Divisadero Community Gallery Presents: Gold Love Standard

Divisadero Community Gallery Presents:
Gold Love Standard
Featuring: Edward S. de Leon
Exhibition Dates: July 16th – August 31st 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday July 16th 2009, 6 – 9pm

June 23, 2009 – Divisadero Community Gallery presents Edward S. de Leon’s first solo exhibition entitled “Gold Love Standard”, a reinterpretation of illuminated manuscripts in the context of love and money. The exhibition will run from July 16th through August 31st, 2009. The gallery invites the public to attend the opening reception on Thursday July 16th from 6pm – 10pm.

With this series de Leon has created modern-day, deconstructed illuminated manuscripts that blend old and new calligraphic elements. The Zen-like surface of each piece is complicated by the almost ritual process of obsession and destruction that went into their production.

The artist compulsively rewrites unrequited love poems over and over until words and letters overlap and dissolve into the background losing their meaning altogether. The first letter of each poem is outlined in calligraphic script and then filled in with crushed glass – the product of a cathartic hammer. The juxtaposition of shattered glass with careful letterforms represents the possibility of sublimating pain and anger through containment and control.

In addition, de Leon includes small patches of 22 karat gold leaf for its brilliance and durability. Real gold leaf never tarnishes. Gold also goes up in value in the event of a disaster and used to back paper money. Today, many of us have begun to question the real worth of money. This exhibition attempts to examine the ways in which our present "bling" culture -boom, bust, and bailout- informs our intrinsic human values such as love, honor, and duty.

The Divisadero Community Gallery is located at 537 Divisadero between Fell and Hayes. For more information, visit www.divisaderocommunitygallery.blogspot.com or email Jayna Swartzman at J_Swartzman@yahoo.com

Prett/Tough

Exhibition: June 4th - July 10th 2009
Opening Reception: June 4th 2009 6pm- 9pm
Featuring: Nikki Levine and Jessica Katzki

Pretty/Tough: The Life of a Teenage Girl project is a collection of portraits that illuminates the complexity of the teenage experience. This project is conceived by Nikki Levine (photography instructor at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay) in collaboration with her student Jessica Katzki.

The goal of this project is to explore and reveal the inner emotional experience of being a teenage girl today and to translate those feeling into a visual medium. This is achieved by enabling each subject to feel comfortable within herself and by honoring exactly who she is right now.

Nikki Levine and Jessica Katzki selected 12 students from JCHS who they felt embodies the Spirit of the teenage girl- either in their personality or unique physical attributed. Everyone of them was required to fill out a questionnaire that gave them an opportunity to think about themselves both subjectively and objectively. The girls were asked what they like about themselves, their comfort level about how they look, if they felt the fit in, and where they want to be photographed.

It Was and Remains

Featuring: Elizabeth Ribera and Megan Diddie
Exhibition dates: May 3rd – May 24th 2009
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 9th, 12pm – 3pm

“Oh, it was, and remains a source of great and terrible wonder.”
- Humbert Humbert

Elizabeth Ribera and Megan Diddie investigate ruins, by-products, and vestiges in an effort to understand our relationship with the past. Using art as a creative lens, employ mixed media, photography, and works on paper, to make sense of our skeletons reconcile our organic fate.

Elizabeth Ribera revives the intersection of art and science in the tradition of the Wunderkammer -- an encyclopedic collection of objects whose categorical boundaries can variously be defined, as natural history, geology, archeology, ethnography, historical relics and works of art according to the whims of the collector. By re-contextualizing traditional photography, found objects, biological material and mixed media into a cabinet of curiosities, Ribera challenges traditional taxonomy by collecting and organizing relics and specimens according to her individual will and personal interest.

Ribera’s collection demonstrates how humans, as voyeurs, deliberately manipulate found-evidence in an effort to resolve the natural world with human subjectivity. It is her hope, that by ‘knowing how to see’ our natural world perhaps we will be inspired to preserve what we have left, and she don’t mean in formaldehyde!

Megan Diddie’s work presents a psychological excavation of a land buried among the sticky lobes of the mind. A tension mounts between the land, its inhabitants, its tumors, artificial limbs, industrial outgrowths, progeny and predecessors, until eventually the world consumes itself with a chaotic tremor and vanishes beneath the fault lines to fester and reform.

E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion and notions of solipsism inform Diddie’s most recent work. She explains "Thinking about this idea has made me more aware about where my ideas come from and how they are shaped. My own expectations, arising from imagination, knowledge, and personal experience, are not expectations in the sense of hopes I have for the future but rather expectations created in the past and informing the present which have an indefinite impression on the way I perceive things. The work in this show is born of ideas which arose when expectation created an illusion, a discursive thought, or an intense impression that went on to inspire a visual idea or aided in the process of making."

Making Space

Featuring District 5's Peter Max Lawrence, J Morris, and Jeff McElroy
Exhibition: March 5 - April 2 2009
Opening Reception: March 5th 2009, 6pm- 9pm.

Previously a vacant store-front (and before that, a Money Mart) the Divisadero Community Gallery has been temporarily donated to the neighborhood as a proto-exhibition space for what we hope to be a sustainable arts incubation program in District 5. The shows title, “Making Space”, announces the need for community based response to San Francisco’s developing alternative arts scene. The exhibition itself is a big THANK YOU to D5 property owners, community leaders, and neighbors for supporting and encouraging local art.

Making Space will include three emerging artists working in a variety of mediums. Photographer Jeff McElroy will display select images from his upcoming book project, The Deleted Scene. J Morris will present mixed media collages that reflect a confluence of 90s skate art, comic books and graphic design. A veteran alternative arts organizer, Peter Max Lawrence’s will present oil paintings and conjure environments rich in texture and possibility.

The opening reception will be held in conjunction with the Divisadero Art Walk on March 5th and will be a participatory event. Visitors are invited to take part in the exhibition through various fun and engaging activities led by the artists themselves.

Her

Featuring Stevie Verroca, Art Van Kampen, Aubrienne Greene, Dani Spinks, Bob McIntyre
Exhibition: December 11 - March 1st 2009.
Opening Reception: Thursday, December 11th, 2008: 6:00pm – 9:00pm.
In collaboration with: The Other Shop and On the Corner.


Divisidero Community Gallery presents Her, a group exhibition featuring painting, photography, print, text, t-shirt design and home-grown cuisine. Her - as subjective pronoun and indicative object - explores the actuality of “woman” as a person and the concept of “woman” as a symbol of beauty and desire.

Trained as a fashion photographer, Stevie Verroca translates vanity and commercialism into transcendental meditations on identity and place. In this series, Verroca focuses on the “fashionable woman”. A female figure, fitted in Marc Jacobs, traverses the moniker of Motherhood- Nature- only to discover, in her infinite horizons, a boundless and Martian indifference.

In an additional series, lust inevitably leads to repression and the Adult Section becomes the Confessional. Searing Biblical tradition, Van Kampen rediscovers Eve as a wholly liberated individual, the apple biter – the rebel.

While printmaking is traditionally associated with mass reproduction and commercial spectacle, Aubrienne Greene’s self portraits redefines this practice through personal narrative. Through solipsism, she embraces both her extant beauty and her inner depth.

Supplementing the artwork on opening night only, local t-shirt designer Danni Spinks will collaborate with writer/comedian Bob Mcintyre, to channel a distant and difficult relationship through “Tina.” Bob’s wayward alter ego will materialize through puffy-paint and text to remind us that there’s a little Tina in everyone. In response to Freudian analysis and commodity fetishism, the curator has invited members of The Other Shop collective to contribute memorabilia and vintage collectibles, time honored by theoreticians as surrogates for oedipal desire and castration anxiety. Of course the objects are for sale; the women are not.