Author: tmorotmoro

Marcela Pardo Ariza / Conrad Guevara 
Burn Notice
March 10 – April 7, 2018
​Opening Reception: March 10, 2-5pm
​Essay by Ángel Raphael Vásquez-Concepción
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In the joint exhibition titled Burn Notice, the works by artist Marcela Pardo Ariza appropriate and analyze the forms of still lifes by painter Fernando Botero. The photographic prints by Pardo Ariza, are a pastiche that elaborates on the work by the Latin American Master. Pardo Ariza presents Botero’s burly fruits as discernible, juxtaposed fiery forms; a departure from the original purpose of offering a voyeuristic gaze of a grouping of tangible objects, and his superfluous critique of the privileges of the upper classes in his native Colombia.

In Pardo Ariza’s photographs, she appears to “harness” the calamitous power of fire; each of the works exhibited was composed by pasting together a variety of combustion stock photography. By suggestively detouring the evaluative, traditional paintings by Botero to convey her brand of satirical humor, Pardo Ariza eloquently queers the genre of still lifes, as well as the work and sociopolitical critique issued by him.

In connection, the whimsical mobiles by artist Conrad Guevara oscillate, like some post-apocalyptic orchids, between the mundane and the elegant. Made of a variety of brightly colored household items and painted surfaces, as well as other vernacular objects intentionally selected by the artist, each assemblage invokes both suspension and suspense -because of the hovering forms, and because of their apparent fragility as teetering expressions.

While each work by Guevara in Burn Notice is undoubtedly a sculpture, each is also a drawing and a painting, swaying and sprawling across the gallery space. The works are not still, aesthetically or politically. Like the work of artists associated with the Arte Povera movement in Italy, one could argue that the sculptures by Guevara contrast with the typical bourgeois minimalism related to contemporary capitalism and the field of technology, so pervasive in the Bay Area. Each work by Guevara is a fecund, sophisticated mashup of cultural and temporal references, banking on his personal multicultural experience and skills as a colorist. 

​Á.R. Vázquez-Concepción
Independent Curator

Marcela Pardo Ariza (b. 1991 Bogotá, Colombia) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Ariza is the recipient of the Tosa Studio Award and a Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award from the San Francisco Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been recently exhibited at R/SF Projects (San Francisco), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco, CA); De:Formal Gallery (New York, NY); Alter Space (San Francisco, CA); Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco, CA) and ProArts (Oakland, CA). Ariza works in the Programs and Pedagogy department at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and is a current member of the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure.

Conrad Guevara (b. 1986) lives in Albany, CA.  solo exhibitions include Kayrock, Brooklyn and City Limits, Oakland.  Recent group exhibitions include Lane Meyer Projects, Denver; Levy Art and Architecture, SF; Material Art Fair, Mexico City and 1599 Tennessee, SF.  Conrad is also one third of Bonanza with L. Williams and L. Tully with exhibitions at Interface Gallery, Oakland; di Rosa, Napa; Southern Exposure, SF and Recology Artist-in-Residence program, SF (forthcoming). 

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Chris Hamamoto / Jon Sueda
Flag Festival
January 20 – February 10, 2018
​Opening Reception: January 20, 2-5pm
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“The color beneath, which has been covered over, will begin to show through later, when what overcame it is questioned and scraped on, if not away.”
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tmoro projects is proud to announce an exhibition by Chris Hamamoto and Jon Sueda. The Flag Generator is an ongoing self-published project by Chris Hamamoto and Jon Sueda where they examine the iconography, symbolism, and graphic languages of nationality through generative flag graphics. This exhibition entitled Flag Festival, includes the full series of Flag Generator projects as well as a new edition that includes two flags and a limited edition booklet. In this new edition of Flag Generator, Hamamoto and Sueda explore the graphic flag elements from tmoro family’s history (the countries, states, and prefectures they have lived) to randomly generate three new works.

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Aspen Mays // Adam Schreiber
Sailing Under False Colors
​November 11 – December 9, 2017
​Opening Reception: November 11, 2-5pm
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“The color beneath, which has been covered over, will begin to show through later, when what overcame it is questioned and scraped on, if not away.”

​tmoro projects is proud to announce a two-person exhibition by Aspen Mays and Adam Schreiber.

Aspen Mays was born in 1980 in Asheville, North Carolina and received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Center for Ongoing Projects & Research in Columbus, Ohio and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her work has also been included in the recent exhibitions, State of the Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Tales from a Dark Room at the New Mexico Museum of Art, and Double Back: Photographic Reflexivity at the University of Maryland. She is currently Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts. Mays lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Adam Schreiber was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin (2007). Recent exhibitions include Same Sky at Ruffin Gallery, UVA, Phantoms in the Dirt, at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and Photography Sees the Surface at Higher Pictures, NY. He was a recipient of a 2014 Graham Foundation Grant for Living High, Letting Die and has participated in the Artpace Residency Program. He is currently Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Trinity University. He lives and works in San Antonio and Austin.

Please join us for the opening reception on November​ 11, 2-5pm.

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Rebekah Goldstein / Dana Hemenway / Mayuko Kono​
February 11 – March 11, 2017
​Opening Reception: February 11, 2-5pm
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​tmoro projects is proud to announce a group exhibition by Rebekah Goldstein, Dana Hemenway, and Mayuko Kono. Cut From the Left negotiates the tensions between color, form, and the fragmentation of the familiar.

Goldstein’s paintings depict imagined structures and spaces that rely on and create their own internal logic. Her sculptures – created as if plucked from the paintings into real time and space, assert a dialogue between imagined and actualized form.

Hemenway’s work continues her investigation of extension cords as aesthetically manipulated objects by using handcrafted ceramics as a substrate to weave prefabricated extension cords. Over the past three years Hemenway has employed craft techniques using extension cords, to elevate and transform the object’s value beyond the scope of its functionality. 

Kono’s sculpture are made of found metal racks and paper mache.  Her manipulations to the racks playfully soften and disrupt their inherent rigidity and repetition, creating new forms that are reminiscent of architectural models.

Please join us for the opening reception on February 11, 2-5pm.

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Gipe + Tell
Some Men
October 29 – December 9, 2016
​Opening Reception: October 29, 2016 2-5pm

Gipe+Tell is a collaboration of Oakland-based artists Lawrence Gipe and Sarah Tell.  Since 2013, G+T have maintained a joint studio practice, exhibiting as an art team and curating group exhibitions in the Bay Area.

In 2013, they organized and curated the exhibition MASAttack:LAX/SFO, which combined 30 San Francisco artists and 30 Los Angeles-based artists in a single-night, “relational aesthetic” group show.  In 2014, as part of the same series, G+T curated the San Francisco contingent of a 100-artist group show at the Torrance Art Museum. In 2015, they won Root Division’s Curatorial Proposal Grant to organize an exhibition called The Known Universe, an 8-artist show that addressed relationships between art, science and technology (opened March, 2016). Upcoming shows include FaultLine, an exhibition curated by Gipe+Tell for the Open Studio Tour at the Brewery Arts Complex in Los Angeles.

​G+T’s collaborative artwork is prompted by a mutual interest in ideological and authoritarian sites, along with shared experiences and narratives that inspire them to combine aesthetic forces. In 2015, Gipe+Tell exhibited together in an installation called Is This Normal? at InSpace Curatorial in the Felt Factory, San Francisco (curated by Hanna Regev). The piece contained images and work completed during a three-month stay in Leipzig, Germany, where they resided at the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei arts complex. G+T’s second exhibition, Some Men, will open October 29, 2016 at tmoro projects in Santa Clara, CA, and will include a large drawing by Gipe and sculptures by Tell.

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Nando Alvarez-Perez
Still Life/Nature Morte
September 24 – October 22, 2016
​Opening Reception: September 24, 2016 2-5pm

In Still Life/Nature Morte the unusual dichotomy between the English and French phrases acts as the launching point for considering the death of nature and its subsequent resurrection in a series of cultural artifacts. Presented as a group of traditionally framed photographs, photo constructs, industrially produced housewares, and ready made sculptures, in Still Life/Nature Morte the natural world itself is the stockpile of stockpiles, the raw material for generating cultural objects. Flora, fauna, stone, wood, and other natural materials, repurposed for human consumption via the act of representation, become the cultural accoutrement for living. Together the work asks the questions: if nature is suitably translated by and for culture, in what form can it survive and at what cost?

​From 2008-2011 Nando Alvarez-Perez studied the history of cinema at Hunter College in Manhattan where he graduated summa cum laude and received his BA in Film Studies and Special Honors from the Thomas Hunter Honors Program. In 2012 he spent two months in Santiago, Chile which resulted in his first self-published photobook, Piss/Cola/California. In 2014 he graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute where he was awarded the Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Photography. He finished his second book, Lacuna, while in attendance there. His work has been shown throughout the West Coast at the New Space Center for Photography in Portland, OR, the LA Center for Digital Art, and across the Bay Area. His work was featured in the group exhibition Salón Boricua as part of the 4th Poly/Graphic Triennial in San Juan, PR and in a solo exhibition at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY at the beginning of 2016. Most recently his work was exhibited in a two person show in Zurich, CH with artist Marcel Freymond and he published his third book, Alpine Shadow Black Madonna in August 2016.

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Sarah Thibault & Micah Wood
There’s no such thing as a free hand.
August 20 – September 10, 2016
Opening Reception: August 20, 2016 2-5pm

Essay by Leora Lutz

tmoro projects is pleased to present “There’s no such thing as a free hand.” an exhibition of painting, drawing and sculpture by Sarah Thibault & Micah Wood. Sarah Thibault’s artwork for this exhibition, drawings on paper and sculptures made of provisional materials like cardboard and aluminum foil, investigates the quiet trauma of the everyday: injustices felt only by the invisible and the silenced. Among her subjects are the homeless population in San Francisco- people who are cast out and living at the fringes of the city; and women aging in a culture where youth and beauty are valued over experience or agency, and where they are often denied ownership of their reproductive choices. While the challenges faced by each group are unique, there is a common thread of powerlessness and a loss of humanity that is shared. Engaging a surrealist approach to materials and humor as access points into challenging subject matter, the work attempts to bring light to the issues that haunt our culture from the shadows.  

Micah Wood’s small paintings on panels and reproductions of original posters offers a chance for the viewer to think about the current conflicts in the US and abroad. His use of posters by the French group “Atelier Populaire” draws upon the political context of France in the 1960’s, a time that is eerily similar to the American political landscape of today. Atelier Populaire posters were made for the May 68’ protests in Paris and primarily produced at the Beaux-Arts academy. The artists were addressing issues such as capitalism, fascist governments, consumerism and immigration, among other things. These artists decided to de-authorize the posters, making them available for mass reproduction— a nod to a more Marxist way of distribution. Wood felt a particular resonance with these posters while he was living in Paris this past year. The radical notion of giving up authorship of the “artwork” is also of particular interest to Wood in terms of appropriation and a conflation between political texts and painting.

Leora Lutz has written as essay as a response to the concepts in Thibault and Wood’s work. Through studio visits to view their work in progress, and conversations about recent overarching thoughts and ideas, Lutz has observed and documented thematic relationships in the two artists’ work, specifically: Economy, Faciality and Dwelling. Weaving theoretical links with personal narrative and wit, the essay creates an alternative read to the work, remarking on the notion that art as a springboard to foster energy and dialog beyond the visuals.

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Maysha Mohamedi & Tamra Seal
“All Summer in a Day”
March 12 – April 9, 2016
Opening Reception: March 12, 2016 2-5pm

Born in Los Angeles in 1980, Maysha Mohamedi earned an MFA from California College of the Arts (2011) and a BS in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego (2002). Prior to enrolling in graduate school, she worked as a researcher in molecular neuroscience where she studied the neural basis of addiction. She has exhibited widely in Northern and Southern California, including exhibitions at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco, Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles, and the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. She is the recipient of several awards and residencies, ranging from a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Tokyo, to an AICAD New York Studio Residency. Her work has been profiled in The Huffington Post, KQED Arts, and SF Arts Quarterly.

Tamra Seal’s light oriented sculptures have form drawn from cinematic imagery. Referencing telephone booths, swimming pools and flying saucers, Seal fabricates her sculptures with synthetic materials in fluorescent colors creating works that are otherworldly, strange and affective. Seal was originally trained as a painter at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Turning to large scale sculpture/installation, she earned an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. Engaged in a hybrid practice, Seal creates three-dimensional works and often proceeds to photograph and animate them towards a sculpture-photo-meld. Oscillating between 2D and 3D perceptual phenomena, her work challenges the viewer to contemplate their individual sensory experience. Recent exhibitions include 2 x 2 Solos: Pro Arts, Ever Gold, Interface and City Limits galleries. Seal lives and works in Oakland.​

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Now, Here and Everywhere
Miriam Hitchcock & Matthew Weston Taylor
May 30 – June 20, 2015
Opening Reception: May 30, 2015 3-5pm

Miriam Hitchcock was born in San Francisco and grew up on the peninsula. She completed a BFA at University of California at Santa Cruz and received an MFA in Painting from Yale University. Hitchcock has taught painting, drawing and design at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design and Cornell University. Returning to to live in Santa Cruz in 1990, she has instructed courses at Stanford University and San Jose State University, and was member of the Art faculty at University of California Santa Cruz from 1992 to 2012. Hitchcock has led studio courses in Rome, Italy through the Cornell University Dept of Art and Architecture, and later with The American University in Rome, in conjunction with University of California at Santa Cruz.

Working in painting, drawing and animation, her imagery and working process are informed by the inherent displacement and fragmentation of contemporary life and a fascination with the experience of time.

Matthew Weston Taylor was born in Stockton California.  He received a BFA from San Jose State University in 2008 and an MFA from the University of California Davis in 2011.  Working primarily with painting and drawing, Matthew teaches at Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA and San Jose State University in San Jose, CA.  He lives with his wife and daughter in the Bay Area.

The new freestanding sculptural works are based on paintings and drawings that Taylor has been making over the last several years. The imagery and compositions pull directly from the two-dimensional lexicon that feels both personal and enigmatic. Images that at one time referenced other objects become objects in themselves, sometimes retaining their references and sometimes becoming abstracted independent forms.

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Luca Nino Antonucci & Kate Bonner
“Subject to Change”
April ­18 – May 16, 2015
Opening Reception: April 18, 2015 3-5pm
Curated by Evan Reiser

Luca Nino Antonucci lives and works in San Francisco, California. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and is a resident artist at Basement. He is co-founder of Colpa Press, an independent publishing and design company specializing in art books. He has exhibited his own work widely in San Francisco, New York and Berlin.

Kate Bonner received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2012. She lives and works in Oakland, California. In 2013, Bonner was included in NextNewCA, a survey of select California MFA graduates at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. She has exhibited at The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, Luis De Jesus Gallery, Et al Gallery, Queens Nails, The Popular Workshop, Important Projects, Paris Photo LA, and NADA New York, among others.

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