Spray paint on wood, 20′ x 40′

As part of a larger building renovation, muralist Jonathan Wakuda Fischer designed a prominent “wall tattoo” of “modern graffiti-inspired art in the style of traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints.”

Combining the studies of traditional Japanese art with modern process and content, Fischer’s work seeks to address a post-globalized world as well as his own personal biracial history as a Japanese-American with a uniquely biracial aesthetic. He anachronistically combines Ukiyo-e woodblock prints – one of the first mass produced forms of pop art – with modern process of stencils and spray paint to create layers of homage to explore cultural dualities. In doing so, Fischer feels he is part of a centuries-old artistic discourse that has long addressed lineage, obsolescence, and appropriation.

Acryilc on Duralar, nylon pegs, shadows, 40″ x 84″ x 3″

Katy Stone’s Little Universe (burst boom, bloom) comprised of the delicate Duralar shapes in contrast with a dark grey wall. The installation triggers a range of associations from the macro-cosmic to the micro-cosmic. Spreading across the wall, spilling onto the floor, or cascading from architectural supports, Stone’s artworks are both Rorcharch tests of natural phenomena and rich harvests of line, shape and color. She pains on a variety of materials and layers the elements into sculptural assemblages and installations that blur the boundaries between drawing, painting, and sculpture – engaging viewers with their complex fluidity. Stone has exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vienna, The MacNay Museum, Boise Art Museum and alternative spaces including Suyama Space in Seattle.

C-print, each 55”75 (left to right)

1. 333 Brannan, SF, CA – Construction worker in action on the roof of the project.

2. 350 Mission, SF, CA – Testing of ‘Virtual Depictions: San Francisco’, a public art project by media artist Refik Anadol. The project consists of a series of parametric data sculptures that tell the story of the city and the people around us within a unique artistic approach for 350 Mission’s media wall in collaboration with Kilroy Realty Corporation, Mr. John Kilroy, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP Architects and DPA Fine Art Consulting.

3. 555 Mathilda, Sunnyvale, CA – Detail from the multi-day metal assembly, welding and installation of Jon Krawczyk’s massive red ribbon sculpture installation at Sunnyvale campus. Lauded for his ability to turn metal into large scale biomorphic sculptures that strike viewers as having their own ubiquitous presence, Krawczyk cuts, pounds, and welds sheets of stainless steel to fabricate these massive smooth, monolithic, curvilinear forms that almost look as though they were carved by a samurai slicing clay. Krawczyk’s sculptures highlight the massive physicality of making art objects from that material action of welding energy and matter with entropic force.

Mixed media on canvas on wood panel, dimensions variable 

Brazilian-born painter, photographer, and mixed-media artist Silvia Poloto is a prolific artist who has shown in an impressive list of venues during her career. She is best known for her lyrical abstractions on canvas and series of recent multimedia works on wood entitled Absence~/Presence; these pieces combine painting with digital imagery, both found and manufactured, in order to reflect on the psychology of illness and mortality. While the new works take on the serious themes of classical art, they retain Poloto’s masterly command of color, gesture and texture; they are sumptuously beautiful improvisations that have come together from the disparate elements filling the artist’s studio through the agency of Poloto’s intuition her perfect visual pitch. The mixed-media Observations paintings are brilliantly colored but modulated fields of acrylic paint inhabited by an assortment of visual events: sweeping brushstrokes in black and white, meandering lines, grids of dots, poured squiggles, and scrubbed-in blobs. They are reminiscent of various Abstract Expressionist painters such as Miro, Baziotes, Rothko, Motherwell, and Tapies but this is a synthesis that creates its own world. A variety of marks is presented close up to the picture plane in front of an aqueous, shadowy mass of color, as if floating on waves or emerged from chaos, but drifting slightly; a sense of temporality and change emerges from the sometimes odd and ambiguous shapes, which seem to breathe.