SF OPEN STUDIOS
at Studio Teobi | 550 Thornton Avenue, San Francisco, 94124
On the third weekend in October, I will be participating in SF Open Studios. I will be opening my studio to the public, for two days to exhibit new and past works. Please stop in and pay me a visit.
If you are unable to make it during these times, you can contact me directly to arrange a private studio visit at a later date.
Saturday October 20th: 11am-6pm
Sunday, October 21st: Noon-6pm
About SF Open Studios:
SF Open Studios is the oldest and largest open studios program in the country, featuring an annual, month-long art event in October that showcases over 900 emerging and established San Francisco artists in their studios. Each weekend, art patrons, admirers, and collectors venture out on self-guided tours to see as many SF Open Studios artists and their artworks as possible, in the hopes of finding their next true art love. The event connects collectors with artists for engaging dialogue and a glimpse into the life of the working artist; SF Open Studios simultaneously helps artists build their mailing lists, gain new admirers, and ultimately sustain a living making art.
http://artspan.org/sfopenstudios
http://artspan.org/artist/toddbrown
A MULTIDISCIPLINARY CLOSING RECEPTION
The Biology of Ancestry in the Making of Now
MONDAY, JUNE 4TH, 2012
6:30pm-8:30pm
You are cordially invited to the closing night of Todd Thomas Brown’s exhibition, “The Biology of Ancestry in the Making of Now,” at Z Space Gallery. Todd will give a walking tour of the exhibition beginning at 6:30pm, followed by a live jazz set with renowned composer/bassist Marcus Shelby and a guest appearance by award-winning poet Michael Warr. Between and around the evening’s events you will be hearing the recorded music of Coeur d’Alene jazz vocalist of the 30′s and 40′s, Mildred Bailey, one of the very first female big band singers in the U.S.
The Biology of Ancestry in the Making of Now explores the interweave between the personal narrative and the collective; the tension and dialog between the social-cultural-biological being we have inherited and our capacity to transform it.
6:30pm – 8:30pm
6:30pm – Artist Tour/Talk
7:15pm – Jazz Set with Marcus Shelby
8:00pm – Poet Michael Warr, Excerpts from the Armageddon of Funk
Exhibition runs April 13 – June 4, 2012
Gallery hours Tuesday – Friday 1-5pm, and by appointment by emailing kbrennan@zspace.org
450 Florida Street (between 17th and Mariposa)
San Francisco, CA 94110
TODD THOMAS BROWN
ARTIST STATEMENT
“The Biology of Ancestry in the Making of Now”
The Biology of Ancestry in the Making of Now is a series of mixed-media paintings in which I explore the interweave between past and present, biology and identity. The work reflects the present stage of a multi-disciplinary process I began last year with an Artist Fellowship at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. There I explored themes of inheritance and transformation through a new series of paintings as well as through an experimental performance work that utilized improvised monologue, musical composition, and dance/movement. A conversation between these two processes emerged as each began to inform the other. The result was a concept of the “biology of ancestry,” an imaginative inquiry into identity.
What happens when I begin to perceive that I am the living sum and dynamic of my ancestors before me, of a line of beings that literally extends back to the origins of humanity? We seldom consider ourselves in such a light, and yet each of us are this; a complex and nearly indefinable amalgamation of bio-cultural characteristics that have traveled and mutated across time, from one organism into the next. The present organism looks out through its present eyes, trying to understand the world it sees, and to see it itself within it in some cohesive fashion. There is an intuition of self, and yet his self is made of a multitude that came before. What happens when we deeply consider this fantastic idea that our ancestors are living through us? Your particular smile, or laugh, or temper, were they not possessed by someone before you, by many, who perhaps lived centuries if not millenniums before? How do we both absorb this inheritance and remake ourselves anew? How do we live with the many of who we are?”
As the self becomes seen as many selves, the concepts of individual and collective grow blurred, and personal, national, and cultural histories morph into one another. Integrating this vision into work, I use paint and collage to lay down an interweave of layers of lines and stripes, lines of generations and stripes of nations, conflicting ideologies and personal histories, simultaneous and in succession. Through hand-written script I juxtapose a narrative of the perceived individual I am against the matrix of this collective human history, posing questions to the ancestors within my cells, my living DNA. Through this process, I begin to glimpse how we are each a full and living accomplishment of the millenniums of human beings before us, having survived since before the splitting of the continents. Each one of us has made it this far. Our lives were not made at our births, rather they were handed down, pulsating gifts that have traversed all of time since the beginning. We are, indeed, the now of our ancestors. And to consider how many of them are unknown within us, invokes within me the most profound sense of curiosity and awe.
Gunter Gerzo, Mark Toby, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell and Todd Thomas a bold tradition.