111 @ 111
111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco, CA
7 December 2006 – 28 January 2007

Review by Tonya Warner

The good people at 111 Minna have decided to ring in the holidays with their “first annual” 111 @ 111 – featuring works by 111 “111 Minna artists, future, present, and past” (so basically any local artists they like). In an attempt to unify a knowingly disparate collection of styles and subject matter, the curators decided upon a coherence of size – 20 x 20 – which was adhered to by most of the artists. This attempted uniformity, however, backfired by emphasizing not only the differences between these artists but a lack of curatorial concern. The works on show run the gauntlet from artists who think they can still get away with selling drawings on cardboard or a very half-assed effort consisting of orange mesh tacked on a frame, to accomplished artists such as David Lee, Casey Jex Smith, and Sam Flores, whose “Getting Hify in My White Tree” (ironic? I can’t even tell anymore) is a nice example of the decorative, Japanese-influenced style he has been showing lately, but without the trademark (and at this point overdone) claw-handed women.

In walking around the gallery with one of the artists, who was solely concerned with the asking price and methods of construction, it became very obvious that this show was more akin to a craft fair than an exhibition. The emphasis was definitely on holiday buying – offering a 10% discount before the 21st of December. The idea was to sell what they could and then condense the remaining pictures into a smaller space to make way for the next real show – Kelly Tunstall and Ferris Plock, whose exhibit underlines the purely commercial nature of the 111 show. The work of these two local artists play off each other quite nicely with their finely detailed decoration of repetitive figures. The strongest and most visually interesting works seem to be their collaborations, which work well as unified compositions despite the two artists’ distinctive styles.

Overall, 111 @ 111 was less of an exhibition than a sampling of what fits into 111 Minna’s aesthetic, unfortunately anaesthetized by confining each artist into a 20 x 20 box. If the works had been chosen for qualities other than size (and I do believe that many were made for this show because of such restrictions), and were allowed to butt up against each other – to interact aesthetically and rhetorically – the effect would most likely be overwhelming (as it should be with 111 artists in such a small space) but it would have been a much stronger show.

http://www.111minnagallery.com/
http://www.sfstation.com/111-at-111-e28183