Eff
Solo Exhibition
June 24-July 30, 2016
Romer Young Gallery
San Francisco, CA

Eff – shorthand for effigy and also short-shorthand for the colloquial “f,” as in fuck – leads these new works in a summoning of states of passion, self-possession, and responsive activity.

While some works in the Eff series are direct tributes to actual individuals (track star Flo Jo, poet/activist Adrienne Rich, activist/librarian Barbara Gittings), the works in this exhibition focus less on individuals and more on states of being. Colorfully loud and wall-based, the works employ textile processes such as dyeing, printing, masking, patterning, negative and positive image construction, garment construction and re-construction. Traditions of Icon painting serve, secularly, as an underpinning for these works to be (about) ways of being in the world.

Formal relationships in the works test out metaphors of margins and centers. Time-shifts are evoked in works that are “branded” – much like a tattoo on skin – with logos and dates that span a past and future timeline. In some works an ancient Neapolitan symbol for protection is employed in the service of this time-travel (much in the way a medium asks for protection when dealing with the spirit world). This looking backwards is not motivated by nostalgia but rather by a need for models, comrades, and a wider understanding for dealing with our current troubling times.