PRINT NOTES
LIMITED EDITION OF PRINTS ON METAL
The individual prints available at this limited sale offering highlight “alt-Oakland”—a place as unseen as Oaklanders themselves. They feature the vernacular of the town’s inhabitants, as opposed to images of the media, civic institutions, or business districts. The urban landscapes captured are at once emerging and short-lived, morphing and metaphorical, ephemeral and poignant. The pictures hold those manmade artifacts in rigorous compositions with a high priority on color.
Adeline Palace:
Fruitbowl
JNCO
Portal
Delta
From the Oaktown series, Adeline Palace is the site of an endangered industrial yard completely appropriated by street artists who converted it into a museum-class site-specific installation of their works. The site is no longer accessible and as of this writing it's fate -- renovated or demolished -- is unknown. Either way will mean the entire wall art installation will vanish forever.
Treasure Island:
White Panes
In 2019, Oakland photographer Malcolm Ryder spent two days wandering around Treasure Island, a naval station originally built in 1942. It was decommissioned and transferred to the city of San Francisco in 1996. There much of it sat, abandoned to the forces of nature and the hands of man. Or taggers and skaters.
Ryder saw this warehouse ruin as a hidden local landmark, one that might be transformed by the frame of his camera into a source of dramatic and abstract pictorial beauty. The Treasure Island series is an expression of photography as art, but with its subject made poignant by the fact that the site was at high risk for demolition. It has since fully disappeared, except for this photographic record.
BLM (Black Lives Matter):
Stop Asian Hate
Angela Davs Corner
In the wake of the George Floyd murder, downtown Oakland exploded with public protest art not only pointedly condeming chronic institutionalization of hate crimes but also forcefully declaring multicultural solidarity across ethnic and gender lines. The vast majority of those art works are no longer present, intact, or visible anywhere commonly known even by Oaklanders. Much of it is known to have been destroyed. The Oaktown series' artwork on metal provides permanency to the otherwise disappearing artistic statements of that historical public work.
Market Street:
Market Wall at MacArthur
Market at MacArthur-L
Market at MacArthur-M
Market at MacArthur-R
Market at MacArthur-Dazzle
The scale of street art usually exploits large expanses of public-facing side walls in alleys, parking lots, and so on. While these locations exhibit "all-over" images created for large-scale impact, they also frequently generate artistic surfaces of complexity and balance usually assumed to result only from the meditative and even exclusive sensibilities of unusual individual artists. Much of the Oaktown series focuses intently on abstracting these qualities of the wallworks that are in fact a key ingredient of the conscious and unconscious landscape. In generating new art from that landscape the series includes work such as the Market Street wall in both single panel and triptych (L-M-R) formats.
Kaspers:
Totems Island
The OAKTOWN series focuses intently on how resident Oaklanders create and recreate their own landscape, resulting in constant change. The Kaspers Original Hot Dogs site, commercially closed for over a decade, became an ever-morphing outdoor art installation until permanently terminated as such by its sale in 2022. Beforehand it became a neighborhood landmark, now gone but preserved by the archival prints in its Oaktown portfolio.