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Floating World + The Labor PartyPost an Event »

Patricia Sweetow Gallery

January 5 - February 12, 2012

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480 23rd Street Oakland, CA 94612
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Floating World + The Labor Party Artist: Ernest Jolly, "Carry Me Home" acrylic, wood, metal and rayon EJ 16
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present Bay Area artists' David Huffman, Floating World, paintings; and Ernest Jolly, The Labor Party, sculpture, drawings and installation. Exhibition dates are January 5 through February 11, 2012. The artists' reception is Thursday, January 5, from 5:30 - 7:30 pm. In 1997 David Huffman began painting the image of the Minstrel, which by 2003 morphed from Blackface to Black explorers in spacesuits. The explorers, referred to as Traumanauts were depicted as migrants – without home, without borders, perpetually traveling in celestial space. In 2005, Huffman introduced the basketball, painting it as a pyramid, floating nebula, or playful game of sport. The basketball quickly transformed, becoming the Traumanauts' altar of hope and despair, offering eternal salvation or certain degradation. Fast forward to 2011, and the current exhibition, Floating World where the basketball remains the harbinger of the Traumanauts and their epic battles, but as Huffman says, "...they are now understood as part of the underlying structure". Huffman's new paintings continue to talk the politics of race, power and conflict, but instead of figures floating on an abstract ground, the underpainting has come forward. Within this vast terrain of luminous brushwork and pourings, Huffman has reframed the basketball as a stunning metaphor of dissociated spheres, an evolving vision of dissolution, floating in and amongst the play of paint. Kenneth Baker says of Huffman's new paintings, "In these pictures, Huffman uses the basketball - distinguished from more numerous monochrome circles only by a few lines - as a symbol of African American social elevation, euphoria and, potentially, of a transfigured world. Huffman has reinvented the abstract pictorial space of color-field painting as a field of dreams, not forgetting their flip side, nightmares: See his titles. He demonstrates a sweet and confident artistic economy..." David Huffman's work gained national attention during the The Studio Museum in Harlem's celebrated Freestyle exhibition in 2001. Huffman was recently included in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Bay Area Now 6, along with an exhibition funded by the NEA at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery. Huffman was the recipient of the Artadia Foundation Award in 2006, and the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship in 2007. In November 2008, Huffman was a panel speaker at Transformations: New Directions in Black Art, the 3rd Annual Conference for African American Art, hosted by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. Exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and the Institute of International Visual Arts, London; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Santa Monica Museum of Art; de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; and The Luggage Store, San Francisco. Huffman's work has been reviewed and written about in Frieze, Artforum, Art Papers, Flash Art, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The International Review of African American Art, NY Arts, Art Journal, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. PSG is pleased to welcome Ernest Jolly in his second solo exhibition, The Labor Party. The Labor Party is a symbolic exploration of the relationship of the agricultural worker in the Southern United States before the First World War, and industrial workers in the North From 1950 to 1980. The drawings “Canʼt See To Canʼt See” refers to the sun up to sun down labor of field workers. “Limbo” while being a popular party game dance, also acknowledges the Crossroads between the supposed "Heaven" of the North, versus the “Hell” of the South. Limbo, consistent with certain African beliefs, reflects the cycle of life. The dancers move under a pole that is gradually lowered from chest level, it is considered the triumph of life over death when their heads clear the pole. On view will be a plexi-glass wheelbarrow transformed from a tool for transporting material to that of symbolic movement of the spirit, along with other objects. Ernest Jolly is a musician, and visual artist who combines his interests in unique ways. His installations bring together sculpture, sound and light using common building materials, such as concrete, wood & wire - his exploration of material and form is inspired by social and ecological issues. The work for this exhibition began at his residency at The Luggage Store in 2010. Recent exhibitions include Natural Reaction, San Francisco Art Commission Gallery; Depth of Surface, San Francisco State University and The Alchemist Suite, Oakland Museum of California, Gallery 555.
Floating World + The Labor Party Artist: David Huffman Title: Migration 2010 mixed media on canvas 72 x 60 inches (185.76 cm x 154.8 cm) DH 326