Nanjing (2004); and FEI, FEI, FEI, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai.

Xiaoyu Weng is an independent curator and writer based in San Francisco. She is the inaugural 101 Curatorial Fellow at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College for The Arts and currently directs the Asian Contemporary Arts Consortium in San Francisco.

Click here for an interview between curator Xiaoyu Weng and artist Zhou Tao

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The Immortal: Facundo Argañaraz and Chris Hood

February 4th – March 5th
Opening reception February 4th, 8pm -11pm
Free and open to the public

Queens Nails Projects
3191 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
queensnailsprojects.com
Gallery hours are Friday and Saturday 1pm – 6pm or by appointment

The Immortal is an exhibition that transforms the gallery into a self-reflexive space to explore the visual ideology of Modernism.  Utilizing various forms such as painting, collage, and sculpture/furniture, the artists Facundo Argañaraz and Chris Hood have created an installation where no prioritization of objects is present.  Artworks lean, stand, hang, turn and act as framing or support for other artworks creating an inquiry into the relationship between object, art, decoration and utilitarian function.  The installation’s imagery draws from mid-century design catalogs and retro advertisements depicting various 20th century utopias.  The images are reproduced from Internet archives, photocopied from vintage magazines and then used as direct mark-making tools.  By employing the reproduction as a physical medium, the artists portray the visual ideology of Modernism as both an immortal and dead series of forms.

The title of the exhibition references Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Immortal,” written in 1949.  “The Immortal,” in short, is a story about the infinite flux of the universe’s (and human) permutations and the dreadful character of its endless repetitions.  The story lays bare the banality and entropic characteristic of all human enterprise, the erosion of content through time and the impossibility of anything new.  Everything has already been said.  Considered an important precursor and originator of many Postmodern devices, it deals with themes such as the death of the author, pastiche, intertextuality, self-reflexiveness and disbelief in master narratives.

Facundo Argañaraz was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  He studied illustration and painting from a very young age and later earned a degree in Law and Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.  After traveling worldwide for more than two and a half years without a pause, he moved to California to pursue a career as a painter and visual artist.  He has exhibited nationally and internationally including recent exhibitions at UNtitled Pop Up Gallery, Buenos Aires, David Cunningham Projects, San Francisco, The LAB, San Francisco, MCCLA, San Francisco.

Chris Hood was born in 1984 in Atlanta, Georgia and currently lives and works in San Francisco.  Exploiting a wide range of materials and subject matter, Chris creates iconic abstractions with installations, paintings, and sculptures in a nuanced critique of the condition of contemporary art making.  By playfully mining the shifting boundaries between established art forms and processes of digital imaging, he casts doubt on current systems of cultural reception and consumption.  He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has exhibited nationally and internationally including recent exhibitions at Southern Exposure, San Francisco, Pehrspace, Los Angeles, Federal Art Projects, Los Angeles, and Blankspace, Oakland.

6/6/6: SIX ARTISTS, SIX CITIES, SIX CONNECTIONS

January 8-29, 2011*

*This exhibition is the first of six exhibitions in each of the home cities of each of the artists involved.

Opening Reception:

January 8, Saturday, 8-11pm

QUEENS NAILS PROJECTS

3191 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA

www.queensnailsprojects.com

queensnailsprojects@gmail.com

Artists: Jeff Badger (Portland, ME), Carl Baratta (Chicago), Amanda Curreri (San Francisco), Joanne Lefrak (Santa Fe), Kathy Leisen (Detroit), and Dan Schank (Philadelphia).

6/6/6 is a traveling exhibition that created itself through connectivity. With the proliferation of social networking and technology-based communication, making real connections becomes more important than ever. Each artist in this exhibition has selected one other artist who lives and works in a different community, forming a network of art communities and developing personal connections among artists and audiences. This effort makes introduces new practitioners to each locale and infuses each region with new energy from around the country. Like a chain letter, this process is expansive and like an exquisite corpse, the results are surprising and unexpected. Appropriately for a show about drawing connections, the show takes the drawn line as its subject and features artists from all over the country. The exhibition, in a sense, created itself by means of connectivity.

www.666exhibition.blogspot.com

This exhibition presents the work of:

JEFF BADGER http://jeffbadger.com/

CARL BARATTA http://carlbaratta.com/home.html

AMANDA CURRERI http://amandacurreri.com

JOANNE LEFRAK http://www.joannelefrak.com

KATHY LEISEN http://kathyleisen.com

DAN SCHANK http://danschank.com/home.html

6/6/6 EXHIBITION DATES & VENUES

January 8 – 29, 2011

Queens Nails Projects, San Francisco, CA

www.queensnailsprojects.com/

February 11 – March 12, 2011

Linda Durham Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, NM

http://www.lindadurham.com/

April 2011

Lloyd Dobler Gallery, Chicago, IL

http://www.lloyddoblergallery.com/

May – June 2011

Popp’s Packing, Detroit, MI

www.poppspacking.blogspot.com/

July – August 2011

Pterodactyl, Philadelphia, PA

http://www.pterodactylphiladelphia.org/

September 2011

Gallery 37-A, Portland, ME

http://www.thirtysevena.com

www.666exhibition.blogspot.com