ARCHEOfacts
January 31st - February 24th, 2007

MMGalleries is pleased to announce the first exhibit of the new year by introducing three new artists, David Buckingham, Robert Larson, and Will Marino, and reintroducing Don Porcella. All of the artists in the show work with archeological finds of our modern culture, transformed into new concepts.

The bulk material of Will Marino’s pieces is made up of old dartboards that he finds at flea markets and at the local bars where he plays darts. In his work, the long paper strips that compose a dartboard are first uncoiled, then rewound and
either packed into frames, or wound into discs, bowls, cones, domes, and arches. When the concentric rings of a dartboard are rewound, new patterns emerge--intricate spirals and circles, numbers and text that create landscapes, patterns, constellations, and abstract compositions. With this improbable, discarded material, Marino creates painterly images and objects that reference the movement and flow of water and air, the sparkle of a night sky, mathematical obsessions, chance and probability. Will Marino lives in Santa Cruz and is the recipient of the 2006 Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship, Santa Cruz, California.

Wanderlust- David Magnusson, Steve Wrubel, Steve Hough
May 18th - June 20th

Photographers David Magnusson and Steve Wrubel turn their trained lenses to artistic endeavors on their travels around the world, celebrating foreign landscapes and inspiring a sense of Wanderlust. Successful in the commercial arena, these two photographers travel in to new realms with their distinguished artistic ventures. David Magnusson’s tiled photographs bring to mind the mute observation of the outsider in a foreign landscape. The unique process and materials used in Magnusson’s work, along with the division and reconstruction of the image, serves to remove these photo-based images from the world of traditional photography. His has been exhibited in Southern Exposure Gallery’s juried exhibition, 2003, and at Modernbook Gallery, Palo Alto, and joins us from his studio in San Francisco.

Steve Wrubel takes a break from shooting in Ecuador, Costa Rica, Belize, Mexico, Italy, Hawaii and the American Southwest to share his recent travel image innovations. Wrubel’s first one-man show, “Delicately Tough”, was a
triumph in Boston at the Kidder-Smith Gallery in 2004. He returns to the Bay Area, a place called home along his exhaustive travels to exhibit a series of large format works that impart a glimpse into Wrubel’s extraordinary lust for life and the open road.

Steve Hough provides us with the sorbet between rich courses with his pieces that share the smooth aesthetic of Magnusson and Wrubel, and further seduce the eye with color-shifting car paint and a meditative illusion of the movement of rippling water.

Rex Ray, New Work
February 16- April 14, 2006

The widely celebrated, prolific San Francisco artist Rex Ray opens an exhibition of new works at Michael Martin Galleries. You have seen this colorist’s botanical arabesques: he has caught your eye all over San Francisco in the most sophisticated locales, including the Slanted Door and the W San Francisco. Rex Ray’s stunning design genius has brought him to the attention of the most judicious culturati: he has designed for David Bowie, Matmos, Bill Graham Presents as well as Apple, Sony Music, City Lights Publishers, among many others. His collage work, paintings and drawings have been exhibited in major museums and galleries world wide, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Michael Martin Galleries, Gallery 16, New Langton Arts, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Rex Ray’s exhibition at Michael Martin Galleries will feature the breadth of his works, from his slick resin pieces, rich canvases to an installation of hundreds of his collage source material, previously installed at the Yerba Buena Center. A favorite of savvy collectors and design aficionados, join Rex Ray and his long time gallerist Michael Martin at the Artist’s reception Thursday, February 16 from 6pm to 8pm. If you miss this event, make your appearance at a closing party at the W San Francisco, Thursday, March 30 from 7-9PM

Henry Jackson, New Paintings
November 9th - December 16th 2005

Although Jackson is typically known for using the Human form as his catalyst for exploration, his new paintings suggest further complexity in his figurative ambiguity.Landscapes mutate between environmental and figurative fragments that seem void of human content or reference but rather suggest the fertility of nature and it's unsettling energy.Oil and raw pigments suspended in wax add to the unfolding history of imagery shrouded in diaphanous layers of medium.

Henry Jackson was born in San Francisco and graduated from the Calfornia College of Arts and Crafts in 1986 with a BFA in painting. He currently resides in San Francisco. Jackson has not only exhibited with Michael Martin Galleries, but
he also participated in solo and group shows at Trillium Press in Brisbane, The Broadbent Gallery in London, , Conduit Gallery in Dallas and Toomey Tourell and Limn Gallery in San Francisco and Smith Anderson Edition in Palo Alto. In addition, Jackson has received a number of prestigious awards, and his works are in several public as well as private collections.

SPRAWL
June 9th- July 8th 2005

A collaboration between HMG and Ampersand International Arts, the exhibit features painting, sculpture, works on paper, video and mixed media curated by three artists. Whether through irony, awe, empathy, detachment or fear, all works in SPRAWL examine a range of visual interpretations of the urban and suburban landscapes.

SPRAWLMEDIA:
painting, sculpture, work on paper, photography, video, mixed media

ARTISTS:
Clark Buckner, Matthew Cusick, April Gertler, David Hamill, Val Imus, Jason Jagel, Jason Kleidosty, Steve Lambert, Sean Mc Farland, Jeff Morris, Ben Peterson, James Sansing, William Swanson, JP Villegas, Lee Walton, Heidi Zumbrun

SPRAWL is collaboration between Michael Martin Gallery and Ampersand International Arts, who invited California artists Robert Gutierrez, Amanda Hughen, and Jennifer Starkweather to curate a group show based on the core of their own artwork. The exhibition will be held at the Haley Martin Gallery in San Francisco, and is on view from June 9 – July 8, 2005.

SPRAWL will also be exhibited at Ampersand International Arts’ sister space in Paris, France in the Spring of 2006. Robert Gutierrez, Amanda Hughen, and Jennifer Starkweather have curated SPRAWL based on ideas present at the core of their own artwork. They have included artists whose works address issues of
man-made environments, isolation, alienation, and defining and controlling space and reality in the American cultural context . The exhibition features painting, sculpture, work on paper, photography, video, performance, and mixed media.
Whether it is through irony, awe, empathy, detachment or fear, all the work in SPRAWL examines a range of visual interpretations of the urban and suburban landscapes. The exhibition features painting, sculpture, work on paper, photography, video, performance, and mixed media. Whether it is through irony, awe, empathy, detachment or fear, all the work in

SPRAWL examines a range of visual interpretations of the urban and suburban landscapes.

For Example
December 4-31, 2003

"For Example"
A show of recent work by architects, artists, designers, and writers teaching first-year Core studios at California College of the Arts

Guest curator: Jane Martin, California College of the Arts

All proceeds from sales of artwork go to support the MMG Foundation's Community ArtReach Program focused on bringing art and visual literacy to San Francisco's elementary school students. The thirty creative professionals showing in For Example are collaborators in the education of first-year students at California College of the Arts (formerly California College of Arts and Crafts). As teachers of studio practice in the Core program, we impart skills and concepts, and facilitate artistic exploration for students of all majors. Practicing in a variety of media from drawing and sculpture to video, design, and architecture, the faculty teaching in Core represent CCA's eighteen undergraduate programs. Many of us also teach within a specific discipline, at upper-division undergraduate and graduate levels. In the Core classroom, we often refrain from showing examples of our work to students in order to sidestep the issue of stylistic mimicry -- to support students' engagement in their own creativity, rather than encourage production in the manner of their instructor. There is, however, value in acknowledging the presence of the lessons we teach in our own work. Frequently, what we emphasize in the classroom connects very directly to what we do in our own studios. To that end,
this brochure offers three lenses for viewing the work in For Example: Technique, Concept, and Outside Influences. These encompass an emphasis on the mastery and innovation of methods, cultivation of ideas forming the basis of
creative investigation, and acknowledgment of inherent characteristics and personal curiosities that serve as guides and motivators. While these and other aspects are present in each piece, the artists' statements are an invitation to
look more closely at select thoughts, issues, and generating forces behind the work.

The presence of this show in the Michael Martin Galleries is of particular relevance as it is the mission of the MMG Foundation to support arts education at the elementary school level within our community. Many thanks to Michael
for her contagious enthusiasm for extending the promise of the arts to our children -- a critical link to our collective creative future.

Jane Martin
California College of the Arts

Hans Dieter-Schaal
November 6-November 28, 2003

Hans Dieter-Schaal works as an architect, scenic designer, sculptor, exhibition designer/architect, landscape architect, and writer. He lives in Attenweiler, Germany and designed the San Francisco Opera's new production of The Barber
of Seville.All proceeds from the opening-night event and sales of artwork throughout the exhibition will go to support the San Francisco Opera's education programs, which reach over 40,000 children and adults annually, and Michael Martin Gallery's Adopt-a-School program focused on teaching elementary school children to think, learn and communicate through art education.

Co-sponsored by: SF Opera, MM Galleries, Toki Designs, Delicious Karma, SFMOMA, Gallo, Speedway Printing

Trillium Press
June 3-28, 2003

Prints and books by Trillium artists

TRILLIUM PRESS (www.trilliumpress.com), a group show, features works completed at Brisbane's Trillium Press since the year 2000. Trillium is a fine-art printmaking facility specializing in innovative, collaborative, multi-modal printmaking. Beginning in 1979 with hand lithography, Trillium has expanded to include silkscreen, intaglio, digital, and monotype. They print with artists at many different levels of career achievement, which is an unusual business model for a print shop. Late-career and emerging artists are all welcome. Each project is designed around the artist's individual vision.

Featured artists in this show will include Rex Ray, Henry Jackson, Enrique Chagoya, Tom Lieber, Kara Maria, Richard Barnes, Bathsheba Vechte, and Jeremiah Maddock. There will also be books by Heather Wilcoxon, Sandow Birk
(Inferno), William Wiley, Nathan Olivera, Tucker Nichols, and Inez Storer/Marie Dern.

The show will also feature works by Trillium Fund awardees Jason Jagel, Kirko, Jose Guinto. Hillary Williams, and Kathy Aoki. Over the years, Trillium has provided one scholarship per year for promising art students. The Trillium Fund has been receiving donations to augment this program since April 2002 and now awards eight scholarships per year. The idea is to give up-and-coming artists access to materials, techniques, and expertise that are usually only available to artists at the peak of their careers. In 2002, this scholarship, given to a senior at the California College of Arts and Crafts, resulted in his being awarded a full scholarship to Columbia for graduate school.

SPECIAL EVENT:
Please join us June 19 at 7 p.m. for the next Talk on Townsend, our Salon series, featuring guest speakers Richard Lang (president of Trillium Press), David Salgado (Trillium's founder and master printer), and Phil Sanders (Trillium's collaborative
printmaker). Lang will discuss the effects of science education on his own art and on art-making in general. Salgado and Sanders will talk about printmaking techniques such as monotype, lithography, and intaglio, as well as the concept of a limited edition and the ways in which digital technology is opening up a new world of printmaking.

Paint Junkies
April 1-May 29, 2003

PAINT JUNKIES, a group show, features the work of emerging and established artists who have in common an incurable addiction to paint. Continually experimenting and probing the boundaries of the medium, they perpetuate its grand tradition and celebrate its wonderful physicality.

Charles Eckart, established San Francisco painter, creates works that are multicolored, highly textural, and nearly abstract. His most recent "Ground Cover" series is inspired by direct observation of landscape.

Constance Harris' (San Francisco) paintings constitute a private ritual of markmaking. Using oil and wax, she develops an integrated, landscape-like fabric that is heavily layered and saturated with color. Her materials are sensuous and capture the light in unique ways; each painting appears to change with the time of day and the direction of the light.

Henry Jackson (San Francisco) uses oils, dry pigments, and wax to create his multilayered paintings. The finished works are dark and only vaguely figural, evoking more of the subject's soul than the physical body.

Ricardo Mazal's (New York) paintings depict transformative moments—the cusp that separates order from disorder, location from location, or one time period from another. He appears courtesy of Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery.

Carole Pierce (San Francisco) paints soft-focus landscapes that are filled with a sense of memory and longing, suggesting but never revealing a human presence in the scene.

Arngunnur Yr's (San Francisco) paintings are on one level an ode to nature (in many cases Iceland's majestic landscape) but they are also about the vision of ourselves that we, as humans, project onto nature.

Vidvuds Zviedris (Chicago), originally from Latvia and a recent graduate of Detroit's Center for Creative Studies, is a fast-emerging artist in the world of abstract expressionism. His paintings are almost overpoweringly luscious and thick.

Subtil(e)
February 7-March 25, 2003

Call it the art of understatement. A lost art, perhaps, in today's info-glutted world. A respite from the garish, the overpowering, the coarse, the media-saturated. Some of the artists in this show, like Linda Karshan (London), Rebecca
Haseltine (San Francisco), and Ritsuko Ozeki (Tokyo), utilize both a minimalistic, abstract style and a great economy of media. Karshan rarely uses anything but pencil on white paper to create her drawings. Most are ostensibly abstract, but sometimes call to mind a close-up view of woven cloth, or a cellular-level view of plant matter. Haseltine says she often draws with both hands, with her eyes closed. Drawing in darkness, perhaps ironically, is a way for her to engage more fully with the world within and without -- a total immersion in herself and her surroundings, transferred onto paper. But her drawings are also about things that remain ineffable, shadowy and hidden. Ozeki, a master of intaglio printmaking, also works mostly in monochromatic black-and-white. Her images are mostly of domestic scenes and pieces of intimate apparel; looking at her prints is a little like peeping in someone's window.

Other artists in the show, like Philippe Jestin (France) and Amanda Hughen (Berkeley), approach the title theme in a different way, employing unconventional and potentially messy materials but in a strictly controlled way; Jestin's mesquite charcoal is dirty and difficult stuff to work with, but his finished mosaic-sculptures are all about clean lines and understated textural detail. Their surfaces resemble polished wood, but they are infinitely more fragile than wood, with each tile painstakingly sanded down to fit seamlessly into the whole. Hughen, currently an MFA candidate at U.C. Berkeley, makes use of everything from wood to Plexiglass, resin, and contact paper to create her "construction- paintings." Each finished work includes both hand- and machine-made elements, and examines, in both a literal and metaphorical way, the essence of surface and structure.

Munson Hunt's (Santa Fe) mysterious, monolithic sculptures seem at first to follow in the abstract, minimalist tradition of Brancusi. But unlike Brancusi, who worked primarily in metal and loved perfect, regular surfaces, Hunt works in wood, shining her sculptures to a high gloss that shows off every crack, knot, and other irregularity.

Chongbin Zheng's (San Francisco) paintings are abstract in the western art-historical sense, but created using traditional Chinese ink techniques. Enigmatic and shadowy, their multiple layers seem controlled and uncontrolled, referential and non-referential, intentional and completely accidental.