365 - Presented by 111 Minna Gallery and ArtNowSF
June 5-28

A Group Show and Music Event

San Francisco— 111 Minna Gallery and ArtNowSF are delighted to present 365, a group show featuring an impressive selection of 14 of the country’s most visionary, contemporary and abstract artists. The Gallery will host an art opening Thursday, June 5th at 6pm. The art opening is FREE and open to the public before 9pm and $10 after.

The exhibition will be on view from Thursday, June 5th through June 28th. 111 Minna Gallery is located at the corner of Minna and 2nd Streets in downtown San Francisco.

365 features a provocative variety of contemporary art from a diverse group of 14 of the country’s most forward-thinking, contemporary, nouveau-surreal and abstract modern artists. Featured artists include co-curator of the event Kris D, known for live painting and inventive graphic landscapes; Damon Soule, a contemporary artist whose paintings have a galactic, future-forward sensibility; and Oliver Vernon’s furiously creative studies in color and perspective. 365 also showcases the amazing talents of David Choong Lee, Jason Alberto Garcia, Gregory Euclide, Ethen B. Luce, Des10, Rob Pellicer, David Hale, XAVI, Third Peak, Adrien Robert (Sane), and Joshua Mays
A defining element of the 365 group show is the music-fueled element of live art, allowing audience, musician and artist to intersect and ultimately integrate the creative process and widen the art’s communicative scope.

The auditory experience at 365 opening features a staggering mix of national talents in genre-bending sounds from electro to breaks to indie-jazz to house-soul to live music in Minna’s two rooms of art and music.

The OPENING PARTY line-up, from 6pm-2am, includes Eliot Lipp first ever live performance featuring Alex & Lane of the Pnuma Trio, Deadelus, The Gaslamp Killer, Deru, Free the Robots, Alex B, Odd Nosdam, Jel, DJ Centipede and DJ Pedro.

Then on Friday, June 27th, ArtNowSF brings you a very special edition of their monthly art & dance party Suite Jesus, from 9pm-2am. Performers include VinRoc, I-Vier, Ren the Vinyl Archaeologist, Bootleg, and Adam Twelve.

Interested parties may sneak preview the work at www.myspace.com/threehundredsixtyfivemay and RSVP to the opening and closing parties at going.com/365artshow.

365 SHOW ARTIST BIOS & ARTWORK (after the jump)

Kris D
Although Kris D works in several different stylistic variations, the common thread through his work is rooted in geometry.  The artist arranges novel forms with strategic color to create compositions that challenge the parameters of the viewer’s perception.  While using little or no figurative imagery, Kris D intends for the viewer to rely on his or her own capacity to determine meaning in his work. The titles of his works reflect this idea in their own intentional ambiguity.  When Kris D is not in his studio, you will most likely find him touring with bands doing live painting. The artist’s live paintings begins with a geometrical background that he responds to in an improvisational manner. Through the course of the show the painting captures specific moments in time incorporating the energy of themusicians as well as the audience. Kris D started doing live performance painting in 2000. He has since toured extensively with bands throughout the US and Japan. He continues to share the stage with musicians at different clubs, theatres, and festivals.  

For more information on Kris D look at www.krisd.net.

Gregory Euclide
Gregory Euclide is an artist and teacher living in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. His attraction to the landscape originates from his experience of growing up in the rural landscapes of Wisconsin. Free to roam from farm field to forest edge, he developed an appreciation for authentic experience within the natural landscape. The complexity and interconnectedness of the environment had a profound impact on him as a child and would become the content and conceptual framework for his future work.

Gregory was the third generation of the Euclide family to become an educator though The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. He graduated with honors receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Arts Education.

After teaching high school art for three years in southern Minnesota, he took a teaching job in the Twin Cities. In 2001 Gregory was awarded a summer residency at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. This time allowed him the opportunity to explore a number of materials and\ techniques important to the development of later works. He has been awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and a\ Jerome Foundation Residency through the Blacklock Nature Sanctuary.

Currently he is teaching high school art and attending graduate school at The Minneapolis College of Art and Design on a Trustee Scholarship.

Jason Alberto Garcia
J Garcia’s paintings tactically construct and explore a diffusion of color within fleeting relationships of associating symbols. He highlights these relationships by integrating an embedded repetition of geometrical motifs. Working with a fluctuating, yet recognizable repertoire of imagery, Garcia’s paintings consist of multiple layers that tell stories of botanical, zoological, mechanical and invisible dynamic worlds.

Observations of how separate objects in space interact with each other provide the impetus for Garcia’s paintings.  The existence of one entity inherently affects all others through attributes of thoughts, language, action and occupation of space.  The underlying tone is the fundamental idea that the present paradigm is comprised of all that has led up to this point.

Each layer’s natural progression is evidence of the foundational layers that came before. Intentional contrast of transparent and opaque foreground imagery serves as a platform to examine what is beneath. Essentially, these initial layers act as a vital component to define the foreground layers.  Garcia confirms a visual language that reflects a grounded understanding of a ubiquitous, comprehensive consciousness. The paintings remain open to definitive interpretations that validate the viewers’ culturally established
perspectives and expectations.

When Garcia is not painting in his studio or researching local taquerías, he can be found painting live on stage with touring musicians.  The painting of each performance is in congruence with the sound and energy of the collective experience of the musicians and the audience. Each event dictates its own unique catalog of imagery and has allowed him to develop a broad progressive range of imagery and styles. For over a decade, Garcia has painted with an eclectic variety of bands and musicians, as well as professional sports events across the United States, Europe and Japan.

For more information please look at www.jgarcialive.com.

Oliver Vernon
Deeply rooted in abstract painting history, Oliver Vernon’s visual world blends varied painting languages into a balanced chaos of densely layered compositions alluding to the frenzied rush of our over-saturated information age.The imagery in Vernon’s created universe stems from his imagination through a process of spontaneous composition. His forms become metaphors for a transcendental reality, while remaining open-ended enough for viewers to project meaning from their own experience. His painted worlds depict the simultaneity of microcosmic and macrocosmic perspectives, as well as exploring themes of biology, physics, mythology, and ancient visionary wisdom paths. According to Light Space gallery, LA, "The organic, abstract paintings
of Oliver Vernon plunge the viewer into vivid and vertiginous baroque efflorescence."  Martin Irvine of Irvine Contemporary Fine Art states, "His work represents a bold and confident fusion of many trajectories in contemporary painting never before combined in one coherent vision: post-pop surrealism and visionary art, high-tech science fiction, figural abstraction, street and graffiti art, and the multi-layered, complex visualizations of artists like Matthew Ritchie, Julie Mehretu, Fred Tomaselli, and Ryan McGinness."

Born in New York in 1972, Oliver Vernon received a BFA from Parsons School of Design in 1995, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He has exhibited in galleries across the US, including New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and Chicago. His work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as private international collections in Switzerland, Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Japan. Special Projects include commissioned work for Burton Snowboards, and 3D digital animation collaboration with Belief,
Santa Monica. His work has been featured in Juxtapoz and Arkitip magazines as well as in the 2006 Gingko Press book publication, Convergence.

David Hale
David Hale is an artist currently living in Athens, GA where he is enjoying life and the world that surrounds him. He probably has paint\ all over his hands, his clothes, his fiance Emily, his dog Penny, and about everything else he comes into contact with. David received his BFA in painting from the University of Georgia in Athens in 2006. He has called this planet home since 1984.

Damon Soule
Damon Soule was spontaneously infused in our solar system via the magnolia state, 1974 and began expanding annually in a location sometimes referred to as the crescent city. Around the age of four, he began work on his lifelong pursuit concerning the application of homogenous forms to linear topography. Exposure to such a wide range of serendipity during his formative years provided him with a unique vision: "self determined entropy can produce highly contagious effects," he recalls, "until the horizon line begins to recede and the
ends become independent of narrative."

Several years later, as a schismatic indoctrination subject living at the foot of Pikes Peak, damon began crafting this vision by creating experimental simulations distilled from the intangible mass of not really knowing anything . At this time he also started to include the study of monotonousness systems in his repertoire by cataloguing subjective experience under controlled experiments.

As a production inhibited stagnant and increasingly weary of structureless hegemony, damon began his work in earnest, which he found even more compelling than the actual disingenuous sufficiency of common interaction. In damon’s bold use of saturation and composition, he effectively transforms everyday subject matter and it’s refuse into unintended correlative material.

Damon’s visualizations have been exhibited throughout the universe. His work is included in the permanent collections of nearly all of his friends, as well as many private collectors.

A tangible timeline of his thought experiments can be viewed here under the title artwork archived.

David Choong Lee
Artist David Choong Lee was born in 1966 in Seoul, Korea. He moved to the USA in 1993 in pursuit of gaining the skills to be a traditional fine artist. He found that he was very interested in the art of young people after his graduation from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, in 1997.

After seven years of focusing on the figure, he began to explore different concepts, such as mixed media, sculpture and graphic design. He’s been influenced by such diverse sources as Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Sukdo, and underground music DJ scenes. He ended up creating his own artistic style that is a combination of graffiti, collage, portrait, and classical realistic skill with bold graphic elements. As you can see by the release of his products, he has combined many different forces to create his own, distinctive style.

David’s work has shown at many galleries in San Francisco such as 111
MINNA GALLERY, BUCHEON gallery, CULTURE CACHE gallery, LEVI’S as well
as other places in the US and also in South Korea. He has self-published a number of art books– God made dirt, and dirt don’t hurt, 4 WORDS, DIRT– and some of his books are distributed by Gingko Press and 2nd round productions to Europe and Asia.

He’s been teaching figurative art at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco for last 10 years (from 1998), and he lives in downtown San Francisco with his wife, Sori Kim.

Rob Pellicer
Each of Robert’s paintings is infused with an organic simplicity that attempts to cut through the complications and chaos of modern life. As a representation of the artist’s world, each piece carefully positions plant and animal life in vibrant settings inspired by the merging of the Urban and the Rural. Although many negative effects usually accompany urban encroachment on the natural landscape, Robert suggests that a compromise can be reached if only we open ourselves up to a collective consciousness that advocates a healthy relationship with our natural environment. By viewing each painting as a statement of nature’s resilience and supremacy we may temporarily connect with its healing abilities and tap in to a confluence of art and environment that seeks to narrow the gap between people and place.

Des10
Rhett Johnston developed an interest in art growing up in Alabama when he began reading comic books and attempting to duplicate the characters within. This gave him an insight into human and nonhuman forms alike. Also, the influence of comic books brought out elements of fantasy to his work. As the years went by, Des10 developed a deep appreciation for music, which would eventually become his main source of inspiration and allow his creativity to truly flourish. He soon developed a friendship with a group of musicians, with whom he began painting live on stage. This relationship then paved the way for him
to begin painting live with Dubconscious,

Eoto,Zilla,Vibesquad,Sandia,Pnuma Trio,Grogus,Telefon tel aviv,Glitch mob,Eliot Lipp,Bassnectar,STS9 and various other artists. While incorporating elements of nature and humanity with urban art forms such as graffiti and hip hop, the art of Des10 portrays abstract visionary landscapes that break the mold of typical visionary art.

Ethan B Luce
I was born in Marin County Ca, and have lived throughout the Bay Area
ever since. During High School I was obsessed with graffiti, sneaking out to the
cities to paint.

On the weekends I’d end up finding places to paint pieces in the suburbs, usually under bridges and on water tanks.

My love for graffiti and an awesome art teacher landed me in the California College of Art in San Francisco.  There I really began to understand computer graphics and Illustration.  After graduating with a BFA in Industrial Design I began working on a bunch of projects for several small music, clothing and design companies.

As of 2005 I’ve focused my energy into painting, illustration and graphic design which scored me a job as Art Director for ARTNOW ( a company in San Francisco that promotes local artists, musicians, djs, and fashion designers).

In 2007, I won the Get Exposed contest hosted by Juxtapoz Magazine, and was featured in their following issue.  Since then i’ve been showing paintings and doing live paintings around San Francisco and I just recently step up my game and started making three dimensional pieces using plywood and paint.  It’s a really exciting time right now and I can’t wait to start my next project.

Adrien Robert (sAne)
Originally from Switzerland, Adrien Robert has grown up in many parts of the world. Living in places like Europe and Asia even as a youth opened his mind to accept the vast array of cultures he experienced. He found himself driven with a curiosity to explore, and to create along  the way of his surroundings. His education has a wide spectrum; even when  studying Academics, Martial Arts, and Music formally he spent time in underground channels, learning to apply his creativity; painting and breakdancing in the streets, as well as embarking on nomadic adventures in search of new places to go climbing.  

Adrien’s formation definitely lies in physical disciplines, but synesthetic theories in Hip Hop and martial arts inevitably drove him to discover the meaning of sAne through the fusion of creative outlets. Currently residing in Boulder CO, Adrien works part-time as a professional ninja, and trains every day with hopes of one day attaining MacGyver status with his creativity. His concepts and artwork all reside in a thought pattern, website and way of life which he calls the Freestyle Movement.

XAVI
 Age 30, XAVI lives and creates in San Francisco CA.  Xavi works in many mediums including painting, clothing and costume making, multi-media sculpture and beyond.  His art is a joyful exploration of the Multi-dimensional Universal Imagination with deep influences from graffiti art, old school rave flyers, indigenous arts from many world cultures and Taoist design philosophies

Current projects include; a large scale meta-multi-media ‘Alien Temple’ themed installation at Temple Nightclub SF, and concept art and lead design for the upcoming "Illuminated" animation series from Studio Lightship. To check out more of Xavi’s galactic art, go to www.myspace.com/artbyxavi