To inquire about work from "New Works" Gallery please contact www.togonongallery.com and to inquire about work from "Golden Meadows" contact SFMOMA Artists Gallery.

To inquire about work from "New Works" Gallery please contact togonongallery.com and to inquire about work from "Golden Meadows" contact SFMOMA Artists Gallery.

Glimpses in Time Photography

Joyce Gordon Gallery | July 2 - August 29, 2010 | 406 14th St. - Oakland, CA 94612

Strange Beauty

The Center for Fine Art Photography | July 30 - August 21, 2010 | 400 N. College Ave - Fort Collins, CO 80524

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General

Togonon Gallery |  77 Geary St., San Francisco, CA

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COUNTERPOINT 2009, THE BEGINNING"

-Recent Works of 7 West Coast Artists Using Photography

Participating Artists: Richard Bluecloud Castaneda, Jack Fulton, Klea McKenna, Darcy Padilla, Jackson Patterson, Jessica Skloven, & Lucia Zegada

Exhibition Dates: November 5-December 31, 2009 
Opening Reception: Thursday, Nov. 5, 5:30-7:30 pm
Meet the Artists: Saturday, December 5, 3:00 p.m.
Catalog Available 

Togonon Gallery inaugurates a new exhibition space devoted to photography at its 77 Geary Street location with "Counterpoint 2009, The Beginning--Recent Works of Seven West Coast Artist Using Photography". This is a showcase of the freshest and most engaging work of West Coast photographers in the first show in a series answering the query: "Is there a West Coast perspective that can be captured by present day Photography?" 

The artists in the show are on both established and emerging career paths. They bring together elements of their artistic talents to create images that reflect nature, beauty, politics, poetic symbolism, personal and social issues, balancing varied photographic techniques from the historical to the cutting edge technology and simultaneously responding to worldwide photography practice. This will be a rare treat to see local Bay Area artists in an established gallery setting downtown.

Counterpoint, 2009, artists articulate their views about doing photography in the West Coast
 “As a Native American and having lived all of my life on the west coast, I became interested in the portrayal of Native identity and the lack of an honest representation in the media. Beginning with the question of what a Native identity is, I use my camera as my template, then use additional materials and techniques of layering to build up the concept. Once completed, I revisit the texture to determine its final message”. -Richard Bluecloud Castaneda

“Since WWII a dichotomy of the expressive content in art articulation has existed between the East and the West coasts. For one fascinated by jazz, and believing that to be true American music of complexity, there was also an ideational war. But as things East moved West such as baseball, banking and other popular social factors related to television via the old path of manifest destiny, the differences between the East and the West Coasts diminished. My artwork in the 21st C is essentially what I’d say to be American Western expression. It allies ideas from calculus, jazz solos and the idea of stream of consciousness. It is cross-pollinational, text ridden and with no discernment as to color or black and white. -Jack Fulton

“My relationship to nature lies somewhere between adoration and suspicion. This ambivalence is the source of my recent projects, which have each dealt with human relationship to nature and landscape. In my current work I explore the materiality of the photographic medium and it’s potential to interact with place and landscape in new ways. I work with a variety of analogue photographic methods to create unlikely, sometimes abstracted photographs. Recent experiments have included filling the camera with river water and folding the film up so that it reacts to light as a 3-dimensional object. While photographing landscapes in ecological change, I want to make the flawed material of the film itself visible. I think there is a sense of adventure that links several west coast photographers who are engaged with experimental methods of image making. Also, expansive spaces, whether open water or sprawling city lights have become an emblem of the West. Having grown up in this landscape, it comes up again and again in my imagery”. - Klea McKenna

“As a French photographer, what struck me visually the most in the West Coast are the never ending landscapes: The dimensions and the land/sky ratio are completely different here compared to Europe. Yet, I feel that, because I grew up watching all the American classics, I have known these places forever. Traveling the West Coast I constantly feel like I am on a movie set. And this is one of the main ideas in my photographic work: I intend to give a cinematic quality to my images, and I like to see each of them as the beginning of a story. In my work I am always looking for the strange and to give a dreamlike dimension to reality”. - Lucia Zegada 

“I never really have an idea of what the image is going to look like until it's finished, but if I began my practice with an intuitive approach to picture making, that is seeing and reacting, now I approach projects from both an intellectual and emotional response to the subjects. In this, I don't know if there is a West Coast perspective per se, but living and growing up in the West has had an effect on the art I make. I think art is the product of your environment and the experiences you have”. - Jackson Patterson

“I view the indeterminate stretch of ocean meeting land neither as an end nor a beginning, but as a negotiation of two very separate worlds. To me, the West Coast is an embodiment of this physical coalescing of space that has enabled me to expand my field of vision. My work has evolved from being entirely abstract to having a more subjective sensibility that is influenced by this landscape and my interaction with it. I have become increasingly interested in the relationship between the illusions that occur in the natural world and those that are produced-- both in the act of photographing and in the re-constitution of those images when they are transferred to paper in the darkroom.” - Jessica Skloven

“My work as a documentary photographer started from a sense that I could not create anything as moving as real life looked at with sympathy. There is no transcendence in these stories, no triumphal arc plot, only struggle. My photography at present still explores this struggle. There is a certain sad byway of human nature that I keep walking. I am not sure there is a West Coast perspective in my work. My subject matter transcends both Coasts. My photography from early on always focuses on social issues – poverty, homelessness, incarceration, AIDS – whether it is on the West Coast, East, or abroad”. -Darcy Padilla