addendum

"When you first see a new picture you are very careful because you may be staring at van Gogh's ear." Rene Ricard 

Carletta Sue Kay sings

photos Michelle Guintu

November 2011

Keep It Cherried, a two-person exhibition featuring artists Michelle Guintu and Joe Roberts. The show marked these San Francisco artists’ first exhibition at the Backroom Gallery, brought together based on their shared impulse to create through their own obsessions. Based on inherently introverted personal infatuations, the artists presented painting, drawing, and low-budget assemblage. 

Making something out of nothing is a prime artistic act. Neither harbor pretensions about their work or the impetus that pushes them to create. 

Michelle Guintu combines facets of cultural identification and transcendent personal expression, without polish or refinement. Everyday cultural detritus (R. Kelly, McDonalds, Sonic The Hedgehog, canon of Abstraction) realize new potentials in their transformations. The collusion of the discarded distills a Lynchian consciousness, rendering a surreal and nightmarish craft.

“Joe Roberts is a stoney-eyed, scrapped out genius and he’s done art for some of my favorite records in recent memory besides. I can’t exactly say he throws wild parties, yet somehow I’m always at his house when they happen. He’s not allowed inside any bar that I’ve ever tried to meet him at. Yet somehow he’s like the giggly heart of it all, speaking out of the side of his mouth like “you need to be IN on this shit”, like somehow halfway through a pudding-pack he just figured out the connection between Hanna-Barbera and the JFK assassination.” —Matt Jones

Organized by Daniella Fernandez Murphy xo