I was inspired to photograph Crustaceans after finding containers of crabs, shells and bugs in my parents garage where they had been hidden and placed in jars for the last 53 years. I photographed the Crustaceans and made beautiful prints but I needed to take things a step further. Working with my hands has always been a love of mine - particularly working with beautiful woods, since I was sixteen years old and I apprenticed a master cabinetmaker. Recently, I've combined this love of creating beautiful objects with my career as a professional commercial photographer, in creating Photographic Cubes. Each cube is hand made and these measure 2ft x 2ft and house four archival photographic prints covering four of the six surfaces of each cube. The two remainder side show the ornate wood of the cube. Hence, the cubes can be viewed from any angle with varying effect. The cubes are self contained units and can be displayed in any number of ways including stacking them upon one another. They can be made in any size and configuration. I wanted the cubes to become their own entities and combining the sculptural with the photographic without taking away from the photography but adding to it and making it something new and alive.

I collect images and color stories.  Themes emerge and these give way to the next body of work.

I choose subjects for their sense of design and once the process is underway, it shifts toward something improvised.

My background is in textiles and illustration and I have always been curious to know how structural problems are solved. 

The purpose of my work is solely in its rendering so, rather than state its meaning, I invite the viewer's intepretation.

I love the shape, design, “feel” of industrial objects.  I search these objects out at garage sales, flea markets, dumps, attics, construction sites and roadsides, add them to my collection and then get to know them.  In time their individual contours, textures, compositions suggest a whole – something new created from the found – that stands on its own as a complete system.  My WaterContraptions create soundscapes that afford relief from the urban hum, attract birds and their songs, provide self-sustaining plant habitats and “soften” any garden or home environment with the sight and sound of moving, falling water.  Each piece is completely one-of-a-kind, made to the order suggested by its reclaimed elements, held together by my tried and true “fountain plumbing” technique and made personal by the setting you provide.  Every WaterContraption also comes with a foolproof prescription for it’s new owner: Listen, watch, relax, repeat.   

The Friends of Sharon Art Studio (FOSAS) is devoted to sustaining and enhancing the Sharon Art Studio’s (SAS) goal to promote artistic development, craftsmanship, and creative expression. FOSAS is proud to be a partner of the SF Recreation & Parks Department (SFRPD) to bring Sharon Art Studio’s outstanding art programs to you. FOSAS believes that art education is an essential component of a healthy community and strives to ensure that quality, noncompetitive art programs are affordable and accessible to all.  Sharon Art Studio offers classes for youth and adults at two facilities: the beautiful historic Sharon Building in the Eastern end of Golden Gate Park, and now at Mission Arts Center. To register for classes and workshops, visit www.sfreconline.org.

I experiment with characters and screens to explore and create alternative experiences in video sculpture. My characters are pigments, fluids, and electronics on the micro scale and despite the unorthodox cast, my films follow narrative structure and are shot using established film lighting and editing techniques. The result is a collection of images and sounds which appear very similar to natural phenomena but have no scale, and therefore transcend the boundaries of their literal setting.

Contemporary San Francisco painter Henry Riekena fuses the energy of graffiti and graphic art with the deep, meditative mindset of abstract expressionism, resulting in mesmerizing canvases that one can wander around in for hours. “The first thing you need to understand about my work,” he says, “is that I'm not painting a 'thing,' I'm creating an effect. You spend some time, let your eyes start to flow around the piece, your focus shifts back and forth between all of the different compositions, and once you get a little bit lost and your brain clears out—that's when the magic happens.”

Looking at Riekena's work, the viewer first notices the energetic quality of his line and composition, and the balance and subtle control of color learned over a lifetime spent obsessed with visual art. But taking his cue and spending a little more time with the work, another dimension opens up, as the visual space becomes plastic and hypnotic, and the viewer begins to feel almost intoxicated. “There is a very intentional mental element to it, I am very consciously trying to take your brain into a certain state. I see a lot of my peers obsessed with irony, surface, and the minutely specific and personal, but I'm maybe old-fashioned—I'm trying to be earnest, go deep and universal, to get people on kind of a zen level and share something that's really hard to describe.”

This idea is most completely expressed in his recent monumental work A Nice Way to Travel 3 Hours Into the Present, a “Walk-in painting” consisting of a single 7' x 60' canvas that wraps around the entire inside of an 18' diameter circular yurt. Nearly a year in the making, the installation cuts the viewer off from the outside world, enveloping them in an environment of endless pathways that swirl through the work, shift, and re-emerge, creating a space that is as incomprehensible as it is beautiful.

Riekena still considers himself an emerging artist, but has shown his work throughout the Bay Area, as well as showings nationally and as far away as the Chianciano Museum in Italy. The 32-year-old cites many varied influences in his work, including the graffiti art prevalent in his adopted hometown, the meditative abstract expressionist works of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, the playful juxtaposition of line and color in the work of Paul Klee, and contemporary masters such as Mark Bradford. "I don't think of abstract expressionism as a mid-century movement.  That's maybe when a lot of the parameters of it were laid out, but there is still a lot on the table there, a lot of opportunity to take the goals and mindset of those seminal abstract painters and continue to push them forward with new ideas, new tools, and create really powerful contemporary artwork.  And I'm not the only one who is proving it."