Recology

Recology is pleased to announce a two-day art exhibition and reception for local artists Christina Mazza and Erik Otto. The exhibition will feature two separate bodies of work including drawings, paintings, and installations inspired by and created out of salvaged materials found during each artists’ four-month residency at San Francisco’s city dump.

Redemption by Christina Mazza
The Last Shall Be First by Erik Otto

Friday, January 22, 2010, 5pm to 9pm
Saturday, January 23, 2010, 1pm to 5pm

503 Tunnel Ave. San Francisco, CA 94134
http://www.recologysf.com/AIR

Christina Mazza, Redemption

A focal point of Christina Mazza’s exhibition is a large mural in the center of the gallery depicting matted strips of white packing paper recovered from a collection of vintage Chinese lantern boxes. Mazza reproduced her findings as an abstracted pattern on the wall. Along with her mural, Mazza has focused on creating intricate drawings of ropes, cords, and twisted metal. Using found materials for her canvases, Mazza delighted over a graffiti-marred wooden tabletop, rusted metal cooking trays, and vintage book jackets as exciting surfaces to draw and paint on.

Although Mazza’s materials vary, everything she collected during her residency offered her a compelling opportunity to work with texture, form, and line. Themes of rejection as well as redemption appear throughout her work as she searched for beauty in discarded material. In regards to her selection process during the residency, Mazza remarked, “every rejected item I’ve drawn is meant to be closely examined. In doing so, the discarded object is acknowledged by the viewer and therefore redeemed.”

Her impeccable drawings are completed with ballpoint pen, pencil, or gouache, and present singular objects taken out of context from an often tangled conglomerate of disposed material. In regards to her technique, Mazza stated, “I work with the most humble and basic of implements. Using these common tools, I create sensitive, exquisitely-detailed and somewhat abstracted works that not only cause us to look at the environment around us differently, but also help us to closely examine ourselves and our own impact on that environment.” Her precision and realistic drawing style demands that we take a closer look at everyday objects. By highlighting a rope, or a pile of shredded paper, Mazza focuses on fragility and the individual beauty of objects that often go unnoticed. To accompany her drawings, she also produced an installation and a short collaborative video to document her memorable experience at the Dump.

Erik Otto, The Last Shall Be First

A Bay Area native, Erik Otto studied illustration and animation at San Jose State University. He is committed to drawing, painting, and constructing large installations using a variety of materials and surfaces. The amount of material available to Otto during his four-month residency at the Dump was both stimulating and inspiring.

In his exhibition, The Last Shall Be First, Otto calls attention to objects and materials that have been forgotten and disregarded. He incorporated house paint, spray paint, stenciling, collage and screen-printing in his artwork and through his creative process, regenerated these materials, turning waste into art. Through his homage to trash, Otto brings new spirit to old things and reminds us that thrown away and forgotten items can be salvaged and remembered.

Erik Otto considers himself a process artist and often, during the act of scavenging for materials, he develops his ideas. “I meditate and develop the concepts for the work I am about to create largely based on what I find. I often leave the initial stages of my work open and uncertain while intuitively working out a resolution that will decide its final outcome based on the suggestive qualities of the medium and materials at hand.”

His artwork and installations incorporate abstract and illustrative symbols and scenes with undercurrents of destruction. Themes of repetition, beauty, and devastation appeared in Otto’s work prior to his residency and continue to be central threads during his time at the Dump. Otto has only grown more compelled to find ways of visually depicting the never-ending cycle of waste.

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