In These Great Times: Contemporary Satirical Prints from Bay Area Artists, 4/1 - 4/19/10
In These Great Times: Contemporary Satirical Prints From Bay Area Artists
David Avery, Art Hazelwood, Roberta Loach, Rik Olson, Patrick Piazza, Anthony Ryan, Jos Sances, Shane Weare, Imin Yeh
April 1- 29, 2010
Reception Thursday, April 1, 2010, from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Back to the Picture\SoMa Gallery
1110 Howard Street @ 7th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
(415) 558-9901 / (415) 826-2321
www.backtothepicture.com
“What prevents him who says the truth from laughing?” –Horace
Satire is the art of overturning the ordered universe. It isn’t the same as humor, but it often employs humor as one of its most valuable assets. Nor is it sarcasm with its dry wit dripping off the end of a well placed knife thrust. Neither is it irony, although parsing the difference has become the business of psychologists. No, satire is the great placebo for a great nation. Satire is the antidote to the deep seriousness of an overly top heavy society. Satire is a kick in the pants to the new world order, a slippage of the mask of this happy face world. It needn’t be political, it is just as often mocking the intricacies of fashion, culture and art itself.
Satire and prints have had a long happy relationship… the sordid details of which we need not go into here. Suffice it to say that wherever a society looks in the mirror and likes what it sees there are printmakers making rabbit ears behind the nation’s back. If it were not so it would be left to painters, a sorry lot, that can’t be expected to satirize themselves out of a paper bag. Satire has fallen to the lowly graphic artist as a birthright and like fools and knaves everywhere it is employed as a sharp tool wielded with gusto.
Back to the Picture, in their SOMA gallery is exhibiting the satirical etchings, screenprints, wood engravings and woodcuts of nine artists. The title, In These Great Times, refers to the writings of Karl Kraus, Austrian arch satirist, and points to the importance of literary satire in the work of many of the artists.
David Avery, Roberta Loach, Rik Olson, Patrick Piazza, Anthony Ryan, Jos Sances, Shane Weare, Imin Yeh were invited by Art Hazelwood to participate in this exhibition. Their approaches to satire vary from the knock ‘em over the head approach of Roberta Loach to the miniscule vulgarities of David Avery’s etchings, from the heresies of Jos Sances screenprints to the ethnic consumption satire of Imin Yeh, from the consumer madness of Patrick Piazza’s screenprint paintings to Rik Olson’s linocut farces, from Art Hazelwood’s political screeds to Anthony Ryan’s whimsical apocalypse and Shane Weare’s mythic lamentations. There is something for everyone, no one is spared.