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Gallery 16

September 10 - October 30, 2010

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501 Third Street San Francisco, CA 94107
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New Work
Gallery 16 is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions opening with artists CLIFF HENGST and WAYNE SMITH. Both solo exhibitions will open concurrently on Friday, September 10, 6-9PM. There will be live music with aero Mic'd. For this exhibition, CLIFF HENGST presents a series of works on paper and a large wall drawing. For this new body of work, Hengst decided to limit himself to the materials that he found in the lobby of his studio. "There were two weekly gay local papers that I culled most of these images from. I started to notice a lot of protest photographs appearing in the weekly papers, especially after the Proposition 8 initiative. Many of the handmade signs appealed to me, and by painting out the protesters I could isolate and manipulate the image to my liking. The result is an obviously edited image, abstracted and frozen in time." Cliff Hengst is an artist based in San Francisco, California. His wall drawings, paintings and performances have been included in numerous exhibition including Marella Arte (Milan, Italy) and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA). He has worked collaboratively with Larry Rinder at Testsite in Austin Texas and with Scott Hewicker on Good Times: Bad Trips, a book dedicated to the phenomena of the bad drug trip. Over 50 contributors—including noted artists Devendra Banhart, Tony Labat and Chris Johanson - recount their bad trips; their stories are paired with photographs, paintings and collages by Hewicker and Hengst. WAYNE SMITH is a visual and sound artist who lives and works in San Francisco. Of his new body of work the artist writes: "As long as I can remember I’ve been collecting thrift store paintings — scenic landscapes and the occasional abstract composed by people who are unknown to me. Many are beautiful, others grotesquely attractive, and still others feel anonymous enough to warrant augmentation and commentary in some form. Uneasy about the act of physically altering the surface of these paintings, a more benign method of defacement evolved over time: cut-out newsprint images that float over the surface of the picture between the pieces of glass that typically protect and preserve a painting in a frame." Smith received a BA in Painting and MA in Sculpture from the San Jose State University. Working in a variety of media including drawing, installation and video, his work has been shown locally and internationally. In 2007 he collaborated with Berlin-based artist D-L Alvarez on a sound and video installation loosely inspired by Joan Didion's "The White Album" that took place at Derek Eller Gallery, New York. A video installation at Exile Gallery in Berlin, Germany was shown as part of the Psychometry exhibition in 2009. Recording as Aero-Mic’d, Smith has released several cds, employing combinations of field recordings, improvisation, and digital manipulation.