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Catharine Clark Gallery

January 31 - March 15, 2009

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248 Utah Street
 San Francisco, CA 94103
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Other Choice, 2008, Graphite, cut paper, 15 x 14 inches
Catharine Clark Gallery announces concurrent solo exhibitions: new digitally-based images, sculptures and installations by John Slepian, titled (un)natural, and new graphite drawings by Jonathan Solo, titled Other. The exhibition dates are January 31 – March 14, 2009. An opening reception for the artists is Saturday, January 31, 2009, from 5 to 7pm. In Jonathan Solo’s exhibit of graphite drawings collaged on paper, the artist portrays individuals struggling to reconcile disparities between their psychological state and their physiological appearance. The resulting portraits are of embodied, fractured identities. Exposing characteristics often hidden from view because of the shame or physical harm that might come to the person revealing such secrets, Solo surrounds these figures with vast, unmarked space that forces the subject’s story to the forefront of the image. In What’s your Secret? Solo delicately depicts a figure wearing thigh-high stockings and heels lying in a fetal position, his genitals attached via a nearly invisible thread to a metal ring positioned in the opposite corner of the paper. The struggle to hide a vital part of one’s identity can be a precarious and painful endeavor. Wearing a pig mask and straight jacket and kneeling, the figure in Examination, legs apart, exposes male and female genitalia. The work in Other expresses Solo’s belief that “gender is in the mind, not the groin” and that some sexuality defies conventional categorization. Jonathan Solo credits Romare Bearden’s careful collaging for his own practice of digital collage--the preparatory step for what become his hand-drawn images; and he further sites Diane Arbus’s photographs as a key influence on his interest in the intersections of male and female identities, queer culture, gender dysphoria, and transgender issues. Solo’s own practice is at once a nod to technology and craft. His drawings are often compared to photographs, because of their technical precision ‘assisted’ by careful assembling of disparate images ‘rendered’ whole in the computer. Images are culled from fashion magazines, vintage family photographs, and the female iconography of Catholicism. The resulting montages are studies for what are then translated by his hand into pencil drawings. Referencing their own process (and concept), Solo cuts and re-assembles the hand-rendered drawings on a pristine sheet of cream-colored paper. Solo’s fine draftsmanship is perhaps all the more impressive since he is self-taught and one of his visual pathways never developed, making him blind in his right eye. Recently selected for inclusion in New American Paintings, his work was presented in Selections from the Diane and Sandy Besser Collection at the de Young Museum, San Francisco in 2007. Solo lives and works in San Francisco. This is his first solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery.