SAN FRANCSCO, CA.- The San Francisco Art Institute is proud to present the 122nd Annual exhibition, The Line Up, featuring new works by nine artists, including five who are SFAI alumni. The Line Up opened at the Walter and McBean Galleries and is on view through January 8, 2005. Selected from among hundreds who responded to a national call for entries, the works in this exhibition resonate with additive and subtractive strategies as employed by the artists in various media including video, painting, drawing, and site-specific installation. Several of the artists included in The Line Up create sculptures that reference painting through media or placement. Maria Vasconcelos’ (SFAI MFA 2003) installations result from the labor-intensive process of building up layers of paint until the paint itself becomes a three dimensional form. Diane Romaine’s (SFAI BFA 1988) graceful and subtle sculptures are literally the enactment of line in space, made of the coincidence of carefully placed plastic strips, gravity and shadows working in concert. Genevieve Quick’s (SFAI MFA 2001) works reference model-making and man-made ‘natural’ environments such as aquariums and terrariums, imagined ecosystems that capture the plastic twinkling of light and water frozen in time.

David Allan Peters (SFAI BFA 1997) and Curtis Hollenbeck make paintings derived from the process of sculpture. Hollenbeck’s large “asphalt paintings” consist of found fragments of street pavement, arranged on the wall around the central graphic of the painted yellow or white line. David Allan Peters’ process is the opposite of Vasconcelos’ technique of additive paint accumulation, building up the paint layers on a canvas until they are thick enough to carve back into them, at which point he begins to expose layers of saturated color and enigmatic patterns through small circular incisions. A reference to the passage of time combined with an improvisational approach towards the creative process is another point of similarity between otherwise diverse artworks in this exhibition. Although it is suggested in the process of building up paint in both Vasconcelos and Peters’ work, time passing is a central component in the construction of Murat Musulluoglu’s (SFAI PB 2004) interactive, three-dimensional paintings composed of cups of colored water arranged in. And a different but equally compelling use of improvisation and time can be found in the work of current SFAI.