Analog Hole, or "Abundance"

by John Neff

Window display on view May 9 - May 31, 2009

Gallery hours with the artist: Sunday, May 10, 2009, 1-5 pm and by appointment

RIGHT WINDOW Gallery
972 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Curated by Cassie Riger

The Analog Hole (or “Abundance”) is a new installation for RIGHT WINDOW Gallery by Chicago-based artist John Neff. The term “analog hole” refers to the difficulty of controlling rights to non-interactive digital media during playback. Coined by the Motion Picture Association of America, “analog hole” was quickly corrupted by the vernacular into “a-hole”. Neff’s recent digital-to-analog photographic process involves shooting digital images, creating hand-collaged acetate internegatives from those images, and printing his negatives as cyanotype photographs (or blueprints.) At RIGHT WINDOW gallery, the artist’s elaborate print-making process embodies the rich possibility offered by the analog hole.

Neff was one of three artists commissioned to create special projects for Photo Miami this year. His project, Father, can't you see I'm burning mixed images of nude male bathers with pieces based on his ongoing series depicting a nautical history of the United States. Exploring transparency and opacity, the bather images, large-format cyanotype prints, were presented on the specially constructed transparent exterior wall of his exhibition booth. The nautical subject – a monitor-bound digital image based on U.S. military photos of the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and a collection of cyanotype reproductions of news clippings about that incident – were shown in the booth's dim interior, a space that was furnished to resemble a makeshift workspace. The project's title, Father, can't you see I'm burning?, was drawn from a Slavoj Zizek text that discusses the relationship between external violence and internal traumas in psychoanalysis, by way of a Freudian dream.

At RIGHT WINDOW Gallery, Neff will apply acetate negatives to the space’s front windows, transforming their panes into interpenetrated representations of an enlarged computer desktop and a small business storefront. Inside the gallery, prints made onto a variety of found fabrics will hang from lines stretched across the space. (Cyanotype prints are, in fact, developed in a water wash). Sorting, washing, folding, and hanging images out to dry, Neff will transform RIGHT WINDOW Gallery into a laundromat of sorts. As with his recent series, Bathers and Other Liquid Pictures (2007), Neff’s new project foregrounds watery studies of nude figures to suggest a return to the primacy of subjectivity in the visual arts.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: John Neff presented a commisioned artist project at the 2008 PhotoMiami art fair in Miami and premiered a new body of work, Basic or Boring Pictures, in a solo project at the 2009 Armory Show in New York with Western Exhibitions. His recent solo shows include Bathers and Other Liquid Pictures at Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Nocturnes for Boston at Proof Gallery in Boston. Neff’s 2006 solo show at Western Exhibitions was reviewed in several publications, including, TimeOut Chicago and Art Papers, where critic Anthony Elms called Neff “the most ambitious emerging artist regularly exhibiting in Chicago.”

Neff’s work has been discussed in Art in America, Artnet Magazine, Frieze, The Chicago Tribune, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Neff’s work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Location One (NYC), and Chicago Cultural Center, Donald Young Gallery, Gallery 400, all in Chicago. His work is in the collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Neff received grants from Artadia and the Illinois Arts Council in 2002 and was a 2007 nominee for The Altoids® Award. His work Neff received a MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2001. Neff lives and works in Chicago.

RIGHT WINDOW Gallery: RIGHT WINDOW Gallery is a collaboration of twelve San Francisco artists and curators who pool resources to create street level venue for visual art. Because the exhibition space is small—it’s literally the right display window of a Valencia Street store front—the Gallery aims for creative uses of the space. Neff’s exhibition during May 2009 is curated by Cassie Riger. Riger’s last project for RIGHT WINDOW Gallery was Looking But Not Touching, a four-part performance series featuring over 30 artists, writers, and musicians, all free and available to pedestrians on Valencia Street in May 2008.




Above: John Neff, Pornographic Pantograph with Allusions to Juan Sanchez Cotan, (In Progress, Patent Pending), 2004. Installation View. Foreground: Presentation Figure, 2008. Plaster, cement, patching compound, lamp, glass eye, hardware.| John Neff, Father, can’t you see I’m burning?, 2008. Installation with cyanotype prints on paper, clear extruded acrylic, wood, mounting tape, sealers and adhesives, toner, tape and sealers on acetate, office furniture, computer with digital files. Exterior view, Photo Miami, 2008.

March!

A Series of 'Life-like' Mini-Manipulations by Authority Office. San Francisco Edition. (Free)

Opening Sunday March 8th, 6-9pm

Meet the most fantastic troupe ever to wander on to an American stage! Mini-Mud, Mini-Brian & Mini-Gwin delight capacity audiences daily, yet they don’t get a single red cent for any of their work! Hurrah! Each selfless Authority Office representative is a fascinating visual formula of skin colored webbing, limb pennies & strategically placed body hairs - manipulated by an invisible head string that controls their every move. Look! They possess every vestige & appearance of being perfectly normal & perfectly human! If a famous Broadway producer was lucky enough to find himself with a handful of these little ‘uns (willing to work for nothing), he would think he was in a nut factory! Authority Office’s Brian, Mudlynne & Gwin are determined to inform & represent humans with a resemblance that fills one with continuous awe. Join them in the month of March at San Francsico's ATA/Right Window Gallery as they walk, observe & touch items.

Limited edition residual ‘March!’ album unleashed at the end,
of March!

For those admirers outside of the greater San Francisco area, you can virtually masturbate to http://www.authorityoffice.com and/or http://www.youtube.com/authorityoffice

Don't delay!

Cliff Hengst - New Work

CLIFF HENGST
New Work
opening reception February 8th, 5-8 PM
Open on request throughout the month of February 2009

Tea Dance Closing
Sunday February 22nd
12-5 PM

photos of exhibition on Cliff's flickr page

           

i wanted everyday to last forever 

films and photographs by irwin swirnoff

  jan. 11th -31st

  right window opening sun. jan. 11th 5-8pm

  ata screening sun. jan 25th 8 pm

P L U N D Y H A Y

Hay window pane...do you remember?
Bringin' back sweet memories...
(Plundy, 11/09/08, Right Window)

The Plastic Exploding Inevitable

The Plastic Exploding Inevitable
an installation by Christine Wertheim

Right Window at ATA
992 Valencia at 21st Street, San Francisco

Opening: September 7, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
At 6:00 Christine Wertheim will talk and answer questions about the project

Installation continues through October 3

Coral reefs the world over are dying faster than rain forests. In homage to these vanishing wonders, Margaret and Christine Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring instigated a project to crochet a woolen reef, an effort that now engages women around the globe. This collective testimony also celebrates the strange hyperbolic geometry of the oceanic realm. As it has grown the reef has spawned, dividing and growing into multiple sub-reefs, each with its own unique ecology of corals, anemones, kelps and other sea life.


In September Right Window will be showing the Plastic Exploding Inevitable (PEI), a spawn of the Toxic Reef, aka Bikini Atoll, made from plastic bags and other refused and recycled materials. The most psychedelic of the Institute for Figuring reefs, the Plastic Exploding Inevitable features irradiant pink "sand," miniature white plastic spires, a grove of wine-glass trees, and a gorgeous reef panorama painted on a take-out box by Alicia Escott. In the decades since Warhol created his Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the multimedia component of the Silver Factory, the words he strung together have taken on a more sinister edge, and Wertheim’s installation helps us parse this new reality. In the North Pacific, for example, there is a gyre of floating plastic debris roughly the size of Texas.

Garbage Christine and her sister Margaret collected for the project.

Contributors to the Plastic Exploding Inevitable include:
Kathleen Greco, Sarah Simons, Evelyn Hardin, Alicia Escott, Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim.


The Right Window at ATA is curated by Dodie Bellamy for the month of September, 2008.

When she is not crocheting reef items, Christine has a full-time job in the Department of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, where she teaches experimental writing and feminism. She is also an experimental poet and writer whose work deals with the intersection of language and logic. Christine's first book of poetry, +'Ime-S-pace, was published in 2007 by Les Figues Press, LA.

Christine at home with crocheted hyperbolic planes lining her mantel.