Robert Minervini: Race to the Bottom
Jan 26 – Feb 29, 2008
Queen's Nails Annex Extensions proudly presents Robert Minervini’s body of work entitled
, Race to the Bottom at Muddy Waters Coffee House, 199 Tiffany Avenue (between
29th St & Duncan St) San Francisco, CA 94110
Robert Minervini portrays figures engaging in absurd situations and defeatist tasks. Humorous in nature at first glance, Minervini’s work deals with issues of terrorism, fear, media propaganda, current affairs, and is primarily social commentary with political overtones. Concerned with investigating various narrative strategies, his work functions metaphorically. The irony and satire involved in each work of art alludes to the darker meanings behind the framework of the story.
The combination of art historical, literally, and pop culture references creates a matrix of meaning. A myriad of contradictions and pictorial epiphanies create a space of explorations into familiar settings of foreign consequence, and of relevance to contemporary society. The intimacy of the scale of these drawings brings one closer into the pictorial space, inviting consideration of the images’ multiple meanings. Each work is assembled from various media web sources, magazines, and textbooks. The appropriated images are rearranged and placed into new symbolic contexts, drawing a new reality that resembles our own.
Robert Minervini grew up in Philadelphia and studied at Temple University, Rome and received his BFA in painting in 2005 from the Tyler School of Art. His work as a mural artist and a teacher in Philadelphia has significantly influenced his studio artistic practice through bringing together the social functions of public art, as well as employing the materials and techniques of mural painting. In 2007 he moved to San Francisco to attend The San Francisco Art Institute where he is currently completing an MFA in painting.
D. ALEXANDER HOLMES: SOCIETY OF THE UNSPECTACULAR
Nov 9 – Jan 9, 2007
Queen's Nails Annex Extensions proudly presents D. Alexander Holmes' exhibition,
Society of the Unspectacular. The show is on view at Muddy Waters Coffee House,
521 Valencia Street (between 16th St and 17th St) San Francisco, CA 94110.
Society of the Unspectacularis the most recent realization in D. Alexander Holmes’ experiments in the politics of apathy. Comprised of found digital images relating to current affairs in foreign politics, pop culture, the "war on drugs," child labor and religious agency. Holmes’ collages appropriate society’s spectacles and admittedly invert them toward the mediocre. Holmes’ use of out-dated hardware and obsolete software (such as M.S. Paint V. 2.0) is a regression nearing technological abjection. It is through this lens that he allows us to view the effects of generic media—our beloved YouTube aesthetic—and here we find the signification of images rendered remarkably boring. Society of the Unspectacularnot only calls into question America’s reactionary tendencies, but as Eric Kluitenberg describes the universe of self-media, "the grand testimony to the human spirit’s inability to move beyond itself."
Queen’s Nails Annex located in the Mission District of San Francisco, has built a strong reputation for dedicating its project space to presenting collaborative, site-specific and experimental works by artists. At this point in the gallery’s tenure, Queen’s Nails Annex will launch an individualized movement that will allow the gallery’s inception from one central space to expand outward into the complex sub-communities of San Francisco. This movement titled "Queen’s Nails Annex Extensions" will allow artists to use varying neighborhood locations to serve as modules for housing exhibitions akin to Queen’s Nails Annex’s original gallery location, following the traditional gallery mission objectives. Artists will have the opportunity to work outside of their normal practices and have new unexpected challenges working with unique spaces that have already formed their own identities and reputations in different ways from a traditional gallery viewing setting. Some of these locations being: coffee shops, laundromats, video stores, bookstores, etc. Queen’s Nails Annex is presenting this project as a way for its artists to think about the work they create in connection to the community in which it is being presented. Most importantly, the artists are able to reflect on viewers and their association with their artworks and their relationship to everyday life within these sub-communities.
