The SMART Art ‘Trash into Treasure’ competition was launched earlier this year with the goal to show the world that discarded items can be re-designed, re-used and re-thought into works of art and every day functional items.

The strongest finalists have been selected by an acclaimed panel of judges that include representatives from both the Art & Environmental Community including:  S.F. MOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Artist in Residence Program at S.F. Recycle, The Independent Film Channel, The Sundance Channel, MTV Intl., as well as environmental luminaries David de Rothschild, Paul Hawken and Annie Leonard.

Lincart Gallery will be showcasing the final selections from the SMART Art Competition through June 25th, 2009.

Percentage of the sales will go to benefit the Sculpt the Future Foundation.

About Adventure Ecology:
Founded in 2005 by David de Rothschild, Adventure Ecology harnesses the power of dreams, adventures and stories in order to inspire, educate and engage individuals, communities and industry to become agents of change.  By building on its “edutainment” ethos of making learning an adventure, Adventure Ecology’s unique expeditions to some of the world’s most dangerous, exciting and environmentally challenged regions continue not only to call attention to humanity’s impact on our Earth’s most remote and fragile ecosystems, but also help to articulate and promote a better understanding of one of the most pressing ecological issues of our time:  waste.
Adventure Ecology’s long-term vision is to create a global, youth-based community of change-makers that learn, share, speak and most importantly act to address our global sustainability issues in order to promote a greater respect, connection and responsibility for our Planet, its environment, species and people.

www.adventureecology.com
 

Lincart Gallery is pleased to present:

“Frida Lives”:  Photographic portraits of the immortal Frida Kahlo

“Studio Man Ray”: Photos of Man Ray’s studio by Ira Nowinski

Exhibition is open to the public as of Saturday April 18th and will run through May 23rd.

VIP reception will be held prior to the public opening.

Lincart is pleased to present a dual exhibition of historically significant photographs. On display in our main gallery will be a stunning selection of intimate portraits of Frida Kahlo, the artist and icon who mesmerized and seduced the camera’s lens during her short but richly compelling life. As a painter, a fiercely stoic survivor and a transcendent fashion symbol, Frida continues to fascinate people everywhere decades after her death in 1957. The images on view are by a range of photographers. Some are famous and some unknown, yet all were clearly captivated by her unconventional beauty and the unique way her physical presence manifested art as a way of life.

In the small gallery will be a select presentation of intimate photographs of Rue Ferou, the Parisian studio where Man Ray lived and worked for the last 25 years of his life.  The images are by Bay Area’s esteemed photographer, Ira Nowinski, well known for his thoughtful documentary subject matters. Through a series of fortunate connections, Ira was introduced to and befriended Man Ray’s widow, Juliet Browner, a few years after Man Ray’s death. Julia had in essence frozen time, and kept the studio with all of it’s ready-mades and ephemera just as Man Ray had left it, thereby functioning as a direct window into the life and times of the Bohemian artist. All photographs from the book The Studio of Man Ray, Nazraeli Press. Artwork copyright 2009 Man Ray trust/ADAGP 

Lincart Gallery 415-503-1981

"Waste Management": New wood sculptures by Richard Haden (Miami, Florida)

"Men, Women and Children": New paintings by Jeff McMillian (London, UK)

Opening reception for the artists: Thursday, February 19th, 6 to 8pm

Show runs from February 17th through March 28th

Richard Haden was born in Frankfort, Kentucky. He attended the University of Kentucky where he apprenticed as a sculptor. After college, he moved to the West coast and continued to develop what is now an incredible mastery over his medium of choice, wood. Haden’s Hyper-realist works try to exceed the traditional trappings of banal tromp l’oeil and to counter the passive nature of phenomenal perception. Haden relies on various discursive strategies as well as visual deception to engage the viewer. His interest in readability and possibilities of narrative inspire the use of text, metaphor and metonymy in his work, and creates further connections and meaning. Unlike the ready-made, these contemporary re-mades astound and amaze the viewer as they re-create scavenged objects such as cardboard boxes, fire extinguishers and plastic jugs, with an uncanny precision which belie the raw material from which they are carved. Haden now lives and works in Miami, Florida.

Jeff McMillan was born and studied in the United States but has lived in the UK for the past ten years. McMillan creates startlingly fresh new paintings by marrying found forms and images such as second hand paintings and card board boxes with rich physical paint. For this exhibition, McMillan has taken found portrait paintings and literally turned them on their side and partially submerged them in layers of thick, solid colored paint. The resulting works are elevated beyond their traditional beginnings and become transported into strangely beautiful territory. McMillan’s works are exhibited in both the US and Europe.

Please join us to celebrate these artists on Thursday the 19th.

Cheers, Hope, Holly and Charles

Show runs through February 14th 

Laurina Paperina: "RIDICULOUS THINGS"
With live musical performance by Ralph Carney (on horns) and Michael McIntosh (on piano) 

We are absolutely tickled pink to present new and hilarious work by the playfully sinister young Italian artist, Laurina Paperina. On view will be drawings, animation and an amazing installation from her newest series "How to Kill the Artist". Laurina is here visiting from the small mountain town of Mori, Italy, so please join to give her a warm(er) San Francisco welcome….

View  Chronicle Press

View KQED press 

Pulso: New Paintings by Fernando Rascon
In the small room: Clever Drawings from Jack McLean’s Tiny Notebook

Opening reception for the artists and costume party:  Wednesday, October 29th, 6 to 8pm

Live music by Foosil Fool the Bike Rapper!
www.fossilfool.com

Please join us for a festive gathering to celebrate art and to welcome the arrival of autumn. This time of year signifies the start of the holiday season and we at Lincart are prepared to embrace the madness with open arms. All reception attendees are encouraged to release their inner alter ego and arrive in costume. It’s Halloween week and we mean some seriously silly business.

Free candy for guests in costume.  Conceptual costumes are preferred.

Fernando Rascon lives and works in Chihuahua, Mexico. His colorful, abstracted quilt like paintings reference folk-minimalism and Op-Art. They are constructed with a keen attention to texture and patterns, investigating the process of both chaos and control.

Jack McLean was born in Scotland and currently lives and works in Tokyo. He possesses an incredible ability to render detailed narrative drawings with an uncanny precision using only a micro-tipped pen. On view will be pages from a notebook he used to pass the time on a Tokyo commuter train. Which leads us to conclude that the Japanese rail system is a extremely smooth ride.

Please Join us for a very amusing time!

Lincart Gallery
1632 C Market St.
SF, Ca 94102
415-503-1981
www.lincart.com 

Jack McLean

   
Curated by: Lawrence Rinder

Opening reception for the artists: Thursday, Sept. 25th 6 to 8pm
With special surprise musical guest…

Show will be on view September 16th through October 25th

Lawrence Rinder is currently the Director of the Berkeley Art Museum. Previously, he was the Dean of the California College of the Arts as well as the curator of the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

At Home brings together four extraordinary, rarely seen artists: Dieter Roth, Franklin Williams, Ajit Chauhan, and Brian Chippendale.  Historically speaking they have little in common, but their work draws on similar energies and themes.

Dieter Roth (1930-1998) was a Swiss artist who spent much of his life in Iceland.  Unusually prolific, Roth created vast numbers of artist’s books, sound recordings, furniture, multiples, paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, jewelry, and installations. His work displayed a remarkable capacity to balance between the most refined and classical sensibility and an utterly chaotic, even antagonistic approach. His early work, primarily graphic design, was strongly influenced by art concrete, the precise, geometrically based style popularized by the Swiss artist Max Bill. After moving to Iceland in 1957, Roth’s art became increasingly eccentric, incorporating, for example, various foodstuffs, which he would allow to rot and decompose over time.  At the beginning of 1965, he moved to Providence to take a position at the Rhode Island School of Design. At RISD, he worked with students to typeset and print his first book of poetry, Scheisse. Neue Gedichte von Dieter Rot (Shit. New Poems by Dieter Rot). 

Franklin Williams (b. 1940) has spent his entire artistic life in the Bay Area. While a student at the California College of Arts and Crafts in the early 1960s, Williams developed a distinctive approach to art making—combining an eclectic use of materials, intense concentration on pattern and detail, and exploration of personal and imaginary images and themes—that has continued to propel his work until today.  His art is characterized by a tension between classical harmonies of proportion, composition, and scale and a tendency toward bacchanalian excess, eroticism, and—at times—ugliness. He has been a highly influential teacher for generations of young artists at SFAI and CCA. Williams’ approach to art and life is all-inclusive.

Ajit Chauhan (b. 1981) works primarily in film and drawing. His works on paper are remarkable for their incredible detail and wondrous concatenation of real and imaginary forms. He draws inspiration from sources as varied as Paul Klee, Tantric diagrams, and his own travels through India.  “Drawing is kind of like sleeping with your eyes open,” says Chauhan. “In the best of times things materialize without choice.” Nevertheless, Chauhan frequently returns to a number of images and themes: beards and hair, feathers, beaks, teeth, and masks. There is a dynamic quality of becoming in his drawings, as forms evolve and words unfold before our eyes.

Brian Chippendale (b. 1973) was a founding member of the legendary Fort Thunder collective in Providence, Rhode Island. He is widely known as both a musician (drummer/vocalist for Lightning Bolt, Mindflayer, and Black Pus) and comic artist (Maggots, Ninja).  Chippendale’s music and art are marked by frenzy, precision, and intensity. The over-accumulation of sound/noise and image/mark result, paradoxically, in an experience of strangely harmonious calm. Chippendale’s art is comprised of both abstract passages and figurative images which, in the comic format, are arrayed in narrative or quasi-narrative progressions. His recent art explores the possibilities of single, autonomous pictures and is collaged from fragments of the many silkscreen posters he produced for band and wrestling shows at Fort Thunder and continues to produce for events in and around his home in Providence, RI.