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.

Press!

KQED visual art blogger, Molly Samuel reviews Tara Foley's exhibition at Adobe Books here

Nice photos and words about Tara's show on Fecal Face!

SFist editor, Brock Keeling announces Toban Nichols' upcoming exhibitions, including Adobe Books next month here.

Flavorpill contributor Michael DeLong announces Toban Nichols' upcoming Adobe Books show Oppobrium on Flavorpill's San Francisco events page.

Tara Foley exhibition photos

Opening: Tara Foley

Either in a Million Years or Until the Bitter End
Works by Tara Foley

November 3 - December 1, 2009
Opening Reception: Tuesday, November 3rd, 6-10pm

Either in a Million Years or Until the Bitter End is a collection of drawings about memory, both personal and collective. These works are depictions of important moments that blur the line between imagination and memory. How do we remember? What does an important memory look like? How does a memory change over time? For Tara Foley, these important moments have become cathedrals, castles, monuments, patterns, body parts and mountain ranges.

Tara Foley is a San Francisco-based artist who has exhibited locally and nationally. Recently she has had solo exhibitions at local galleries Fecal Face Dot Gallery and Triple Base and created murals for 111 Minna, Sycamore Alley, and New Langton Arts. She currently works as Artists in Education Program Manager at Southern Exposure.

***

JUST ADDED!

Live music from 8 - 10pm with fiddlers Jill Kjompedahl and Hal Hughes and singer-songwriter Mason Lindahl

Mimi Moncier

Inside/Out is the second of five InterMissions that are created and curated by Mimi Moncier as part of the Adobe Books Parlor. Inside/Out will be a continuous series of performances within and around the window areas of the bookstore that will attempt to 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. Inside/Out specifically examines issues of public and private space.

Friday, October 16, 2009 5:00-10:00pm
Saturday, October 17, 2009 4:30-10:00pm*
* Closing party, artist talk and Terri Cohn's burning of stories

SEE BELOW FOR SCHEDULE

Inside/Out Schedule of Events

Friday, October 16th 5:00-10:00pm
WINDOW LEFT
5:00-5:30: Susan Rippberger, Slip
5:40-6:10: Mary V. Marsh, right sides facing
6:20-7:20: Hava Liberman, *like*
7:40-9:10: Emily Dippo/Kim Cook, Bio Box, Suit Construction
9:10-10:10: Cathy Fairbanks, ap-ART-ment Exhibit B

WINDOW RIGHT
5:00-6:00: Alan Lewis, 1/2 Way Home
6:10-7:40: Tony Bellaver, Trekker
7:50-8:20: Jesse Eric Schmidt mirroring
8:40-9:00: Happy Doll, Learning Merce
9:10-10:10: ap-ART-ment Exhibit B

Saturday, October 17th 4:30-10:00pm
WINDOW LEFT
4:30-5:30: Krisztina Lazar, Gilding the Lily
6:00-7:00: Lit Quake, Happy Doll meditating
7:00-7:45: Linda Trunzo, homoboy
7:55-8:55: maude.a.loo tags.along & shy baby collins
night-night, love you, sweet dreams, sleep fast
9:00-10:00:Reece Carter, Grooming

WINDOW RIGHT
4:30-5:30: Kathryn Williamson, Back Fall Front
6:00-7:00: Lit Quake, Krisztina meditating
7:00-8:20: Peter Max Lawrence, Working Out
8:30-10:00: Terri Cohn, Tell me a Secret Story

Christina Corfield and Ruth Hodgins

October 18th – November 13th, 2009

Opening Reception
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
7pm – 9pm

Ruth Hodgins received her BA from the Glasgow School of Art and her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including The Atrium Gallery in Glasgow and Phyllis Wattis Theater at The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Her work will be on view in upcoming shows at Pehrspace Gallery in Los Angeles and Platform 3 in Munich, Germany.

Christina Corfield also received her BA from the Glasgow School of Art and is currently completing her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited and curated exhibitions both in Europe and the US and was most recently included in "Introductions 2009" at Root Division in San Francisco. Her work will also be featured in the Pittsburgh based publication "Unicorn Mountain".

Revealing the delicacy of objects | San Francisco Examiner

Revealing the delicacy of objects | San Francisco Examiner

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THE PARLOR

Adobe Books Parlor & The Pistils
A collaborative project by 10 local artists

Alexis Arnold
Christina Corfield
Nancy de Y Elkus
Rashin Fahandej
Laura Boles Faw
Cathy Fairbanks
Ruth Hodgins
Marya Krogstad
Mimi Moncier
Lauren Ross

Curated by Devon Bella

August 2009 - February 2010

Adobe Books presents the new exhibition series Adobe Books Parlor in the bookstore's front windows on 16th Street in the Mission District. The Pistils are the first group of artists to inhabit the window space with rotating window installations by different members each month. The exhibitions are free and open to the public with monthly scheduled opening events.

Current Project 2: Parlor
19 September - 16 October
Artists: Lauren Ross and selected works from The Pistils

The Parlor project is a salon style exhibition where the storefronts
will invite the public to sit, read, and converse. The first use of
the spelling parlor (c.1225), deriving from the Old French word parler
(to speak), referenced windows through which confessions were made.
The Parlor will rejuvenate the history of specialized rooms for
conversation, as well as reveal the chaotic nature of misunderstanding
worlds coexisting in the same space.

Image: Installation view of Unbound by Mimi Moncier, August 2009

BOOKISH

An artistic exploration into the phenomenon of the book

Patricia Augsburger
Jennifer Brandon
Sonya Derman
Katie Herzog
Arthur Huang
Jennie Ottinger
Nat Russell
Orion Shepherd
Sonny Smith
Michael Swaine
Nicolas Torres
Scot Velardo

Curated by Devon Bella

Adobe Books Backroom Gallery presents Bookish, the inaugural exhibition celebrating the Backroom Gallery’s recent renovation and exciting transformation. To mark this special occasion, and to call attention to the position of the gallery within the context of the famed Adobe Bookshop, the exhibition will feature a range of artistic practices that share the book as an object of inquiry. Through various media including sculpture, painting, photography and social practice, each artist will animate varying questions based on our relationships to books.

Opening Reception: Tuesday, September 22, 2009

September 22 - October 25, 2009
Adobe Books Backroom Gallery
3166 16th Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
11AM-10PM daily
(415) 864-3936

Image: Taped, Jennifer Brandon, 2009