Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it? ~Pablo Picasso
Although art, technology and conceptual art are deep seeded passions, I’m a sucker for a great painting. Illustrative and figurative work often straddles between commercial and fine art. Then again, it depends on what the artist is trying to achieve with highly representational and figurative works. Kenney Mencher’s exhibition, Renovated Reputations, currently showing at ArtHaus showcases what a skilled draftsman can create with colorful stories as inspiration. The work is communal, engaging, textural, and fun. Yes, folks, art can be FUN (I’ll get to the serious stuff later, for those interested)!!
Mencher’s work for Reputations is well spun fiction with a vintage feel, and an impressive use of alla prima.
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Dorothy R. Santos
Dorothy R. Santos (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, computational media, critical medical anthropology, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work as been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society.
Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation. She is an advisor for Brooklyn-based arts and tech organization POWRPLNT and Bay Area-based arts organization slash arts.
dorothy r. santos 
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