Event

Shift, ReturnPost an Event »

Electric Works

January 7 - February 13, 2011

Info

1360 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94103
Google Map »
Shift, Return Pink Beak
Artist Reception: Friday, January 7, 6-8 PM Electric Works is pleased to welcome Geoff Chadsey to the gallery for a solo exhibition shift, return. His skillfully rendered portraits are filled with double, even triple enigmas of identity. What on the surface may look like an examination of contemporary gay life quickly turns into a deep practice of portraiture that follows the discipline back to its roots. Firmly rooted in the present-day and mesmerizingly focused on the viewer, the subjects of Chadsey's drawings greet the viewer with sphinx-like complexity. What is going on in these sometimes tender, often comic, now-and-then grotesque images is the male dance of exhibitionism coupled with a certain coy reticence. The large-scale drawings on Mylar are at once stunningly beautiful and hypnotically riveting. A homecoming of sort for Chadsey—this will be his first solo exhibition in San Francisco in over five years and Chadsey's first exhibition with Electric Works. Chadsey received his MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1995. He has shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, San Jose Museum of Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, New Langton Arts, among other institutions. He is a winner of the Fleishhacker Foundation award, the Artadia Award, the Cadogen Fellowship, and the Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award. Chadsey is represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.