Pulling up to Mission: Comics and Art, the surprisingly large and very comprehensive comic book and graphic novel Mecca of San Francisco, I was impressed by the draw that a talented group of emerging artists could bring to the bustling thoroughfares of the City. Rife with hip styles and broiling with conversation, the sidewalk outside of Mission: Comics and Art was filled with the family, friends and fans of the artist that made up Vim and Vigor, a group show of Bay Area emerging artists. Exploring the complex narratives of the urban environment and its developing cultures, this group of 13 artists opened a great show on the auspicious date of Friday the 13th, 2010.
Squeezing through the crowd that packed the front door, the space opens up to color-filled shelves of new and classic graphic novels and comics. And, on every wall space, there was a display of inspired expression. The front annex of the space held new work by Adam Rosendahl. The articulately rendered “Ganesha Festival’’ exuded the figures and emotion of transcendental India that is expressed in much of Rosendahl’s works, with fine, spidery lines forming the figures of revelers merging into each other. The strongest piece out of his three displayed in the show, this work demonstrated Rosendahl’s increasing facility with figurative language, and a further developed ability to convey emotion through figurative abstraction.
In a similar mode of ink on paper, Joshua Pelletier created abstract narratives of the sub-conscious through the use of rapid mark making and alien figures that pulsated from four framed works. Rendered in a style reminiscent of Ralph Steadman, each work held an image placed over a hand-styled text of the titled, guiding the viewer’s interpretation of each work.
Mary Marxen took abstraction to the third dimension with her light box made up of three vibrant planes, each informing the others to create the sense of rapidly ingesting information while moving through the urban environment. Bike gears merged with fire-trucks and the blurring lines of color that made up the fine, stencil-like pattern of the foreground, overlaid upon a monochrome middle ground of abstraction and the geometric and succinctly primary colors of the background. This layered piece created an Op Art effect, adapted to the rapid and scattered narrative of the urban world.
Other artists took a slightly more direct route of painting images of the urban narrative. Sophie Yanow and Greta Aalborg-Volper seemed at home in the space, applying the graphic novel forms of frame and narrative to their individual perception of urban content. Yanow developed in monochromatic frames a narrative of a bike ride out of and returning to the city, describing the subliminal transformation of the mundane. These intimate and simple scenes combined to form a metaphor describing the rise out of the mire of city pollution to a transcendent plane, and the rapid and abrasive return to the urban experience afterwards. Aalborg-Volper took a more abstracted route in her piece “Love Struck’’ using a psychedelic narratives of shifting dependant relationships as a means to explore the formations of identity, love, and transformation. The vibrantly colored fantasy-landscapes provided an absorbing background for the artist’s unique and developed handling of figure-form.
Carla Fischer Schwartz displayed her adapt ability as a printer, with a complex, hand-tinted lithograph, entitled “Cosmology,’’ a subtly-hued mandala of modern urban stimulus. Fischer Schwartz also displayed a beautifully handled mass of organic shapes made up of beautiful washes and stains contained by fluid, crisp and concentric lines, exuding the feelings of cyclical growth and decay.
Krista Delosreyes brought an interesting level of wonderful grime to the show, capturing the dirty and impermanent experience that is so much a part of the urban sublime in her series entitled “This Is That Hood Shit, 1, 2, 3 and 4.’’ Flanked by Delosreys’ assemblage piece rendering the figure of vagrant propped drunkenly in the corner, this series of drawings on cardboard were rough, layered, and visceral displays of the urban experience, with snapshots of different urban languages being overlapped to convey the scattered yet cohesive nature of a big metropolitan area.
Just down the wall from Delosreyes’ work, a single piece of Mathew Zefeldt’s work, “Before It’s Too Late,’’ hung prominently on the wall, a vibrant contrast to the more subdued hues of much of the other work. Zefeldt’s maturing language of comic-book semiotics had undergone another progression. Forming a large abstracted mass of mark making, this form merged his more spread out compositions of line with his concisely controlled renderings of the death masks of antiquity that populated his previous work. This storm of visual language moved in and out of recognizable structures, pulsating with movement and stillness. This mostly monochromatic mass sat upon the vibrant background of primary color and grandiose gesture that has marked Zefeldt’s return to color.
Max Hield held down the photo front of the show, with his two abstracted photographic works hanging side by side in a psychedelic visual display of repeated fractal geometric patterns that were formed by his manipulated snapshots of the urban sublime built developed out of corporate architecture.
The show also highlighted a variety of sculptural perspectives, including the amazingly developed dioramas of Devin Miller. Miller’s assemblage-like scenes of death and rebirth were rendered out of found materials that were almost exclusively gathered during the artist’s everyday movements through space, making each different scene a collection of Miller’s tactile, visual and intellectual daily experiences. With materials ranging from dead minnows and taxidermy furs to sphagnum moss and brush, each frame-box created a scene that, put into context of the rest of the works, generated a complex and subtle narrative of psychological and physical exploration.
Working in a similar vein, Jory Bidart built a viewing box out of a dictionary filled with live succulents and organic matter. The dictionary’s cover was replaced with an acrylic sheet, housing the interior composition. The middle of the dictionary had been removed and replaced with a planting box holding individual living treasures, juxtaposing the syntax of a modern evolving language with the results of millennia of Darwinian progression, drawing parallels between organic an cultural evolution.
Bringing a more formal and classical form of three-dimensional exploration, Scott French juxtaposed the simple, geometric lines of a graceful candelabra with his organic layered welds in his piece “The 8th Day’’. The square column of the form emerged from Scott’s trademark welds that grew like coral from the pedestal, consuming the column from which four elegant arms emerged seemingly at random to hold the melting wax candles.
Scott also used his organically layered welds to build a graceful shelf which supported little bottles of nostalgia assembled by Mary Marxen in their collaborative piece “Efforts of Recollection.’’ Paired with another of Marxen’s three dimensional stencil collages, this piece seemed to capture individual scenes culled from memory, distilled into fragmented images and choice organic elements.
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