Back from the Bay, Clayton Brothers,

The Luggage Store Gallery

Back from PDX and the BAY. 10 days away from home on an extremely relaxing and at times overwhelmingly exhausting vacation. It was a great trip, lots of great artwork. At the top of the list was the 20 year retrospective at The Luggage Store Gallery entitled, In the Fullness of Time. The show featured work from bay area champs such as Barry Mcgee, Andrew Schoultz, Chris Johanson and Jo Jackson, and a very moving piece dedicated to the memory of Margaret Kilgallen where gallery founders and directors Darryl Smith and Laurie Lazer sanded down areas of a wall Kilgallen had painted a piece on several years before. They removed several layers of paint, each representing a different moment in the galleries physical history. Kilgallens simple yet endearing style of folkloric characters slowly reemerging through the haze of preceding layers of paint. Also included in the show, Os Gemeos, Steve Powers, Yoon Lee and Mark Bradford. I was also fortunate enough to talk to gallery director Laurie Lazer. As she gave a tour of the 6th and Market space, I was blown away by her compassion and dedication to the artists who have passed through the gallery over the past twenty years. The work that has graced the walls of the Luggage Store, has had a tremendous influence on the aesthetic sensibilities and cultural identities of a new generation of see'rs, thinker's, maker's, and taker's. Not unlike the socially conscious and community motivated programming the gallery prescribes, the artists and their work have also taken on socially relavent content that explores gender and sexual identity, popular culture, localism/(vs.)globalism, social justice, graffiti, street art, and skate culture....etc.

Clayton Brothers



What's up bro?
The Clayton Brothers have been collaborating on paintings since '94. Working together to fabricate narratives that weave in and out of our collective subconcious. Within the work, meaning is compounded, symbols exist simultaneously as cohesive and contradictory signifiers, colors are lively, the picture field is full to capacity. These paintings belong to a series of work that reflects and explores western medicine, mental health, and the implications of a medicated society, through the kaliedoscopic eyes of an acid head. Candy coated colors, psychodelic, hallucinatory imagery and sickly looking patiences, are reoccuring themes within this series. They combine to form a disjunctive yet compelling account of a culture infatuated with sickness but in love with the possibilty of finding the cure.