Queens Nails Projects

Opening and Reception on Thursday, February 11th, 7:00-11:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public

Exhibition Dates: February 11th – March 13th
Address: 3191 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110
Gallery Hours: Friday and Saturday from 12:00 to 6:00 p.m. or by appointment
Press Contact: Rachel Adams – queensnailsprojects@gmail.com

Queen’s Nails Projects is pleased to present a new installation by the Mexico City conceptual artist, ARTEMIO along with a video by New York based Frankie Martin.

ARTEMIO’s work speaks to the extreme wealth and violence of the drug trade and the complex cultural reality, which it creates. Narco Mantras is an installation of contemporary mandala imagery that offers a distilled mirror image of an apolitical revolution brought on by violence and an apathetic public’s willingness to be consumed and dazzled by it. In ARTEMIO’s mandala works, guns, grenades, bombs, and machetes assemble themselves in an ornate and impeccable order as a paradox of fascination and repulsion. The work offers insight into a culture of violence that appears anarchist, but is clearly not without order.

This installation of ARTEMIO’s work is organized in conjunction with Galería de la Raza who will simultaneously present the artist’s Hollywoodpedia, an installation comprised of 120 videos that act as an audiovisual encyclopedia of the human condition as represented by Hollywood. Hollywoodpedia will be on view at Galería de la Raza February 6th- April 17th.

Queen’s Nails Projects will also exhibit Through the Vortex, a new video work by the nomadic inter-media artist Frankie Martin.  Martin’s focus is on experiential art, such as comedic dance, light, minimalist writing, sound and video. Her work inspires laughing out loud, self-analysis, and critical consciousness; it opens the door to a radical re-thinking of how cultural reality is constructed. Through the Vortex takes the viewer along the inner journey of her one thousand mile, California coastal bicycle trip of July 2009. The video uses a symbiotic mixture of the ancient and the contemporary, creating an atmosphere of timelessness. An audio edition entitled Who Died? will be available during the exhibition.

ARTEMIO is a multimedia artist whose practice spans video, sculpture and painting. Through the appropriation and reinterpretation of pop cultural elements and icons, he seeks to juxtapose a wide range of concepts including love, war, audience, kitsch and repulsion. Over the last two years alone, he has had individual exhibitions in Bogota, Lima, Mexico City, Guadalajara, New York, and London, and his work has been featured in group exhibitions in Moscow, Sydney, Havana, Miami, and Seoul. ARTEMIO is currently the recipient of the prestigious FONCA Jóvenes Creadores grant and Mexico’s El Universal calls him one of the 17 most relevant living artists in Mexico.

Frankie Martin is currently writing a book of creative non-fiction, creating video paintings, participating in House Plants and Coma Club (Public Access TV shows in New York and Massachusetts) and leading an inspiration management group called The Hands of Light. You are cordially invited to join at www.frankiefeverforever.com.

Queen’s Nails Projects (QNP) is a curatorial platform dedicated to presenting collaborative, site-specific, and experimental projects by both artists and independent curators. QNP aims to challenge both emerging and established cultural producers to work outside their normal practice in order to produce new and unique projects. For more information please visit www.QueensNailsProjects.com

Back to Front: Luke Butler, Christina Empedocles, Jason Kalogiros, and Maggie Preston

Opening and Reception on Saturday December 12th, 2009

7:00-10:00 p.m.

Free and open to the public

Exhibition Dates: December 12, 2009 – January 16, 2010

Gallery Hours: Saturday to Tuesday from 12:00 to 6:00 p.m. or by appointment

Press Contact: Julio Cesar Morales queensnailsprojects@gmail.com

Queens Nails Projects is pleased to present Back to Front, an exhibition showcasing the artists who work in the back studios of the gallery: Luke Butler, Christina Empedocles, Jason Kalogiros, and Maggie Preston.

All four artists graduated from the California College of the Arts’ MFA program in 2008 and now find themselves working alongside each other in the studios at QNP.  While all of the artists have independent and unique practices, the opportunity to exhibit together presents the subtle threads that run through their work.  All of the artists reference connections to moments of history, shown through personal relationships with cultural pasts or historical developments in their particular mediums.  Mostly, this exhibition is a chance for the artists to exhibit new work directly from their studios as each of them present recently completed or never before exhibited projects as well as experiments and departures from their usual practice.

Luke Butler isolates images of male authority that pervade the American cultural psyche, mixing pop culture iconography with political satire.  Stripping bare (both literally and figuratively) individuals from a not so distant past such as former presidents and Star Trek characters, Butler objectifies these figures to represent futility and undone masculinity.

Christina Empedocles’ wax pencil drawings make use of obsessive realism as a means to explore the nature of memory, nostalgia and perception. Her work accumulates and assembles found objects and images, and creates a series of representations of representations. The images stand in for the things she has lost touch with over time and reveals the great distance from artist to source. By rendering what is obviously a facsimile, she monumentalize this distance between herself and the original, using the intense act of looking as a futile means of getting closer to the things she represents.

Jason Kalogiros’ practice embraces different methods of doubling and repetition so as to confuse past and present, copy and original, highlighting his interest in the subjective nature of representation, memory, and history.  His work is rooted in a curiosity about photography, its history, its functionality, and about the physical and visual aspects of the medium itself.

Maggie Preston’s work is primarily based in observations and experiments with the basic elements of the photographic process.  Manipulating the relationship between light, film, and imaging techniques, the interdependency of materials and the history of technical methods in photography become the subject of her work.

Opening and Reception on Friday October 23^rd, 2009

8:00-10:00 p.m.

Free and open to the public

Exhibition Dates: October 23 – November 20

Performances: Thursday nights, 8pm through the duration of the exhibition

Gallery Hours: Friday and Saturday 12:00 to 6:00 p.m. or by appointment

Press Contact: queensnailsprojects@gmail.com

Queens Nails Projects is pleased to present Our Best Machines are Made of Sunshine, a solo exhibition of Jacqueline Gordon’s work.

Jacqueline Gordon focuses on the integration of contemporary folk aesthetics with the emergent technology of sound imaging. Patterns recurrent in nature and collected sounds are synthesized to create inhabitable sculptures that alter one’s physical experience to evoke feelings of intimacy and connectedness or confinement and isolation.

Gordon’s oeuvre contains installation work as disparate as inviting, womb-like interiors made of plush quilted fabrics and inaccessible, voyeuristic settings behind storefront glass. These seemingly opposite types of spaces merge in her newest installation at Queens Nails Projects: Our Best Machines Are Made of Sunshine. The 4-channel surround sound installation includes 24 speakers of audio sourced from two microphones mounted in front of the gallery.  Gordon’s all-encompassing soundscape is housed in a matrix of white vinyl and speakers that whitewash the gallery walls. Replacing the white cube of the gallery with a white cube of Gordon’s own making, her piece teases out the irony of fascist strains within utopianism.  The work references a gap between the lived experience of barebones environments such as sensory deprivation tanks and geodesic domes, as well as Brutalist architecture and the aspirational rhetoric that surround its production.

Live Musical Performances Every Thursday Evening

Thursday, October 29th, 8pm
Sutekh
Joshua Churchill
Virobot

Thursday, November 5th, 8pm
Gregg Kowalsky
Luuse & Fun Santa Maria
Thursday, November 12, 8pm
Wobbly
Nate Boyce and Greg Zifcak

Our Best Machines Are Made of Sunshine is funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant Program through an Individual Artist Commission.

Jacqueline Gordon received her BFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute (2004) and is currently attending the Stanford MFA program. Jacqueline has participated in artist residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and the New York Studio Program.  In 2008 she was awarded a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant.  Jacqueline is also a member of the female experimental music group 0th.

Opening and Reception on Friday, 4th
September, 2009, 8:00-11:00 p.m.
Live Performance: Shimomitsu 9pm
Free and open to the public
Exhibition Dates: September 4 to October 3, 2009
Friday and Saturday 12:00 to 6:00 p.m. or by appointment
Press Contact: queensnailsprojects@gmail.com

Queens Nails Projects is pleased to present a new series of artworks and solo project by Bay Area artist Ian McDonald with 2 additional projects by Conrad Meyers and Shimomitsu. The solo exhibitions: ” Today and Others” featuring new sculptures by Ian McDonald and “Blight “ featuring a new digital video by Conrad Meyers and live music performances by Shimomitsu. All artists will be mounting site-specific works for this exhibition.
Ian McDonald is premiering a new installation and body of work as well as a call and response audio project with Shimomitsu that will be reconstructed live by a music performance by Shimomitsu of original music recorded by McDonald and acts as the soundtrack to his installation. Shimomitsu will be playing the soundtrack live every Friday (6-8pm) during the run of exhibition. McDonald’s work balances somewhere between the logical and a purely theoretical approach to everyday objects and their material associations. It is in the combination of these distinct relatives that objects recede then reappear in value and significance. It is however more than mere references to functionality and form, and more of a system of real objects negotiating a real stream of usability. In some cases McDonald’s objects may have their usability interrupted in sacrifice for display, while others have just begun the process of proposed futures. McDonald’s work in this way refuses the hierarchical approach to sculpture and object making, opting to see as much potential in a corked stoneware bottle, as a purely decorative gold leafed element.
Ian McDonald has shown throughout the United States and Europe, including venues such as, Rena Bransten Gallery, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Wight Gallery at UCLA, Nieuwe Vide Gallery, Sophienholm Museum in Svendborg Denmark and the Museo Internazionale dell Ceramiche. In 2007 he was awarded the “Premio Faenza” from Museo Internazionale dell Ceramiche in Faenza Italy. He has completed residencies at the European Ceramic Work Center in Holland, and the International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark. His work has been reviewed in magazines including Artweek and Art Forum. He is represented by Rena Bransten Galley in San Francisco, and is currently faculty in Sculpture at The San Francisco Art Institute.
Shimomitsu is an experimental music collaboration between Shemoel Recalde and Joshua Roberts, combining acoustic sound origination and real-time digital manipulation. Live sound is produced from a combination of handmade control devices, all emphasizing the importance of physical interaction, using the human as the interface in a live performance setting. The combination between organic and synthetic elements are a common occurrence in both the generation of the sounds, and the aesthetic of the live performance and sculptural qualities of the instruments. Shimomitsu is mostly inspired by the ephemeral quality of the ocean and its historical context in music history, particularly in the 1950’s. The projects’ sound lies in a blissfully uncomfortable place between a tribal doo-wop and a psychedelic surf experience, they like to call ocean rock. Shimomitsu will be in-residence in QnPs newly expanded space and will have process-based artworks on view as well as live performances every Friday during the exhibition with DJ Softserve as well. For their installation and collaboration with McDonald, Shimomitsu will be releasing a limited edition CD on Queens Nails Records.

Conrad M. Meyers II presents a beautiful new digital video in the screening room of a work that derives from speculative medical scientific animation and exhibition, conceived via the amalgamation of memory, the physical and the virtual. The digital images are entirely fabricated, based on the artist’s flesh thus confronting the viewer with subtly interacting objects that are falsely educational: processes to be comprehended with no avail. Meyers II is an artist and educator working in sculpture, installation, and new media.  His art projects, which derive from speculative scientific animation and exhibit, have been shown in Washington DC, Baltimore, Seattle and the Bay area.  He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is currently a resident artist at Root Division in San Francisco.

Shimomitsu

Opening and Reception on Friday, 7th
August 2009, 9:00-11:00 p.m.
Live Performance: DJ Urban Yetti
Free and open to the public
Exhibition Dates: August 7 to August 10, 2009
Saturday to Tuesday from 12:00 to 6:00 p.m. or by appointment

Press Contact: Julio Cesar Morales queensnailsprojects@gmail.com

Queens Nails Projects is pleased to present the final in a series of summer exhibitions for 2009 with Felipe Dulzaides. The solo exhibition: Felipe Dulzaides plays Felipe Dulzaides at L’ Elegante, features a new exciting body of work that will be a launch for an on-going site-specific audio-based installation project. FDpFD marks a new direction for Dulzaides by embarking on a multi-venue project based on his father, Felipe Dulzaides, the late and important Cuban jazz musician and bandleader that has inspired generations of musicians in Cuba. This project attempts to acknowledge his fathers’ music archive, influence and legacy while exploring his own artist practice.

FDpFD is a rare art exhibition that examines the role of music, memory and re- imagined future as influences to life and work philosophies as music maps of personal memory that are not merely single tones but are dependent on the recognition of the in-between notes of the tones, of their placing and their spacing. Dulzaides is fascinated by music’s emotional power and its openness to art that expresses itself through sound and time, FDpFD will allow viewers a freedom of imagination, interpretation, and emotional response that is not based on the literal or the descriptive, but rather on the abstract quality of the sound and vision.

Dulzaides will collaborate with Bay Area DJ Urban Yetti in remixing and reconstructing songs of Felipe Dulzaides live and will be recorded with the final audio being released as a limited edition CD on Queens Nails Records.

Felipe Dulzaides work attempts to instigate a poetical experience. His videos, pictures and installation deconstruct his fragmented bicultural experience from different angles. Dulzaides also has developed several public art projects, which include billboards, inflatable interactive sculptures and videos for public spaces. His work has been widely shown at contemporary art galleries, museums, and biennials. His resent work has been including in the 2008 Gwagju biennial, The 2008 California Biennial and the 2009 Havana biennial. Dulzaides is the recipient of prestigious awards, including the Cintas Fellowship, Creative Work Fund, and Art Matters. He holds a BFA in drama from the Instituto Superior de Arte of Havana and an MFA from the New Genres department of the San Francisco Art Institute. Currently he is a visiting faculty member of the San Francisco Art Institute. He comes from a long line of prestigious writers and musicians and bares the name as his father, a well-known Jazz pianist.

Queen’s Nails Projects presents the group exhibition: Alter Ego (A.K.A.)
Exhibition dates: Aug 13 – Aug 31, 2009
Opening reception: Thursday August 13, 8-11pm
Gallery hours: Wednesday – Saturday 3-7
Address: Queen’s Nails, 3191 Mission St, San Francisco

Queen’s Nails is pleased to announce Alter Ego, a group exhibition about truth in fiction.

The term “alter ego” signifies a second self or a split personality.  Often, this type of identity construction is indicative of a certain pathology, such as in the case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr Hyde by Stevenson.  In this case, the second self is created because the desires of the individual fail to fit the strictures imposed by civilization, and thus create the imposter as an outlet.  Alternatively, a second persona is often created as a way to access new communities, ideas, and activities otherwise unattainable in one’s normal form, such as in the case of Superman. Without the identity of Clark Kent, Superman would be unequivocally an outsider.  Whether we invent masks for ourselves because we fear the ramifications of our actions without them, or whether we don a new hat for personal amusement, escape, or growth, or just to fit it, the fact is that living in a bifurcated world of invented mindsets identities is both prevalent and pervasive.

The featured artists in Alter Ego, all share the fact that they have constructed identities and personas for themselves as artworks, apart from their “real” persons.  These alternative identities exist for many reasons, for pleasure, as rebirth, due to psychosis, or for utility, and we invite you to come and explore this psychological investigation.

Alter Ego features new work by artists:

• Anne McGuire A.K.A. Freddy McGuire
• Tom Borden and Eric Gibbens (A.K.A. Khyssup Muistardeaux)
• Jaime Cortez
• Jon Santos
• Jordan Essoe
• Vita Hewitt (A.K.A. Chuck)
• Kristin Lucas (A.K.A. Kristin Lucas)
• Lizabeth Eva Rossoff (A.K.A. Kelly Flynn)
• Linda Trunzo (A.K.A. Sonni Trunzio)
• And Neal White (A.K.A. The Incredible Randy)

Opening and Reception on Friday, July 10

8:00-10:00 p.m.

Free and open to the public

Exhibition Dates: July 10-18 2009

Wednesday to Saturday from 12:00 to 6:00 p.m. or by appointment

Press Contact: Julio Cesar Morales queensnailsprojects@gmail.com

The Last of The Mojitos is the second in the summer series of exhibitions by emerging Bay Area Artists. This exhibition is based on a collective journey that 13 artists took to the 25th anniversary of the Havana Biennale, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution.

The project led by Tony Labat has produced artworks that where inspired, created, performed and conceived while on the island. The artist also considered the recent shift of the political global landscape since the inauguration of Obama as the new American leader and reflects on the long overdue dialogue about our relationship (or lack of) to the island, to ideas, to tolerance, and cultural and political differences, and its impact on history and memory.

The exciting exhibition includes works in photography, video, sculpture and sound as well as documentation of performances done in Havana, an 80-page full color catalog will be available. Participating artists include: Natasha Agrama, Peter Belkin, Lena Daly, Maggie Dilley, Mercedes Dorame, Jennifer Elmore, Luis Garcia, Alexandra Johnston, Rebecca Kopp, Lauren Kronemyer, Tony Labat, Whitney Legge, Rebecca Parks-Ramage and Allison Taylor 80-page full color catalog will be available.

Queen’s Nails Projects (QNP) is a curatorial platform dedicated to presenting collaborative, site-specific, and experimental projects by both artists and independent curators. QNP aims to challenge both emerging and established cultural producers to work outside their normal practice in order to produce new and unique projects. For more information please visit www.QueensNailsProjects.com

In 1985, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors backed a resolution designating San Francisco a sanctuary city-one of the first in the US-for certain Central American refugees. The resolution decreed that police, schools, and health and social-service agencies were forbidden from assisting INS agents during potential investigations and arrests of Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees. Though the legislation was revised in the 90s and has been broadly and variously interpreted since its initial enactment, it remains in effect. Nevertheless, in the wake of federal policies implemented after 9/11, San Francisco began to see an increased number of federal immigration raids, leading to growing fear and paranoia not only among undocumented immigrants, but among legal residents as well.

Sanctuary City/Ciudad Santuario, 1989-2009 is the fruition of a two-year process of investigation and research prompted by this post-9/11 increase in federal immigration raids. By consulting with a number of local nonprofits (the ACLU, the Edgewood Center for Children and Families, the Mission Asset Fund, the Mission Economic Development Agency, ¡Poder!, and La Voz Latina,) as well as with national NGOs, international think tanks, and governmental agencies, the team of artists led by Sergio De La Torre- including Karla Claudio Betancourt (SFAI student), Dina Roumiantseva (SFAI student), Wenhua Shi, Rosario Alicia Sotelo (SFAI alumna), and Chris Treggiari (SFAI student)-has assembled a bloc of video projections and photographs, together with a text-based installation and limited-edition timeline, that explores and questions the ways in which this pattern of increased federal intervention has affected the Bay Area immigrant community.

Based on the methodology used for Maquilapolis, a documentary film project developed by De La Torre and Vicky Funari for which twelve factory workers in Tijuana, Mexico, were taught to use cameras and editing equipment so they could tell their own stories, Sanctuary City/Ciudad Santuario, 1989-2009 will similarly involve its subjects as creative participants, thereby directly situating the work in the exhibition within the milieu out of which it was generated. Together with testimonies by family members directly involved in the raids and commentaries by local politicians on San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city, the exhibition’s video projections will be screened guerrilla-style-both during and after the exhibition-on the facades of those buildings throughout the city that have been raided by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Sergio De La Torre:

A photographer and performance/installation artist who grew up in the Tijuana/San Diego border area and migrated to San Francisco, Sergio De La Torre focuses his work on issues regarding diaspora, tourism, immigration, and identity politics.

Previous to Sanctuary City/Ciudad Santuario, 1989-2009, he collaborated with both local and international nonprofit organizations on Maquilapolis (developed with Vicki Funari), a documentary film about factory workers in Tijuana; on the project Power in the House, a series of digitally produced cards that narrate the relations between Mexican American teenagers and their immigrant parents; on The Housing Project, in which teens and other local collaborators explore how the shortage of affordable housing transforms private into public spaces; and on SFAI-sponsored Agit-Van, a series of guerrilla-style projections from an on-the-spot cinema truck equipped with a video projector and sound system that work to transport art practice beyond museums and galleries to more participatory and inclusive spaces. De La Torre is assistant professor in the Department of Art and Architecture at the University of San Francisco.

Supported by the Creative Work Fund, Sanctuary City/Ciudad Santuario, 1989-2009 is presented in collaboration with SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs, which are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.
San Francisco Art Institute

Founded in 1871, SFAI is one of the oldest and most prestigious schools of higher education in contemporary art in the US. Focusing on the interdependence of thinking, making, and learning, SFAI’s academic and public programs are dedicated to excellence and diversity.

The Creative Work Fund is a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund; it is also supported by generous grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the James Irvine Foundation.

Queen’s Nails Projects (QNP) is a curatorial platform dedicated to presenting collaborative, site-specific, and experimental projects by both artists and independent curators. Codirected and curated by Bay Area visual artists Mike Bianco and Julio César Morales, QNP aims to challenge both emerging and established cultural producers to work outside their normal practice in order to produce new and unique projects. For more information please visit www.QueensNailsProjects.com

For more information about this exhibition and other public or academic programs at SFAI, please go to www.sfai.edu or call 415 749 4563.

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ZEBULUN will be the inaugural exhibition for the newly defined Queens Nails Projects. The exhibition will be open from  September 18th to October 18th. The opening reception will be held from 7 – 11 and will feature a special appearance DJ.

Kamau Patton is an artist that creates multi-dimensional, non-linear narratives. He works in a wide range of media including sculpture, digital photography, and video. All elements of the work are meant to interact. Sculptural objects are produced to serve as props for video and photographic work. In turn, photographic and video images operate to give context and power to the objects.

His current work is an investigation of forms, visual systems, sound structures and meanings found in (more…)