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At dusk, a radiating neon green herbal leaf welcomes visitors to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It serves as one of the first installations a visitor sees when entering the Bay Area Now 6 (aka BAN6) visual arts exhibition. The signage was created by, Bay Area artist and San Francisco Art Institute faculty member, Tony Labat. As a play on the words Yerba Buena and the rich history San Francisco brings to the ongoing political and social debate…
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A writing practice requires a reading practice! I attended a Cherrie Moraga workshop the other week and this was one of the many pearls of wisdom she bestowed to participants. I couldn’t agree more. Reading different publications definitely helps me with my writing. Below, you will find some of my favorite print publications (yes, print still exists)…click on the image to visit the magazine’s website and enjoy!
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Visualize walking into a restaurant and being handed a menu in a foreign language. Most individuals would request a menu that they could read. For Tim Roseborough, such a menu served as the impetus for his latest work: Notes In/troducing Englyph. Much like the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roseborough examines human perception and understanding of language. Meanings and judgments within language frame our collective understanding and dictate our experience and engagement with one another. From texting to answering e-mail messages to…
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As you can tell by the lengthy title, I wanted to touch upon the idea of regionalism (again). I’ll keep this short. Promise. I’m an optimist. I’m a believer in appreciating art, artists, and art scenes wherever I am and being respectful. I’ve got a lot of places to go and art to see but one thing I want to say, and I’m talking to the couple that were standing behind me waiting in line to get into BAN6 at Yerba Buena…
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When it comes to art, New York has been called a hub where intellectualism and creativity meet. Although it has a smaller population, the same sentiment can be said about San Francisco. As the city known for its diversity, its no surprise that one can find a multitude of extraordinary and unique artists creating art ranging from traditional to highly experimental and conceptual. These individuals need someone capable of navigating the art world as well as having the deft business…
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Anais Nin once said that the role of the writer is to not to say what we can but to say what we cannot. The sentiment certainly translates well into the visual arts. Often, dishonesty abounds in everyday pleasantries, which is why the artist strives to reveal the truths of human interaction. To detect the context and sub-context. The artist mines the crevices of everyday exchanges and finds the raw, unpolished, sometimes tarnished, kernels of mundane gesture and speech to…
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What is it about the construction of the human mind that makes the interplay of words and images seem, despite innumerable historical and regional variations, to be something like a cultural universal? ~ W.J.T. Mitchell, Word and Image essay from Critical Terms for Art History At the moment, I’m taking a Voice and Vision class at the San Francisco Art Institute through the Continuing Education program. We’re learning how to incorporate text and words within our work. It’s pretty difficult to make something that looks…
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He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. He had never thought of this before, the similarity between an electric animal and an andy. The electric animal,…
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It is the whole traditional world of causality that is in question: the perspectival, determinist mode, the “active”, critical mode, the analytic mode – the distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the end and the means. It is in this sense that one can say: TV is watching us, TV alienates us, TV manipulates us, TV informs us…In all this, one remains dependent on the analytical conception of the media, on an…
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writer | artist | scholar
Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. 