Queen's Nails Annex talk with Julian Myers

Please join us for a special closing and walk through with guest curator Julian Myers this Saturday from 12 to 2PM.

Queen's Nails Annex is pleased to present a solo exhibition by ERLEA MANEROS, an artist based in Los Angeles, curated by San Francisco-based writer JULIAN MYERS. The gallery will host an opening reception on Friday, March 16th, 7 – 11 pm. The exhibition will continue until April 13th, 2007.

Maneros is a painter who addresses the abstractions and absurd architectures of power. Her work involves collecting images and re-articulating them in artistic form – in the process transforming, in subtle or aggressive ways, how the picture communicates its information. So too is she interested in making visible the way that painting's historical forms are constantly referenced in contemporary photography – in advertising, of course, but also in documentary and news photography which are understood to represent "real" events. Made with watercolor or watered-down India ink, her paintings' medium and style point back to these printed origins.

For her show at QNA, Maneros will reinstall a constellation of borrowed images from the wall of her studio in Los Angeles, an exploration of the unexpected and odd collusions among museum architecture, art, nationalism, and power. The exhibition will also investigate the case of Charles Willson Peale – painter of the American Revolution, amateur naturalist, and curator of the nation's first museum, which was established in 1792. Peale is also famous for excavating the colossal bones of a mastodon from a bog in New York. The poster for the exhibition reproduces (in Maneros's altered form) Peale's painting of this glorious scene: The Exhumation of the Mastodon (1806-1808). His exhibition of this ungainly fossil would become his museum's most spectacular draw, an attraction so popular that the United States considered appointing the wooly beast as its national animal rather than the bald eagle.


ERLEA MANEROS lives and works in Los Angeles. Born in 1977 in Basque Country, Maneros completed her undergraduate studies at Glasgow School of Art and her graduate studies at California Institute of the Arts.
She has exhibited with Garash Galeria (Mexico), China Arts Objects Galeries (Los Angeles), Pelham Arts Center (New York), Blum & Poe (Los Angeles) and Sala Rekalde (Bilbao), among others. She is founder and
co-director of ART2102 of Los Angeles.

JULIAN MYERS is a critic, historian, and curator whose writings have appeared in Documents, October, Afterall, frieze, and elsewhere. His published works include essays in Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco
(2002), Sightlines (2005), Super-Pride and Super Prejudice (2005) and Zoe Crosher: Out the Window (2006). He presented Riot Show, a collection of recordings of crowd violence at rock concerts, at the Backroom in Los Angeles in 2005, and at New Langton Arts in 2006. He received his PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. He is currently an assistant professor in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts, and visiting professor in Arts at University of California, Santa Cruz. Myers lives and works in San Francisco.



QUEEN'S NAILS ANNEX
3191 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-992-2041/415-202-3199
gallery hours: thurs-sat 12-6
or by appointment 415 637 9741