This weekend is looking to be glorious (and no, I don’t mean the weather—it’s “summer” in SF after all). Overcast skies aside, I’m looking forward to the beautiful silk designs from Oakland’s Serial Cultura as they host another Valencia Street trunk show and White Walls Gallery’s presentation of new works by AJ Fosik (below) and Greg Gossel.
Over Blue Bottle this morning (and not on top of the MOMA—yet), Justin Giarla talked about opening Larkin Street’s Shooting Gallery and its younger sister, White Walls. After managing local nightclubs for 10 years (where he learned “how to get people to show up for things” using everything from postcards to publicists), Giarla started Shooting Gallery, a nod to the photography he loved taking as well as the neighborhood gun violence. (While a heroin reference is also expected, he said it’s unintentional.) Shooting Gallery’s Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine-style pop surrealism is balanced by the art Giarla curates for White Walls next door, whose aesthetic is intended to be more “urban contemporary—the meeting of street art and fine art.”
In currently spending his days working on artist relations and sales, Giarla said he gets submissions via email all the time but rarely finds that they fit his two main criteria for work he a) likes and b) thinks he can sell. The art that Greg Gossel sent him two years ago was different, he says, and the two have since hosted shows of the artist’s typographic and collage work and shown it around the world. Gossel’s “Happy Ending” exhibition opens this Saturday night along with AJ Fosik’s imaginative “There’s Aliens in Our Midst.” Stuffed trophy mounts have never been so bright—they remind me of a cross between the children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” and the psychadelic bear-filled work that used to grace the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The self-described “three-dimensional conversations about American culture” shouldn’t be missed, me thinks.
[...] at the Aqua Art Fair, also in Miami. Greg Gossel and AJ Fosik (featured earlier this year for their strikingly colorful work) will be among those featured starting Thursday if you need something besides white sand beaches [...]