Pretty Pretty Collective
By Atticus MorrisThe Guardsman
Throngs of tattooed, skinny-jean-wearing scenesters crowded the north side of 22nd Street at Valencia on Saturday Sept. 11, sipping PBR tall boys and drinking wine from plastic cups at the grand opening gala for the Pretty Pretty Collective.
The PPC is a new “concept salon” wedged between Bugaloos and the Latin American Club.
The multi-functional space is also a satellite gallery for 111 Minna. The evening’s event, curated by 111 Minna’s Jay Howell, featured the work of influential Bay Area artists Mike Giant, Devon Blood and Audrey Erickson, as well as that of New York-based Dennis McNett.
Once through the door, the sound of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” filled the oddly shaped space—which is 80 feet long with a vaulted two-story ceiling in the center, but only 12 feet wide from wall to wall.
The aesthetic contrast of the artwork adorning the walls was marked, but succeeded nicely in accentuating each artist’s style.
Giant’s signature street-influenced style was reflected in his black and white drawings, one of which was a “tribute” to San Francisco bars, where he simply inscribed the names of many popular establishments in various artistic fonts. Blood’s offerings, by contrast, were complex florid bursts of color dripping with red streams of paint, which looked a lot like, well, blood.
Erickson’s compositional theme took the form of life-like renderings of famous musicians holding cats. Siouxie Sioux, Nick Cave and the aforementioned Bowie were done in black and white water-colors, but for their eyes, Erickson used different colored gouache paints to create a cat-like effect.
McNett, whose style involves intricate carvings made in wood, is a prominent fixture in the skateboarding world, having designed for companies like Vans and Anti-Hero. His “woodcut” technique combined with the color choices he made in his depictions of a jaguar, a skull, and a ram, gave the works a surreal quality, like they were drawn with glowing three-dimensional chalk.
Walking the length of the corridor-shaped space, it would have been difficult to overlook the exceptionally stylish décor.
From the elaborate wrought-iron chandelier hanging from the highest part of the ceiling to large dangling mirrors—crafted from old window frames—rigged on a vintage pulley system, the meticulous attention to detail, from an aesthetic perspective, was impressive.
PPC founder and hair stylist Georgia Howard explained that much of the interior design, like the retractable mirrors, was born of necessity.
Howard, an English ex-patriot, described the process as “making use of small weird spaces to squeeze as much in as possible,” adding, “It’s kind of a British way of doing things.”
It was often difficult to tell just where the art ended and the décor began.
Illuminating the front of the gallery for instance, were scores of light bulbs of varying shapes and sizes hanging from the low ceiling. Strung into bunches, they looked like misshapen clusters of some exotic, bizarrely incandescent fruit. The lighting, as it turned out, was crafted by Allie Zee, a local artist who does installations for the clothing store Anthropologie.
This sort of thing is the rule rather than the exception at the PPC, because the “concept” behind this salon, is a collective of “multiple creators.” A collective that extends into many professions including fashion stylists, makeup artists, lighting technicians, and prop designers.
“It’s culture, it’s music, it’s fashion, it’s hair, it’s art and more art,” Howard said. “We’re just doing our own thing.”
This show was the first of what will be bi-monthly art installations highlighting primarily local talent.
