Nine Square Grid Art Exhibition / Reception

“NINE SQUARE GRID / NEW MEANINGS” AT DIEGO RIVERA GALLERY / SFAI
SAN FRANCISCO–Fourteen artists address the nine square grid in this exhibition opening Monday, July 4, at the Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute and running through Saturday, July 9. The artists’ reception will occur Tuesday, July 5, from 5-7 pm with a talk by curator Emily Silver at 5 pm. The Gallery is open daily.

Artists included in the show are Kathleen Thompson, Paulette Long, Lori Delmar, Joshua Eggleton, Janet Kham, Jan Blythe, Jessie Cork, Eve Morgenstern, Derek Haverland, Clayton Llewellyn, Carla Fraga, Barry Beach, and Alastair Bolton. Their work explores the use of the nine square grid in very personal, versatile ways.

Carla Fraga, who works primarily in photography and installation, looks at optical illusions intrinsic to the grid format in her digitally created print “Optical Allusion”. Jessie Cork explores repetition as movement in her black and white photographs entitled “Market & 4th / 1/30 second”. Paulette Long challenges the grid by dissolving parts of it with overpowering color in her painting “Chromology: Enter (Nebbia).” The comfort of an implied grid discretely anchors Kathleen Thompson’s complex line work in her large untitled painting, while circular forms soften the grid’s structure in painter Jan Blythe’s “Clan”. Barry Beach’s sky photographs and Eve Morgenstern’s “Tracks” suggest repetition can take numerous forms. Lori Delmar invites our visual sense of touch to celebrate the mundane in her fragile lint piece, “Relic” . In eighty-one portraits of men with facial hair, Joshua Eggleton creates a population of men similar, in specific ways, to himself. Also drawing meticulously with graphite on paper, Clayton Llewellyn inventively merges the mechanical into the organic in “Fallacy of Manufactured Inspirato”. In Derek Haverland ‘s sculpture the nine square grid is “extruded” into nine cubes whose relationship one to the other is less rigid. Photographer Janet Kham looks at the viewers’ ability to complete an incomplete image with the grid as an implied format. And Alastair Bolton’s enlists the grid as a format for experimentation in his painting “Untitled Landscape”, a fusion of landscape drawing techniques and acrylic and oil glazes on wood panel.

“The creation and use of this elemental structure throughout history fascinates me,” says curator Emily Silver. “The nine square grid has been a familiar part of human experience for thousands of years, from ancient Egyptians who understood human proportion in grid terms, through the tic-tac-toe-like game the Romans played, to Muslim and Christian symbolism throughout the world. Even Fung Shui has long incorporated the compass-based nine square concept of “Nine Palaces” to describe the invisible energy flow in a building. Starting with John Hejduk at Cooper Union in the Sixties, we see this form in broad use as a contemporary teaching tool. It makes such a high-profile appearance in art and architecture throughout the world, I wanted to see how emerging artists at SFAI make use of it in the Twenty-first Century."