This past Saturday, August 21st, marked the opening night for Gallery Hijinks‘ first show appropriately titled Inaugural Exhibition. The show was a great success and featured work from artists Brynda Glazier, Ryan Riss, Lisa Congdon, Charmaine Olivia, Jing Wei, Pakayla Biehn and Morgan Blair. Gallery Hijinks is located at 2309 Bryant Street in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. The inaugural show runs until September 10th. Opening night photos below….

Art by Ryan Riss

Art by Pakayla Biehn

Art by Lisa Congdon

Art by Jing Wei

Close-up of Jing Wei woodblock prints

Art by Charmaine Olivia

Kaylan Segev and co-owner Lauren Lanzisero in front of art by Morgan Blair

Amazing ceramic sculptures and installation by Brynda Glazier

Co-owner Jillian MacIntosh doing her thing

A thoroughly packed house

Karanina Leigh and Jillian MacInstosh

White Walls gallery director Leigh Cooper and friend

Me with longtime friend Kaylan Segev

Cecelia Krolick and my main man Brian Torcellini

Lauren Lanzisero and Brynda Glazier

Gallery Hijinks Inaugural Exhibition

Opening Reception: August 21st 2010, from 6-10pm.

Showing Through: August 21st – September 10th 2010

We are pleased to announce Gallery Hijinks’ inaugural exhibition opening August 21st, 2010. Our intimate gallery provides a welcoming space for fresh and progressive art to reside. This exhibition will showcase artists Brynda Glazier, Lisa Congdon, Pakayla Biehn, Charmaine Olivia, Ryan Riss,Jing Wei, and Morgan Blair. Please join us for this boisterous celebration at Gallery Hijinks from 6-10 pm, located at 2309 Bryant Street in the Mission district of San Francisco.

Brynda Glazier sculptures bridge the uncertainties related to utopian ideals and the dystopian qualm by challenging the societal standards of beauty and the sublime. In turn, the context of her work offers a certain kind of splendor to the visually absurd and misunderstood figure. Her large sculptures are constructed with coil built ceramic, glass eyes, oil, acrylic, enamel airbrush, and nail polish

Lisa Congdon’s work explores opposing forces: clean and modern versus old and aged, man-made with biological. Her work for Gallery Hijinks pushes the interplay between organic texture (in this case animal hair) and bright colors with graphic shapes that do not occur in nature.

Decidedly resourceful, Pakayla Biehn creates environments of curiosity and intimacy that resonate within her painting, installation, drawing and mixed media. Her oil paintings find a visual language to negotiate the intersection of imagery and distinctive perspective that give the viewer an understanding of her own optical disability.

Charmaine Olivia is an illustrator, photographer and self-taught painter with works that are both romantic and innocent, yet sensually entrancing. Using oil paint on recycled wood and canvas, the artist creates figures that resemble her own self-image. Miss Olivia finds that her best work comes from using herself as the model in paintings, transcending into a reverie of her own imagination.

Ryan Riss works with textures, zombies, ooze, cartoons, text, rap, and a bit of skin. The intensity of black and white create a particular feeling- their lacking of color adapts and takes figurative functions to an abstract level. Liberal doses of textured cartoon comic psychedelic repetition are added, with details to complete the drafted production.

Jing Wei was born in a sub-provincial city in China and raised in the suburbs of Northern California. Each of her illustrations are little self-contained worlds, complex and enigmatic. Her use of ink, lino-cuts and woodcuts allows the simplicity and refined detail in her work to become one.

To access the feeling of a strong memory or the memory of a strong feeling, we can immerse ourselves in the process of obsessively transcribing the experience into pattern and color, so that gazing at it begins to deliver us back into that state. Morgan Blair’s shit houses are the latest in a series of iterations evolving from this idea, each standing as an abandoned state of mind frozen in time, still oozing with life from it’s original inhabitant.

Here is my first animated gif on the two paintings that will be featured in 941 Geary’s FROM THE STREET TO THE CUBE this coming Saturday, August 7th. Triiiiiiippyyyyyyyyyyy….