Christina Empedocles
“Back to Front”
The curatorial platform of the San Francisco gallery Queen’s Nails Projects is to exhibit “collaborative, site-specific, and experimental projects by artists and independent curators.” The gallery’s upcoming “Back to Front” exhibition expresses that goal by showcasing the work of artists who are usually only seen behind the scenes at the gallery – artists who work at Queen’s Nails Projects itself.
All four of the spotlighted artists – Christina Empedocles, Luke Butler, Jason Kalogiros, and Maggie Preston – have very individual styles, although the group exhibition revealed subtle thematic similarities in their work. History, culture, and our personal relationships with its icons are popular topics for all, as familiar celebrity faces are redressed in new ways, and photographic manipulation is presented as a subject in itself.
Christina Empedocles, a painter and paper artist whose work makes extensive use of photographic images recreated in the more hand-crafted media of pencil and paint, is displaying her recent wax pencil drawings in “Back to Front.” Created in soft, stippled gray tones, her images are painstakingly realistic renditions of found images – historical figures, marvels of photography such as the frozen flight of hummingbirds – made altogether new by her choices of media and presentation. By creating a copy of a copy, Empedocles explores memory, nostalgia, perception, and the distance between ourselves and the objects we remember, or think we know.
To create digital files of Empedocles’s drawings (as seen here), for the artist’s Web site, and for other promotional use, Hanson Digital created 4×5 transparencies, which were then drum scanned, and carefully adjusted to match the original artwork.
“Back to Front” features new work directly from all four artists’ studios, many of the pieces only recently completed and/or never before seen. The Opening Reception is free and open to the public, but normal gallery hours are by appointment; see www.queensnailsprojects.com for contact information.
Opening Reception: December 12, 2009, 7-10pm at Queen’s Nails Projects, 3191 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA. The exhibit is open through January 16, 2010.