East Carny Bastards September 30th – Nov.1st, 2016
Mike Shine SOLO – Gallery I
Red Truck Gallery & Parlor Gallery group show – Gallery II
Artist Statements / Bios
Mike Shine’s painting based projects include large scale street murals, extensive installations, and performances – each united beneath his mythical character creation, Dr. Pyotr Mastolf Ilyas (Dr. Flotsam, for short). Mastolf Ilyas is Shine’s modern day version of Mephistopeles, crafted in the persona of a centuries-old Eastern European Carnival leader.
Dr. Flotsam and his carny troupe have been traveling the world for centuries, selling Hell Brew tonic, thereby granting unsuspecting “marks” their wildest dreams, and collecting their souls in return. These transactions are often manipulated by the Dr., and he hints at his grand purpose (The World Riddle) by dropping tips in the paintings, murals and performances.
Shine’s installations have been featured at SFMOMA, The SF Museum of Craft and Folk Art, The Laguna Art Museum, 941 Geary in SF, White Walls SF, and the Corpo Gallery in Los Angeles.
Molly McGuire is a self-taught artist and musician, working under the name “Magwire,” she is based in New Orleans, LA. Her most recent output is circus banners, which re-appropriate used canvasses such as drop cloths and employ oils and tinted latex house paint.
Her circus banners are featured in the TV Show, “American Horror Story” during season 4’s “Freakshow.” She also received a first-place 2012 New Orleans Press Club Award for best editorial illustration. The illustration appeared on the cover of OffBeat Magazine‘s 2012 Jazz Fest issue, themed “Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans: 50th Anniversary.”
Molly is also an accomplished musician and has performed and recorded with Frank Black, Queens of the Stone Age, Martina Topley-Bird, Mondo Generator, earthlings?, Twilight Singers, Goatsnake, The Spores, Rhudabega, Yellow #5, Inbred Bipeds, Brant Bjork and the Bro’s, Mike West and Myshkin. She also created and performed ARUGULA— a death metal puppet band that auditioned human drummers at The Viper Room in Hollywood. She is currently involved with the musical recording project Dastardly Jones.
Adam Wallacavage
Inspired by an obsession with the ocean and a fascination with extravagant interiors of old churches, Adam Wallacavage transformed the dining room of his South Philadelphia Victorian Brownstone into something from the pages of a Jules Verne novel. Teaching himself the ancient art of ornamental plastering, Adam evolved his new found skills into making plaster cast octopus shaped chandeliers as the final touch to his underwater themed room. Not content with leaving the chandeliers to his own home, Adam continued his experimentation by making more and more. He changed the shapes and colors and even collaborated with famed jewelry designer, Tarina Tarantino, who supplied the beautiful pearls for his pink glitter chandelier featured in his first showing at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in June of 2006. The same chandelier will be inclulded in the Juxtapoz retrospective show at the Laguna Art Museum in June of 2008, before arriving at it’s permanent home, in the entrance of Tarina’s new Sparkle Factory, in downtown LA.
Beyond making chandeliers, Adam Wallacavage is also an accomplished photographer, documenting artists, musicians, daredevils and all things weird and wonderful.
Chris Roberts-Antieau’s art career ironically began by walking out of an art class. Her childlike drawing style and perception, which she still uses today, was mocked by her art instructor on her first day of class. So she left that day. Her son’s drawings inspired her several years later to not give up on her art and her own personal style. She first began experimenting with fabric and soft sculpture and wearable art. This evolved into her present-day whimsical fabric paintings.
In her Michigan studio, Roberts-Antieau’s creates each delightful and charming fabric painting by scavenging for different types of fabrics from dime stores and quilt shops. She cuts the designs freehand, then uses the sewing machine as a drawing tool to define the borders of her figures with a beautiful, almost invisible satin-stitch. She finishes with hand embroidery and by framing it behind glass and hand-painted frame. Her combination of meticulous attention to detail and a naive, childlike view of the world makes her artwork a beautiful, young-at-heart decoration and keepsake.
David Marc Grant, a 3rd generation San Francisco native, is a very rare bird indeed. He paints candy colored dystopian landscapes. Growing up in the Fog City in the 80s, he was happily exposed to genres of utopian science fiction and fantasy, the kind that inspired cautionary tales of environmental disaster and extreme spectacle. A student of the wild school of dichotomies and of the prestigious San Francisco Art Institute, Grant’s humor and his history influence his interest in fictitious world building.
“It doesn’t do me much good to make unpleasant looking work even if I think the future may not be very pleasant.” His advice for young artists? “First of all, you have to get out of your own way. Finally get involved in the local art scene. Go to openings. Go to school. Meet people with similar interests. That is the basis of community and that’s where support comes from.” ~ D.M.Grant
Andy Herod
“I am a self taught illustrator, painter, print-maker from the USA. I’m always learning and always up for new challenges. I am fueled by coffee and the promise of great adventure. “ ~ A. Harod
Baseball Card Vandals
Beau and Bryan Abbott, two brothers born in the 1980’s in a town called Springfield, spent their entire childhood obsessing over baseball cards. For well over a decade, every last dime of their allowance money went to funding their beloved collections. But as anyone who collected cards in the 80’s and 90’s knows, roughly 99.9% of these once sought-after collectibles are now barely worth the price of the cardboard they’re printed on. What to do then with the remnant boxes, binders and heaping mounds of these worthless, hilarious, irresistibly charming relics?
Well, a long time ago these two artistically-inclined weirdos picked up their Sharpies and their most mediocre cards and began scribbling strange jokes all over them in endlessly shameless and shameful attempts at making one another laugh. Inexcusably, they’ve continued to do this into adulthood, and they recently decided to share their work with the outside world. The result is baseballcardvandals.com, the most ardently irreverent, beautifully nonsensical, brilliantly gross and sometimes surprisingly sublime thing on the internet.
Katherine Michael
Katherine is a self taught artist and started painting shortly after moving to Florida in 1999. Inspired by the vibrant colors of nature, she works diligently to create a storybook with her paintings. “I paint whatever I want to paint and how I want to paint it. I am always grateful when people respond positively to my work. They seem to understand the emotion I try to create. Communicating through visual art is something I want to do for the rest of my life.” -K. Michael
Ben Venom graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007 with a Master of Fine Arts degree. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally including the Levi Strauss Museum (Germany), the National Folk Museum of Korea, the Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles), Jonathan LeVine Gallery (New York), Charlotte Fogh Gallery (Denmark), Wolverhampton Gallery (England), and the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles. His work was included in the November 2011 issue of ARTFORUM Magazine, and he was selected for Bay Area Now 6 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He has been interviewed on NPR: All Things Considered, the Frame, KQED, and Creative Mojo Radio. Venom has lectured at the California College of Arts, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Southern Graphics Council, and the Oregon College of Art and Craft. pastly, he was the artist in residence at San Francisco’s de Young Museum and is currently visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Kim Alsbrooks is a Philadelphia-based artist. She was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1961, and lived briefly in Philadelphia during the 1990s. After living in Arizona for 10 years, and in Charleston, South Carolina, she returned to Philadelphia in 2007. She has had a number of solo exhibitions, and has recently received considerable attention for her White Trash Family series which includes over 600 miniatures, painted on discarded trash. She is one of the winners of the West Prize.
Alsbrook’s White Trash series challenges perceptions of the history of the civil war and associated class distinctions by creating miniature portraits of 18th century historical figures in graphite and oils on a base of discarded pieces of trash. Her work was sparked in part by an interest in the tradition of miniature paintings on ivory, and also by the comments of a women’s history professor friend on historical biases in art. She began developing the series in 2004 while living in Charleston, South Carolina.
Alsbrooks creates miniature portraits by creating an oval shape that is gessoed onto the trash. Then she draws the image on the gesso in graphite and paints it in oils before varnishing it. She says of the process of finding materials: “The trash is found flat, on the street. One cannot flatten the trash. It just doesn’t work. It must be found so that there are no wrinkles in the middle and the graphic should be well centered. Then the portraits are found that are complimentary to the particular trash.” One of her favorite times to pick up trash is after the yearly Philadelphia Mummers Parade.
Lisa Brawn ~ “I have been experimenting with primarily figurative, portrait genre painted woodcut blocks for over twenty years since being introduced to the medium by printmakers at the Alberta College of Art and Design. For the past five years I have been particularly interested in wildlife and especially wild birds. The most recent development in this series is the use of damask and geometric pattern wallpaper backgrounds. These patterns flatten the picture plane and create a visual intersection between the chaotic beauty of nature and the controlled beauty of design. Almost exclusively, I use reclaimed and salvaged wood, primarily Douglas Fir beams from the restoration of the century-old Alberta Block in downtown Calgary. This wood is interesting not only in its history, but also in that it is very rustic, with knots, nail holes, and gouges. I don’t make prints from the woodcuts, but prefer the tactile quality of the blocks themselves.
There are several ongoing portrait series that I work on, such as Quién es más macho? referencing popular culture personas and archetypes from 1920s silent film cowboys to 1970s tough guys. Other series include “Canadiana”, Sideshow, Telephone Company Transfers and Promotions, Take Me to Your Leader, and Honky Tonkin’ Honey, Baby. I also work on an ongoing series of glossy enamel icons and text-based Pop woodcuts, and in 2013 I installed a series of these on the exterior of private residences in inner city Calgary, in a pay-it-forward public art project called Pophouse.” – L. Brawn
Ryder Evan Robison Multi-disciplinary artist Ryder Evan Robison’s work has transgressed the age old American craft of pyrography taking his drawings and paintings to literally burning them by hand into the handles of antique tools and unique slabs of repurposed wood. With this new body of work he will be exhibiting on both the east and west coasts in the early months of 2015. After ten years working as an artist in New York City, Robison relocated to rural Saint Anthony, Idaho to further push his own DIY ethos. Robison had a tenacious career in NYC churning out solo and group exhibitions for his paintings and drawings at independent gallery spaces. His work was also commissioned by the likes of the ACE Hotel NYC, Hugo Boss, sold to the Museum of Arts & Design and to collectors in Copenhagen and throughout the United States and Canada.
Recently featured in Nylon Guys Magazine and on the JCrew blog, he was photographed by friend Daniel Mehrer where Robison’s trip from east to west was documented as he begun turning his 100 year old family homestead into a functioning artist studio and home base.