I believe that this group of San Francisco artists can be seen as Urban Rustics and Digital Bohemians. Born between 1965 and 1975, as children and young adults they have endured corporate ecoporn advertising and the simultaneous creation of the professionalization of the environmental movement. Their resulting cynicism about good environmental intentions and rhetoric is wed to an absolutely conflicting near – religious belief in salvaging what is left of a fugitive authentic world. This ambivalence is fed by the physical closeness of the immaculate Marin Headlands, peppered as it is with compromising military installations, the elusive remaining San Francisco Bay wetlands similarly surrounded by corporate land use, or the still awe-inpiring Sierra Nevada riddled with water projects.

Layered over this background is the effect on one’s psyche of daily subsistence as part of the new educated underclass, people with college degrees in studios in decaying parts of the Mission district and South of Market in San Francisco, working either the traditional artist day jobs or as new high tech serfs. The internet and digital graphic design are also a part of the landscape, standing out as something sort of clean, neither owned nor codified yet always in danger of cooptation and thus offering a human-scale parallel to a threatened ecosystem.

There is a sense of with drawal from the baser aspects of the culture’s values, a selective puritanism. Skateboards are cool and don’t pollute. Hobo culture declines careerism. Art can offer carte blanche to say anything and can’t be censored if it is on t-shirts and walls. Street style defeats materialism. A new kind of beauty is possible in the broken down and discarded, recontextualized. Move the stick to the outside fringe and declare a new center.

The operative values in these artists’ works include stinging humor, cheeky honesty, an extreme modesty of materials, a demand for empathy with nature and human suffering, and a preference for non-showy rendering skills often based on archaic or pop found sources. It’s a look: off-hand, ironic but not cynical, the half of naive that is childlike rather than ignorant. These are the aesthetic values that the painters and sculptors in this book share with Amy Franceschini.

We warm ourselves each day this unusually cold winter around the fire being generated by the Fellos artists and our heartfelt memories of Miss Kilgallen.

HARVEST
Specification: Book, CD-ROM, 180 x 260 mm, 176 pages
Publisher: Systems Design Limited, Hong Kong

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