The Great Highway Gallery is pleased to present Unsafe at Any Speed. Installation and photography.
August 3rd – September 9th Reception Saturday, August 5th 6-9pm
About Steve Davis Steve Davis grew up and went to college in Charleston, South Carolina and currently resides in San Jose, California. Davis received his MFA from San Jose State University where he runs the metal arts facility for the Department of Art and Art History. Davis also teaches sculpture and small metals at various colleges around the South Bay. In addition to teaching, Davis maintains a prolific art practice. He is currently part of an artist team tasked with the production of a 20, life size figure sculptures for the Guadeloupe River Park and Conservancy in San Jose. His work varies from representational and figurative, to formal and abstract. Though a lot of his work is metal, Davis uses various media as needed to compliment the content of his work. His work is often commentary on social, political, and emotional aspects of society and the human condition.http://www.stevedavisart.com instagram @goofyfoot9196
Artist Statement What is it about old cars that make our nostalgic fantasies go into overdrive? It can be argued that new cars are simply better. New cars are safer, more ecologically and financially efficient, and have greater longevity. But still, there is something about those old cars that rouses the sense of a way we once were. There is something about those endless lines of chrome glistening over two toned paint and the loping rumble of a big block V8 that makes it easy to imagine sitting at the drive in with your sweetheart or driving down a desert highway with the wind blowing through your hair listening to Dion on the radio. There is an ideology hidden in our nostalgia for old cars. This ideology is the notion of American greatness. With this nostalgia comes thoughts of American technological, economic, and industrial might, as well as a sense of social order and patriotism. America of the 1950s is often thought of as the country at its most economically viable, most innovative, and most patriotic. Often forgotten in these reminiscent thoughts are some of the darker parts of American History. The 50s were also a time of segregation, vast gender inequality and prescribed rolls, McCarthyism, as well as little to no ecological conservation concern or practices. This underbelly of Americana is often forgotten when gazing upon the towering fins and the flashy grills that exemplify the cars of this time.
About Spencer Mack Born Spencer Maynard Mack in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 31st,1971. Spencer grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland. His early inclination to walk on railroad tracks and collect glass insulators strung along the abandoned telegraph lines would provide excellent shapes from which to develop basic drawing skills. The importance he places on the the play of water and light in his work evolved from a lifetime of summers spent at Watchic Pond in Maine. There the straight lines of houses and other man made things appeared to him to stand out from nature. http://spencermack.com instagram @spencermack @amagicstory
Artist Statement My work has long dealt with exploring the relationship of two colliding waves of energy. Be they solid against liquid or solid against fire, it is the initial impact of these bodies that is examined. Not unlike the way one’s perception of time slows during traumatic events; the study of the moments of grace preceding certain destruction are the pistons rotating the cam of my work. The focus of study revolves around the moment when relationships between time and scale seem to bend perception in their precarious union.
About the Gallery The Great Highway is a fine art gallery located in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset district. The gallery was founded by John Lindsey, a long time resident of the city with a deep appreciation for images and ideas that explore the intersection of land and water in contemporary work. The Great Highway Gallery’s mission is to seek, analyze, support, and promote the work of a diverse group of artists who seek sincere authenticity, challenge conventional thinking, amuse us, and push the boundaries of today’s creative media. To learn more about the gallery, visit www.thegreathighway.com and on instagram @thegreathighway.
The Great Highway 3649 Lawton St San Francisco, CA 94122
Contact: John Lindsey info@thegreathighway.com +1(415) 680-3891 Unsafe at Any Speed Steve Davis & Spencer Mack
The Great Highway Gallery is thrilled to present Fathoms of the Leviathan, new works from Ted Lincoln.
About the Artist Ted Lincoln was born in 1974 in Wearham, MA and currently resides in Gainsville, FL. Ted graduated with a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. This exhibition will include his Sumi ink on rice paper abstract landscapes and his Asian mother-of-pearl inlay lacquer works. Fathoms of the Leviathan is a visual inquiry of the classic American novel, Moby Dick.
Artist Statement I like to believe I have a grasp of my multi-faceted identity, forged in and through the context of my precise and often complicated time in history, the clashing of cultures that form my ever-changing understanding of the world, and the complex environments within and between which I move. Truthfully, it is more a contingent grouping of vexed notions, often elusive. My art practice has been in pursuit of a visual dialog of ideas, building a sense of who I am, and, specifically, what worlds being hapa spans. I have explored these convergences in two separate bodies of work.
The first has been working with abstract ink painting as an inquiry into the moods of landscape. I have also experimented with nontraditional modern materials to help integrate and therefore transform sumi ink paintings into objects of aluminum and automotive paint.
In the second and more recent body of work, I dive into traditional Asian mother-of-pearl inlay lacquer works, alongside the truly Floridian style of cypress wood folk art that harkens back to the era of my own childhood. Synthesizing these usually disparate media has allowed me to juxtapose seamlessly, both in form and content, my conceptions of millennia-old world mythologies alongside contemporary pop culture in an era of intensifying globalization.
This exhibit will be the first time that both bodies of work, which I’ve previously examined in distinct, parallel worlds, will now be brought together under one theme. Fathoms of the Leviathan is a visual inquiry of the classic American novel, Moby Dick. Moby Dick has loomed large in our collective history, but it also touches my personal history quite directly. Both the book and I originate from a small corner of Massachusetts, and the scene that introduces Ishmael, the narrator of the intricate novel that, like my artwork, unifies previously distinct genres, occurs at a site just a few miles from my own place of birth. The opening of the whaling trade for the first time between New England, the home of my father’s family for generations, and the islands of the Philippines, the home of my mother and her family, may have, in turn, been one of the vast yet subtle tides of history that led to my own creation.
These themes are more than personal, and have resurfaced with renewed energy and perhaps even urgency. The white whale and the rigors of the sea evoke universal ideas of obsession, greed, oceanic power, freedom, danger, global markets and cultural exchange, and all that is entailed in the perennial pursuit of man’s dominance over nature. There seems no better time and place to reconsider how one man’s dire internal conflicts can not only reflect, but also manifest, replicate, and even overwhelm the social and perhaps even natural world around him, leaving few to tell a true, whole tale.
Reception Saturday, April 1 6-9pm Exhibition March 30 – April 29
The Great Highway Gallery is thrilled to present The Horizon Line , ceramics and drawings by Georgia Hodges.
About the Artist Georgia Hodges is a working visual artist, small business partner/collaborator, and mother, living in San Francisco. She makes ceramic sculpture & pottery, as well as mixed media drawings. She graduated from California College of the Arts in 1997 with a BFA in ceramics. From 1999-2008 she ran an art gallery (Soularch Gallery), in the Outer Sunset district. She fondly refers to her ceramics studio as The Mud Room at Ocean Beach, where she invites other ceramic artists to gather and share their work and inspirations on a regular basis, cultivating a ceramics ‘collective’ of sorts. Her homestead, behind the studio, is a “work in progress’, and this collaboration with her husband Doug Jacuzzi (architectural designer and master builder), has, for better or for worse, turned into a lifestyle project. She currently teaches ceramics at SF Clayworks in San Francisco.
Artist Statement I notice the natural world in a state of ongoing adaptation. Nests are built on ledges, vines grow from cracks in buildings, sand dunes migrate. Nature’s presence, steady and persistent, is in constant pursuit of harmony. I learn the lessons of adaptation from nature. I notice the way nature responds to humankind’s irreverence. I’m heartened by the natural world’s ability to accommodate our laziness, our discards, our disregard. In my art, I look to express the beauty in that adaptation, in that grouping together, in the quiet, gentle adjustments. I try to create something that might occur in nature, that has a sense of order and building on itself over time. I work to express that sense of optimism that comes with assurance that renewal will occur. I’m attracted to small, simple details, to stark contrasts, to raw sounds and shapes. I choose materials that are delicate or bold. I strive to accurately reflect what I experience: a world that is drastic and full of contrast, that is tender and quiet; a world where the chaotic is intertwined with and even organized amid the steady, reliable presence of nature. The work for this exhibition, entitled, The Horizon Line, highlights our perceptions of things near and far. Our horizon line, out there, off our local Ocean Beach, is where the sea and sky meet, a seeming ‘edge’, that’s not really there. It is sharp some days, a clear division between the water and the air, and fuzzy and indistinguishable on foggy days. If we were to sail to it, we’d never reach it. It is a symbol of infinity. The work for this show expresses a variety of perspectives, often at once. Calling attention to the ocean, so expansive, yet diminutive in the hands of the fog, in the Ocean on Fog piece. Other pieces reference something that might wash up on the beach, reminding us of a kelp holdfast or something once used by humans, that resides below the horizon line. A drawing might reference the expansiveness of the sky and how similar it is to the expansiveness of microscopic algae living in the ocean water. The horizon line, in essence, calls attention to our tendencies to divide and organize. Its varied appearance reminds us of our diverse points of view, and its endlessness gives us a sense of infinite possibility. About the Gallery The Great Highway is a fine art gallery located in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset district. The gallery was founded by John Lindsey, a long time resident of the city with a deep appreciation for images and ideas that explore the intersection of land and water in contemporary work. The Great Highway Gallery’s mission is to seek, analyze, support, and promote the work of a diverse group of artists who seek sincere authenticity, challenge conventional thinking, amuse us, and push the boundaries of today’s creative media. To learn more about the gallery, visit www.thegreathighway.com.
The Great Highway is a fine art gallery and working studio featuring contemporary works in all mediums. The gallery has a deep appreciation for images and ideas that explore where lands meet water.
