RGB Forever - Opening reception this Friday, 6-10 pm

Exhibition dates: April 15- May 15, 2010
Opening reception: Friday, April 16, 2010, 6-10pm


Adobe Books Backroom Gallery is pleased to present RGB Forever, Parker Ito's first solo exhibition. The title refers to RGB color space, an additive color mode viewed on all computer screens in which red, green and blue, combine to create over 16 million different colors. RGB is also Ito’s metaphor for new mindsets and attitudes about contemporary culture that have emerged out of the pervasiveness of the Internet. For Ito, the Internet is an abyss of readymade artifacts open for excavation, interpretation, and reclamation. In the Backroom Gallery, he will present painting and video works in which Internet ephemera salvaged from both high and low Web culture is translated into new forms.


Curated by Katie Hood Morgan


Parker Ito lives and works in Berkeley, CA. Recently his work was exhibited at Roots and Culture Contemporary Arts Center, Chicago, and in New Wave, the Internet Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale. He also showed work in mybiennialisbetterthanyours.com for the 10th Lyon Biennale. He is co-curator of the online exhibition series Serial Chillers in Paradise at JstChillin.org. Visit his website at www.parkerkooito.com




Support for this project is provided by Southern Exposure's Alternative Grant Program.

Currently in the windows at Adobe Books: SALE (or, How High the Ocean)

"Fritos and Champagne" artist Dori Latman at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

TASTE! is an exclusive, all-sensory tour sure to give you something to talk about. Three Bay Area-based artists converge in YBCA's Grand Lobby Apr 6-11 for a site-specific, collaborative installation using food, art and conversation to respond to the exhibitions on view in our first floor galleries. Each day the menu take you somewhere new, as will the topics for discussion. TASTE! is FREE w/ YBCA Gallery admission, and includes an interactive salon hosted by NIKI KORTH, handcrafted spring lemon elixirs by DORI LATMAN and a global papaya excursion with Chef TA-WEI LIN, curator of the "cultural liberation" brunch at Doc's Clock.

Also on view in the Grand Lobby, unique furniture from select students in the graduate Furniture Program at CCA.

Dori Latman's Fritos & Champagne Part II: Dinner

Dinner can be solitary, in front of the television with a reheated slice of pizza. It can be on the go, with crumpled paper bags strewn across the back seat. It can be a meal shared with family and friends. Dinner, a live cooking event and exhibition, is a celebration of the moments when a simple plate of food becomes a landmark in one’s own life. The event and exhibition respond to the culinary and social means through which one is nourished. The exhibition includes drawings and video works. The live cooking event will showcase a three-dish menu freshly cooked by Radio Africa and Kitchen. Together, these pieces highlight a range of approaches to cooking dinner.

Chef Eskender Aseged, a Bay Area chef with over 20 years of restaurant experience, began Radio Africa and Kitchen by cooking meals for people out of his home. Though, Eskender’s project is of a scale larger than an intimate domestic space. He moves and adapts his operation for a variety of situations and places, from large dining halls, to outdoor spaces, to small cafes. It is those who participate in Radio Africa’s events that promote it. First, Dori Latman knew Eskender as her neighbor, though it was through word-of-mouth that she learned about his project.

Dori Latman's interest in Radio Africa and Kitchen relates to the series of vending carts that she has developed for art exhibitions, serving food and beverages to gallery visitors. Latman experiments with intersections of art, food, and business as a vehicle for fund raising and social networking. She creates multiple versions of the vending cart for different types of events. The foundation of this series has been built through experience in food service at cafes, bakeries, and outdoor festivals and with stretching the meaning of drawing and performance. The artist explores ideas of entertainment, consumption, labor, and culinary creativity. Learning about Radio Africa and Kitchen’s development and processes has been an invaluable education and source for inspiration.

Chef Eskender Aseged shares with Dori Latman's project the possibity to eat well in any space. In that spirit, he brings his nomadic kitchen to Adobe Books Backroom Gallery to celebrate a neighborhood with rich history, dynamic people, and delicious food.As stated on Radio Africa’s Website (www.radioafricakitchen.com): “RADIO AFRICA & KITCHEN is a nomadic restaurant with sustainable products and methods. The food is inspired by old world recipes of Mediterranean and Red Sea countries. The goal of Radio Africa is to create extraordinary meals out of organically grown ordinary ingredients. In the tasting menu we offer weekly, the theme is to create a nutritionally well balanced dinner by including seasonal vegetables, greens, grains, nuts, wild fish, shellfish and fruit.”

Many thanks to chef Eskender Aseged and Bi Rite Market for their generous donations of time and delicious food!

Skillat Hans: a play performed by MFA students from California College of the Arts

Currently on display in the windows of Adobe Books are props, costumes, and remnants from Skillät Hans, a play originally performed at PLAySPACE Gallery on March 25, 2010, by a class of MFA students from California College of the Arts.

Synopsis:
Skillät Hans is the story of a man with problems. He seeks pharmapoiticals to help him with his troubles, and winds up sleeping in the underground world of sweatshop production and human skinning. Skillät abandons life as a successful painter to make more socially conscious art. He befriends immigrant laborers and collaborates with them on a new body of work. Embroiled in kidney stones, brutality, stardom, pharmapoiticals and lavender, this smash-hit-sold-out-on-opening-night exhibition is set in current day New York City.


Some notes on process:
The product of a three-week intensive collaboration, Skillät Hans is a play in which the characters are themselves enacted by characters. An exercise in personality switching and empathy, and a conversation on modes of artistic production, the play is evidence of the rare but serendipitous “organically democratic” success. Each player contributed ideas, adding upon collective agreements, all accepted though imperfect but collectively permitted consensus. Working in such a manner—rushed, without stringent conceptual editing—this process yielded an oneiric portrait that repeatedly folds over upon itself. The discussion of dream states, the fulfilled “dream” of the artist’s success, and the nightmare of confrontation with the ethics of production are astutely explored alongside the cathartic draining of unconscious thoughts—eloquent, grotesque, taboo—to produce not only a narrative, but also a miasmic state.

Participants:
Georgia Carbone as Natasha Wheat as Dr. Natasha Wheat, the French Pharmapoitical Commercial star, Nancy, and the News Girl; Natasha Wheat as Kai Althoff as Skillät Hans; Kai Althoff as Rebecca Ora as Nadia, The Receptionist, and the Snake; Sasha Krieger as Matthew Waldbillig as the Pharmacist and the Father; Alex Wang as Sasha Krieger as Suo Chow and the Thing; Brigid Mason as Georgia Carbone with Kidney stones, as a drug addict and Becky; Matthew Waldbillig as Isaac Gray and the Boss, and Drunk Man with kidney stones; Rebecca Ora as The Table and Matthew Waldbillig with kidney stones

Music composed and performed by Jim Fairchild

Written by Kai Althoff, Georgia Carbone, Isaac Gray, Sasha Kreiger, Brigid Mason, Rebecca Ora, Matthew Waldbillig, Alex Wang, and Natasha Wheat. Organized with the assistance of Chrissie Bradley, Ted Purves, Arden Sherman, Maria Elena Ortiz, and Katie Hood Morgan

Glass gilding demo

Damon Styer presents a concise-yet-thorough demonstration of applying gold leaf to glass in the form of letters and numbers, for young and old alike, easy to understand in all but the mysterious chemical properties underlying its physical beauty!

Tuesday, 23 March, 2010
7pm - 9pm
$Free (donations accepted)

Custom-made political posters

As part of the It's a Sign show, sign painters Jeff Canham and Caitlyn Galloway will be painting free custom-made protest and political posters at the Adobe Books Backroom Gallery.

TONIGHT, Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
7:00 - 9:00pm
$Free (donations accepted)

Come by and get a poster...

It's a Sign

It's a Sign: New Bohemia Signs group exhibition

Caitlyn Galloway
Damon Styer
Jeff Canham
Josh Luke
Ken Davis

**Reception: Friday, March 12, 2010 7:00-9pm

Signs, like any kind of advertising, and most of design for that matter, employ aesthetic concerns to achieve directive ends, if not only to tell you where to go, then perhaps to elicit an emotional response, often one conducive to the more rapid flexing of your purchasing muscles. The "signs, signs, everywhere signs" that ever increasingly break up the scenery, whether or not they're even so bold as to call attention to their own physical beauty, typically do so on behalf of some corporate entity, big or small, wishing you to ascribe whatever design sense is evident in the sign, to the quality of their goods or services on offer. The "language" of signage, meanwhile, encompasses a constantly evolving and multiplying variety of materials and methods to communicate ornately complex nuances of meaning to a bewilderingly polyglot populace.

We sign writers, here at New Bohemia Signs, tend to focus more intently on some of the most rudimentary parts of sign language, or any language – the little squiggles, curves and strokes that form our alphabet. Our tool chest holds brushes, enamel, some gold leaf, and not much else. Individually and collectively, we harbor a cultured and intimate familiarity with, and to some extent, an abiding love for letter forms, which themselves take shape from the habits our limbs have fallen into, drawing and painting them again and again and again and again and again.

It's a Sign illustrates something of the path whereby our signs move from idea to sketch, to pattern, to painting; a show that makes apparent the relationship of letter forms to the arc our individual arms take, or to the way we each roll a quill between our fingertips; a show that celebrates, from amidst this digital era of limitless copiability, the joy of fine tuning the only copier that draws its current directly from our hearts. – Damon Styer, New Bohemia Signs

Exhibition dates: March 4- April 3, 2010

Curated by Devon Bella

Factorycompany: This

Adobe Books hosts Factorycompany
Thursday, March 11, 2010
7:00-9pm

Dori Latman

Fritos and Champagne:

three-part exhibition of cooking, recipes, conversation and food

Dori Latman

Appetizer: February 24-28, 2010
*Reception Friday, Feb. 26, 7:00-9pm

Dinner: April 5-10, 2010
*Reception Wednesday, April 7, 7:00-9pm

Dessert: May 17-23, 2010
*Reception Wednesday, May 19, 7:00-9pm

Beginning February 24th, in the Backroom Gallery, San Francisco artist Dori Latman explores the necessities and luxuries of food through drawing, writing and performance. Structured as a three course meal, Fritos and Champagne will take place as three related instances of eating activity – Appetizer, Dinner, and Dessert– with each course occurring in between the regular monthly gallery programming. The exhibition is part of Latman's larger body of work where she draws parallels between being in the kitchen and in the studio, between art and food.

For the first course, the Appetizer will show Mom's Cookbook Collection, where the artist has generated a gouache facsimile of each book cover numbering over 250 drawings. Also highlighted will be the context of the nearest bookshelves, the abundant cooking section at Adobe Books. Next, on April 7th, will be Dinner, a live cooking event and video installation, highlighting the subject of food at the intersection of art and life. Culminating on May 19th, the exhibition will present Dessert, emphasizing the conversations and social aspects of eating and cooking with a round table discussion. Invited guests will reflect on their experiences of art and food, particularly as both are processed and mediated experiences. As a result of the three course meal, participants and visitors will engage with food as an instance of real life, as a social commentary, personal expression and collective memory.

Dori Latman was born in New Jersey, 1979 and lives and works in San Francisco. In 2009, she earned a Master of Arts degree in Urban Studies from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited at Queens Nails Projects, Root Division, Garage Biennale, Clara Street Projects, Temescal Contemporary, and Canessa Gallery. She received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts in 2001.

Curated by Devon Bella

Last chance to visit My Love is Another Kind

My Love is Another Kind, on exhibition at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, is the debut solo exhibition of Gina M. Contreras. A recent graduate of San Francisco Art Institute, Contreras daydreams through screen prints and paintings. She is a witness to the small moments and idiosyncrasies of other people, specifically the elderly. The aged are an invisible other in American society to which Contreras creates loving narratives on the sweetness, loneliness and possibility in their lives while also drawing attention to the societal tendency to be dismissive and easily repulsed by our inevitable future existence.

My interest in the work of Gina Contreras comes from my own observations of my family. I have three living grandparents and I’ve watched them and listened to them and seen them have new experiences. The specialness in these moments captured lies in the depth and innocence that occurs simultaneously in experiences with my own grandparents. It is this same simultaneity linking depth and innocence that Gina Contreras is able to portray in her work. These are not simply old people, doing cliché, sad old people things, someone is taking time to notice them, and articulate on paper the small parts to their everyday and their very present need for love as well as desire for possibility.

The series If Only Things Were Like That is an installation of page selections from the hand screen-printed artist book of the same name. A new acquisition to the SFMoMA collection, If Only Things Were Like That, depicts an older couple listening to music, walking in the park, and embracing. What we learn from the book, that we don’t fully know from the installation is that this love depicted, is a dream of one of the women. As the book begins she is asleep, and as we turn the pages we see into her dreams of finding a partner to exist in her everyday with. On the last page, again the woman is sleeping and we realize the story was only her dream. The concurrent emotional range of sadness and hope that the viewer finds herself experiencing in the artist book is a great testament to the success of Contreras’ ability as a storyteller.

When asked what books Contreras turns to for her own inspiration (being that this exhibition is in a bookstore y’all) Gina casually states the alcoholic misogynist, Charles Bukowski, as a muse. Realize this, gentle reader, Bukowski dwells in the same issues as Contreras, love and loneliness, with a crudeness and awkward confessionary aspect that Gina’s images also mirror. Although a provocative favorite author, Bukowski speaks to a rawness and honesty in his observations and experiences that Contreras uses in theme, but covers in beauty. Contreras’ palette of beiges, rose colors, muted and mixed pastels create a feeling of home and nostalgia. Her use of floral patterns as a motif and as landscape considers the language flowers speak, in their history and representation. Flowers are fleeting and have a lifecycle, but are an eternal thematic design inspiration.

Just like love.

–Nicole Lattuca, Guest Curator

Alexis Arnold and Cathy Fairbanks

Adobe Books Parlor and the Pistils present

The Gaming Commission

Installation dates: January 18 - February 14, 2010

Artists Alexis Arnold and Cathy Fairbanks reconceptualize the parlor, the location for gaming, entertainment, and the reception of guests. The Gaming Commission will employ the Adobe Books Parlor storefronts through the installation of a salon putting-green and a pedal-powered tandem-bicycle reading station. The Gaming Commission is the final month-long installation by The Pistils in the Adobe Books Parlor.

Opening reception: Saturday, January 23, 2010 7:00 - 9PM

Gina M. Contreras

My Love is Another Kind

Gina M. Contreras debut solo exhibition

January 17 - February 21, 2010

Reception: Friday, January 22, 2010 7 - 9pm

My love is Another Kind, is the debut solo exhibition of Gina M. Contreras. A recent graduate of San Francisco Art Institute, Gina M. Contreras daydreams through screen prints and paintings. She is a witness to the small moments and idiosyncrasies of other people, specifically the elderly. The aged are an invisible other in American society to which Contreras creates loving narratives on the sweetness, loneliness and possibility in their lives. Her works draw attention to the societal tendency to be dismissive and easily repulsed by our inevitable future existence.

Gina M. Contreras was born in 1985 in Fresno, CA. Her hand screen printed artist book, If Only Things Were Like That (2008) was a recent acquisition into the SFMoMA collection. Contreras was the 2008 recipient of the Schmidt Community Arts Fellowship and Bronze Roller Honor at San Francisco Art Institute and the 2005 Promising New Artist to Watch, Art Space Gallery, Fresno City College.

Curated by Nicole Lattuca


Support for this project is provided by Southern Exposure's Alternative Exposure Grant Program.

PLAY by the RULES

ADOBE PARLOR PROJECTS presents InterMission V

A 4 hour public performance / installation on Friday, January 15, 2010 at the Adobe Bookshop Storefronts on 16th Street in the Mission, SF beginning at 6pm.

PLAY by the RULES is the fifth of six InterMissions and is created by artist Mimi Moncier in collaboration with architect Alan Lewis as part of the Adobe Parlor Projects (curated by Devon Bella). InterMissions are short intermittent events in and around the window areas that challenge our cultural notions of display, exhibition and social activity. Thematically, each will refer to the production of space as an ongoing and ever-changing activity within which we are all participating. PLAY by the RULES will specifically examine the sometimes arbitrary nature of alliances as they are made and broken through time.

SFArts Monthly

Christian L. Frock recommends Oppobrium on SF Arts Monthly!

TOBAN NICHOLS

Adobe Books Backroom Gallery presents "Oppobrium" the solo exhibition and public debut of a recent book project by artist Toban Nichols.

Opprobrium is an appropriation and deconstruction of “Vogue’s Book of Etiquette and Good Manners” published by Conde Nast Publications, 1969. Taking apart the post-war book of manners, Nichols scanned and recompiled a seemingly exact copy of the original text. Using Optical Character Recognition, a computer program that creates an electronic translation of images of printed text, an algorithm was designed to translate and recontextualize the volume by replacing every fourth word of the manuscript with the word pussy. Bound in pink cloth boards with gilt lettering on the spine, Nichols’ deconstructed version provides a fascinating glimpse into antiquated notions of etiquette.

Accompanying the deconstructed tome, Nichols' produced an instructional video that provides a psychological, political and aesthetic reflection on gendered realities, whether self-created and/or a product of socialization. Nichols dissects, inverts and reconverts the civilizing process as well as the televisual display of femininity manufactured by our media dominated culture. As a resuult, Opprobrium is not only a provocation of the meaningless restrictions on social behavior, but also calls into question how these realities affect the ways we perceive ourselves.


Showing at Adobe Books for the first time, Toban Nichols is a deconstructivist artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been seen internationally in SCOPE New York, SCOPE Basel, the Digital Fringe Festival in Melbourne, Australia, Les Territoires in Montreal, Canada, as well as the Seattle Art Museum. After earning a Bachelors degree in painting, Nichols moved West to study New Media at the San Francisco Art Institute where he received his MFA in Digital Media and Videography. Toban Nichols was granted a residency with the Experimental Television Center in New York and awarded the Juror’s Pick at the ArtHouse Film Festival in 2009 for his video BATTLESTATIONS!! His work was recently exhibited at David Cunningham Projects (San Francisco) and at the San Francisco Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center.

Please join Adobe Books for the opening reception for "Oppobrium" on Friday, 11 December, 2009, 7:00-9pm.

Exhibition Dates: Friday, 11 December to 10 January, 2010
***
Press:
Toban Nichols in the SF Bay Guardian.
Toban Nichols on Bay Area events site SFist.
Toban Nichols on Flavorpill's San Francisco events page.

Toban Nichols in the SF Bay Guardian

A Crimson Hexagon

Intermission IV and Adobe Books Parlor present:

A Crimson Hexagon
a collaborative theatrical production honoring the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges

Saturday, December 12, 7:30PM
Donation or buy a book

A Crimson Hexagon, based on Borges' short story, The Library of Babel, invites the tragic imagination to twirl, dive and tunnel while searching for the rumored beginning of ends.

Dance choreographed and performed by The Rooftop Dance Collective, with original music by Dirty Snacks Ensemble, narration by Daniel Worley, photography by Patrick Roth, and with producer and director of dance, Samantha Stone.

Curated by Mimi Moncier

MARYA KROGSTAD & RASHIN FAHANDEJ

Adobe Books Parlor presents:

Nuevo Invierno, re/generation
an installation by Marya Krogstad & Rashin Fahandej

December 13, 2009 - January 14, 2010
Reception: Friday, January 8, 7:00-9:00 PM*
*Musical performance by oddTet at 8:30 PM

Marya Krogstad uses formal structures, sculptural components, and texts to build new references and associations. Rashin Fahandej's installation brings a variety of medium together in order to create a space for contemplation; a place for re/defining our definitions of self and others. A space for re/generation.

Laura Boles Faw and Nancy de Y. Elkus

Please join us for the opening of Between the Sheets in the Adobe Books Parlor on Saturday, November 21, 2009 6-8pm

Between the Sheets is an evolving installation by Laura Boles Faw and Nancy de Y. Elkus in the storefront windows of Adobe Books from November 15 to December 11, 2009. Each artist occupies one of the two storefront windows and responds to several texts she has chosen for artistic, historic and psychological significance. The chosen texts serve as the departure point for the artists to visualize the ever-expansive imagination. It is the text itself, the printed word, that makes the sentence, the story, the essay. In the end, the texts become aggressively, sculpturally transformed, mimicking the wanderings of the individual creative mind.