Category: gallery

ATA Window Gallery Presents:
Alice Combs, Three horizons in a neon sky
December 1 – 31, 2022

Drawing inspiration from natural history museum diorama displays, I’m positioning my creature-like vinyl works in the ATA window space interacting in a neon-backdropped environment to tell a fictional story about the plastic-based nature we are living in now and will continue to see. The placement of creatures in the scene signifies something about their role in the environment–how they fight, reproduce, get energy, and sense their surroundings–including the people of Valencia Street. The vinyl creatures become in this scenario like the taxidermied specimens meant to tell onlookers something about life from the past, about the individuals that didn’t survive.

Another important element of dioramas are their subtly curved background paintings which often set the horizon, atmosphere, and time of day for the scene. The neon cloth backdrop of this scene is anything but subtle, and includes three lines of cloud-like ink-bled cloth marking three horizons instead of one. The multiple horizon lines suggest an uncertainty of multiple futures…is a plastic nature where we’re headed? Is it already here? Will it be here for thousands of years to come?

The vinyl sculptures body of work uses reclaimed materials from my day job as a sign maker. Choosing mostly self-adhesive vinyls from color test swatches, miscuts, misprints, and excess, I sculpt densely-layered forms. The forms appear as both whimsically-colored creatures and as folded, curved, and bound bodies. In the process of layering vinyl, I often create short-term rules about patterning and randomness but then change my mind like a picky client. With these sculptures, the relationship between creativity and survival is shown as strained, playful, and subversive all at once.

About the artist
After a 90s childhood spent in Rochester, NY and after completing a biology degree in 2008, Alice Combs moved to San Francisco for an MFA. With a little bit of research and a little bit of humor, she works in diverse–mostly scavenged– media from sculpture to drawing to ephemeral barely-there installations of hair, highlighting the breakdown of everyday rules and objects. She lives, works, and gardens in San Francisco in an intentional community with others who believe art is worth doing.

April 1 – 29, 2022

ATA Window Gallery

The Echoes series consists of fractal-like forms painted on plywood. Multi-surface shapes are reimagined and rendered on a single plane, whilst exploring the dimensionality of the larger installation space. Smaller framed artworks from the Amplification series are affixed onto these new colorscapes. The palette is a nod to recent interior design trends, intermixed with found paints from renovated Victorian homes—an embrace of contemporary and historic aesthetics in the Bay Area landscape. The Echoes series was presented at Minnesota Street Project’s Staging Gallery and ATA Gallery on Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District.

The Echoes series is on view at ATA Gallery’s window space on Valencia Street until April 29th. This body of work consists of energetic, fractal-like forms painted on plywood, reimagining three-dimensional shapes on a single plane. The artworks, suspended from four surfaces of the installation space, integrate smaller framed pieces from the Amplification series into their larger colorscapes. This palette is a nod to contemporary interior design trends, intermixed with found paints from historic Victorian homes.

ARTWORK TITLE

SF No. 63, Echoes

ARTWORK DETAILS

SF No. 63, Echoes Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4, Amplification series, plywood, house paint, color sample cards, graphic tape, Canson millimeter paper and customized frames, 2017 – 2022

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Portuguese-American artist Mário Pires Cordeiro experiments with media and color as he explores the interaction between art and design, with a larger intention to comment on the interwoven relationship between visual art and functional objects. His practice is deeply rooted in the theme of color—unpacking the symbolic and cultural meanings imposed on it in contemporary society by sourcing colors from trends and design forecasts as well as from particular environments or publications.

Born and raised in Portugal, Pires Cordeiro received his B.A. in Fine Art Painting from Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa before moving to the United Kingdom to pursue further studies. An awardee of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation grant, Pires Cordeiro earned an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Art and Design at the University of the Arts London, where he later pursued a PHD as well.   

He exhibited internationally and collaborated in different countries such as Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Spain and the United Kingdom. Over the course of his thirteen years in London, he was awarded the Arts Council England Grant, the Arts Council England Awards for Artists prize and the European Leonardo d’ Vinci Grant Award. His work has been exhibited in museums, art fairs, galleries, independent art projects, and commercial spaces. Pires Cordeiro regularly collaborates with architects, designers, writers, musicians and scholars. He moved to San Francisco and established MPC Studio in 2015.

CONTACT DETAILS AND INQUIRES

w mpcstudio.co

in @mpc.studio

fb MPC Studio

ln Mário Pires Cordeiro  

m +1 415 999 9586

e info.mpcstudio@gmail.com

Yi Martin lives in San Francisco, but actively draws on her Korean immigrant roots in her practice. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and self-taught weaver, who characterizes her work as a conversation between convention, art, utility, adornment, material, light, solidity, and space. Recently, Yi Martin received a grant by the Danish Arts Council to exhibit her monofilament sculptures in Aarhus, and she completed residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Textilsetur, and the Space Program. Additionally, she has exhibited at The Textile Center in Iceland, Ovartaci in Denmark, Nationale in Portland, Roundweather in Oakland, and The Berkeley Art Center.