Into the Fade from Marian Carrasquero on Vimeo.
René Yañez, Into the Fade
Exhibition Dates: March 9 – 31, 2018
6:15pm blessing by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and performance by Richard Montoya from Culture Clash
Closing Reception: March 31st, 6-8pm
Mellora Green, emcee
DJ/Music
Virtual Reality
Into the Fade is a cinematic term that refers to a transition from one scene to another. In this case René Yañez™ exhibit begins with street expression and interventions. Yañez posts on walls in the Mission, documents, and sometimes times, removes parts of the walls and creates a new work on canvas. In this way, he is œjamming and œcollaborating with other street artists. At times, Yañez™ street work has been defaced. He then documents that work and incorporates and reworks it into a new work on canvas.
That work fades into a new series exploring the medical and creative components and effects of marijuana. Yañez illustrates the hallucinations and they have become a new series of works. The exhibit fades into a new series on marijuana that explores its medical and creative components and effects. Yañez celebrates the legalization of marijuana by using actual joints in some of his work. He uses smoke to analyze feelings and visions, and he is undergoing medical treatment whose side effects produce the hallucinations he illustrates.
Yañez has long explored 3D, and is now working with Michelle Wang, a clinic psychologist at Stanford University, who uses virtual reality as part of her practice with patients. She and her colleagues are working with Yañez™ art to find a way to present it through computer analysis and virtual reality.
In The Tortilla Conspiracy, Yañez collaborates with artists Jos Sances, Rio Yañez, and Art Hazelwood in presenting Tortilla Art. This project is a live event around the creation of tortillas with images. Tortillas are silkscreened with chocolate syrup and grilled to make quesadilla and souvenirs. The Tortilla Conspiracy has presented work at a range of places from The Getty Museum, to the Mission, and outside of the Luggage Store. Jos Sances says œit is one way to serve the people. œ
That collaboration fades into a tribute to Day of the Dead, for which Yañez produced a floating altar. After Ralph Maradiaga started presenting Day of the Dead in l971 at Galeria de la Raza. Yañez took up the project in collaborations and single-authored pieces at the Galeria de la Raza, Mission Cultural Center, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
From 2001 to the present, Yañez has co-curated the very popular and beloved Day of the Dead exhibits at SOMARTS (South of Market Cultural Center), featuring father and son team with Rio Yañez.
In an era of novelty and throw away culture, Yañez honors and has reverence for historical contributions.
In l978, René Yañez along with other artists such as Ralph Maradiaga, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Rupert Garcia, Maria Pinedo, Kate Conell, Mike Rios, Daniel Delsolar, and many others, came together to bring about an exhibition homage to Frida Kahlo. Since then, Frida has become an evolving icon. The exhibition fades into a series of work honoring Frida.
Frida Kahlo™s image is now reproduced more than the Virgin de Guadalupe or the Mona Lisa. Yañez presents his own interpretation of Frida, and the tablo vivantes which he first produced for the Mexican Museum in 1991 in the exhibit Pasión por Frida, and at MOMA, for Frida Kahlo™s exhibit in 2008 with living paintings and performances. Jos Sances tile bench made for the exhibit will be presented in this show. A life size cut out of Frida created by Daniel Galvez will be on exhibition so that audience members can be photographed with her. Photo documentation of Frida in Mexico will reference the enormous amount of commercial and folk art devoted to Frida™s image.
The exhibits fades to SOMArts Cultural Center garden which Yañez designed and maintains as a work of art.
The exhibition will be accompanied by several performances during its run (to be announced).
René Yañez (born 1942 in Mexico) is a SF based, Mexican American painter, assemblage artist, performance artist, curator, producer and community activist . Yanez is a Bay Area legend, culture bearer and co-founder of the Chicano arts movement. He …He is the curator of widely popular annual Dia de Los Muertos exhibition (Day of the Dead), and also created and maintains his beautiful garden oasis under the 101 Freeway at the SOMArts Cultural Center. Yanez has shown at the De Young Museum, SOMArts, Galeria De La Raza, œThe Coalition on Homelessness Last 54 years, the Luggage Store and many other local SF galleries.
Please see a recent article from SF Chronicle.
Virtual Reality Team:
Steve DiPaola, both an active artist and scientist, delves into the concepts of the virtual and the social by creating virtual human and community systems both in his research and artwork. An Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University, Steve is an expert on 3d facial and avatar based, and intelligent user interface systems. He directs the social based I-Viz Lab at SFU which strives to make computer systems bend more to the human experience. He came to SFU from Stanford University and before that spent 10 years as a senior researcher at NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, an early pioneering lab in high-end 3D techniques. He has held senior positions at leading-edge companies including Electronic Arts and Saatchi & Saatchi Innovation and has consulted for HP, Kodak, Macromedia and the Institute for the Future. His artwork has been exhibited internationally including the AIR and Tibor de Nagy galleries in NYC as well as the Whitney Museum of Art, and the IBM Gallery of Science and Art.
Lisa Padilla is the CEO of NewPathVR a wellness company that uses virtual reality for psychological and emotional growth. She is also an artist who works in drawing, photography, multimedia, and virtual reality. After studying Multimedia at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, CA, she has dedicated herself to characters that are inspirational, most recently Tilt Brush portraits of Andy Warhol, Jimi Hendrix, Stephen Curry, Peter Dinklage, Stephen Colbert, and Ellen Degeneres. Her work has been featured in books, including the Journal for Contemporary Painting comparing virtual painting to that of traditional mediums, and shown at the Nasty Women UK Art Exhibit in London, the Big City Nights Art and VR show in NYC, and the Bern Art and VR Show in Switzerland.
Dr. Michelle Wang is an Emotional Intelligence (EQ) coach and traumatologist based in San Francisco and Oakland. She holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and has extensive experience working in VA hospitals, centers for survivors of torture, and center for survivors of genocide, often paving unconventional paths with her patients to create deeper healing. Her social good project, Momentary offers dining-in-the-dark suppers to the community where each course is paired with an exercise designed to create deeper connections to oneself, all done using complete darkness as a tool to illuminate the inner landscape. In her EQ practice Michelle offers computer and video game assisted therapy in her work with romantic couples, œcouples therapy for company co-founders, virtual reality assisted art therapy, cannabis assisted therapy, and integration work following plant medicine journeys. Michelle is the Chief Psychology Officer of NewpathVR, a virtual reality company focused on cultivating psychological depth, emotional intelligence, and spiritual awakenings.
This exhibition is funded in part with grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, Grants for the Arts of the Hotel Tax Fund, the San Francisco Art Commission, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and Baldocchi Projects, a member of Intersection for the Arts, who thanks Pazala Foundation for it’s generous support.