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The First 100 Days of ObamaPost an Event »

Steven Wolf Fine Arts

April 29 - April 29, 2009

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2747 19th Street A San Francisco, CA 94110
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The First 100 Days of Obama
One-Day Exhibition, 11 am – 8:00 pm Opening Reception 6-8 pm Steven Wolf Fine Arts will mark day 100 of the Barack Obama administration with a one-day show of drawings by the artist and poet Stephen Vincent and their publication in a book titled The First 100 Days of Obama. Vincent is making one abstract, black and white ink drawing of the same size each day for the first 100 days of the Obama administration as part of a series he calls haptics, a word that describes how the body sensually responds to and interprets stimuli from the outside world. Each drawing is captioned with the date, location and a brief description of the goings-on around the artist at the time of the drawing. At approximately 10 x 7 inches, the drawings are close variations on a theme; randomness tangles with predictability, abstraction with the faint hint of a figure or symbol as they take their flat, pillow form. Like a diary of meditations, they form a partial record of Vincent's thoughts and movements on those days, and offer a stark contrast to the political machinations taking place in Washington even as they temporally mirror them. Mounted in a grid at the gallery, the drawings will cover 588 square feet of wall space. The show aspires to a nutty ceremonial numerology in which the diurnal drawing process, the publication of the book and the target day all harmonically converge. In order for Vincent to remain true to the one-a-day drawing schedule and still make that deadline the gallery will have to run a relay race with its digital publisher who must turn around the final design, printing, binding and shipping in under 24 hours—the frenetic busywork another mirror of the activity in Washington. The first 25 copies of the book will arrive in the gallery with 99 images and one blank page. To draw the project to a close Vincent will work all day in the gallery to create a unique work on page 100 of these volumes. The remaining 75 books will be printed a few days later with the full set of 100 reproductions. The opening will offer Vincent and guests the opportunity to reflect on the changing political landscape and for Vincent to read from texts he created at the time he made the drawings: one day he was on a bench at Dolores Park, dogs, trolleys and ambulances in the background; another day he was switching channels from Keith Olberman's Countdown to NBA basketball; and on yet another he was recalling the night sky over Mercy Hot Springs near Firebaugh, miles away from the world of politics. Vincent is as likely to seek out silence as he is music when he works and the ordinary as often as the unusual. At time these modest drawings bob alongside the rushing political change in Washington like a tiny buoy marking a small personal craft; at other times their zen-master repititiousness underscores perhaps a deeper social and political reality that while the details in Washington change the soap opera stays the same.