Alicia McCarthy

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From folk to punk and back again, Alicia McCarthy’s work loops seemingly discordant aesthetics into a tableau of subcultural Americana–visualize Odetta singing “I Wanna be Sedated.”  McCarthy paints intricate patterns reminiscent of démodé textiles with a distinctive palette of colors that announce her utopian sensibilities. Her purposeful strokes, keen eye for color and formal intelligence are welcomingly vandalized by the use of discarded wood as a canvas.  In an act of rebellion beyond mere Indie-naiveté, McCarthy slips in refuse material to “tag” her own schooled hand and gesture towards the ethos of the neighborhood from which she emerged, the Mission District.

The San Francisco neighborhood was and continues to be the geographical center of an artistic movement known as “The Mission School.”  At the height of the movement McCarthy’s artistic voice could be seen freely in and around the streets.  Echoing “The Mission School’s” refreshingly modest, hardworking and community oriented practices, McCarthy’s exhibitions exceed an individual’s work and become collective projects of resistance and conservation.

Alicia McCarthy lives and works in Oakland, California where she was born in 1969. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994 and also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting/Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, and the New York Studio Program, New York, NY. In 2007 she received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. Alicia has exhibited her work in New York, California, and internationally and is the recipient of awards from the Headland Arts Center and New Langton Art in San Francisco, California.


Jack Hanley Gallery

Know Hope – There Is Nothing Dear (There Is Too Much Dear)

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Know Hope – There Is Nothing Dear (There Is Too Much Dear)

Show & Tell Gallery is pleased to welcome the Israeli artist known as Know Hope to his first solo exhibition in Canada.

Know Hope is best known for his street art, in which he depicts characters through several different story lines. The predominant theme within his work is the need for momentary connection in daily reality. Or, in other words, the everyday human struggle.

This exhibition examines the idea of the collective memory in comparison to the personal memory. Through the growing but steady vocabulary of imagery in his work, Know Hope attempts to research how and why we tend to hang on to memory, despite it having an inevitable ephemeral nature.

Know Hope has exhibited his art interenationally in galleries, art fairs, and on the streets of cities such as Los Angeles, New York, London, Vienna, Rome, Toronto, and Tel Aviv.

Show & Tell Gallery

Bettina Buck

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Bettina Buck’s second exhibition at Rokeby and her first at the Hatton Wall gallery.

What do you hear?     Water.
What sound is this water? Water.
(after Benjamin Péret)

Buck continues to be interested in the inherent instability of material, to search for what in her words create “a tremor, a noise, a mood, a situation, a conversation with its surroundings, with the viewer”.

Recent work includes an unstable room-divider made of tiled fabric / a bronze Swelling, from an ongoing series of 12, each one produced using a single carton of expanding-foam prior to being contained in bronze / a hand missing some fingers / a short film featuring Buck carrying a large block of foam through a rural landscape / a settee wrapped in bandages, linen and plastic by Buck’s mother – under instruction from Buck / some oversized tennis balls housed in 3-sided tiled boxes / etc…

Bettina Buck (born 1974, Cologne) lives and works in London. This is Buck’s first exhibition since her presentation at Art |41| Statements earlier this year.

Rokeby