"Environments"

Artists: Jason Dunda, Cecilia Ramirez-Corzo, Claire Jackel and Ross Racine
July 9 to August 28, 2010
Opening reception: Friday July 9, 6-8 pm

Cain Schulte Contemporary Art San Francisco is pleased to announce a thought-provoking new show featuring works by four artists: Jason Dunda, Claire Jackel, Cecilia Ramirez-Corzo, and Ross Racine.

The show opens on Friday July 9, 2010, and will continue through August 28.

The four artists in this exhibition present their unconventional perspective on architecture, design, urban landscape, and the environment. Working mostly with paper, they all explore and expose a sense of discomfort and awkwardness about the environment, here portrayed as something substantial and yet precarious; a place that simultaneously protects us and endangers us. Dunda's tottering stacks of furniture, while seemingly constructed in a contemporary fashion of sustainable materials, are monumental but frail structures, destined to collapse if ever put to use. Jackel's train wrecks and warped buildings remind us of the impermanence of the infrastructure we take for granted. Cecilia Ramirez-Corzo's drawings on rectilinear graph paper twist our perceptions. Ross Racine's ironic and paradoxical suburban communities present a utopian but preposterous world, from which escape is impossible.

Born in 1972 and raised in Toronto, Jason Dunda received a BFA from York University in Toronto, and his MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been shown in Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, New York, ICA Boston, and the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston. He now lives and works in Chicago, where he teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and where he produces his large-scale yet ethereal works in gouache on paper, to explore the conflicting notions of conservation, fragility, and precariousness.

Cecilia Ramirez-Corzo has studied Fine Arts, Cinematography, and Architecture in London, UK. Her extensive background in video and architecture comes together in her luminous installations, where often light plays an important part of the show. For this exhibition Ramirez-Corzo has created 2-D linear renditions of interior and exterior environments on graph paper, by filling in ink, one by one, each square millimeter. With the manual equivalent of a pixelated image, she portrays the mundane in a flattened imagery, in which people and things are reduced to geometrical entities. She currently lives and works in her native Mexico City, after traveling around the world for her various residencies. Her work has been shown internationally in Mexico, Malaysia, Japan, Italy, Portugal, and the US.

Now a San Francisco-based artist, Claire Jackel has received her BFA from the University of Colorado in 2004, and her M.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship. Her imagined and real airplane and train wrecks painted on canvas speak of the force of the nature colliding with the constructs of society; her aerial installations recreate tumbling building structures and inverted urban landscapes, literal upside down worlds made entirely of parchment. These gravity-defying or collapsing structures visually explore issues related to the human manipulation of the environment and to the fragility and sustainability of the world we create.

Ross Racine, based in New York, has shown his artificial landscapes nationally and internationally for the past 10 years. His work can be read via a number of different disciplines: from the visualization of information, to art; from design and architecture to urban studies; from cartography to photography. Yet, drawn freehand directly on the computer and printed with an inkjet printer, Racine's drawings do not contain photographs or scanned material. His aerial views of fictional suburbs are a hilarious comment on society's occupation and transformation of the natural landscape.