Scott Hewicker & Clint Takeda

Wax and Wane, September 2016 

The impetus for Wax and Wane comes from a chance encounter. Scott Hewicker and Clint Takeda met 15 years ago in Philadelphia just once, where they discovered a shared interest in psychedelic music and folk art. In 2001 they both were already performing and touring with influential bands, Troll (SF, CA) and Bardo Pond (Philadelphia, PA), respectively.

Fifteen years later, Grizzly Grizzly pairs their work to underline the influence of their music on their visual art and vice versa. Wax and Wane is a collaboration in which Hewicker and Takeda imbue a space with the crescendos and fades of time. The paintings and sculptures included are formed by their recollections of places and sounds, song lyrics, old phone numbers, and visions stemming from self-induced states of threshold consciousness; a sort of memorial to personal minutiae. Wax and Wanereferences Tennessee Williams’ expressionistic edge, while exploring the nebulous experience of “memory.” In particular, the faded memory of their dialogue.

Scott Hewicker’s series of paintings Ongoing Epitaph invokes the early modernist decorative mosaic, textile and glasswork of the Chapel of The Chimes, a columbarium in Oakland, CA. He says, “Death and life have been on my mind for awhile.” This work is influenced by the Chapel and “my daily newsfeed of San Francisco evictions, disappearances, upheavals and celebrity deaths, I want to (with some humor) confront my powerlessness over loss and change and embrace the inevitable by memorializing in some degree the seemingly trivial and random minutia of my everyday existence. I've been painting my old phone numbers, earworms (bits of songs that get stuck in my head), orgasm hallucinations, thought-forms and various other memento mori that I’m losing everyday.” Like sounds looping in a an echo chamber, the forms in Hewicker's work repeat, change direction, distort and rebuild as they transform from clarity to ephemerality.

Artist Bios

Clint Takeda is making new sculpture that expresses his obsession with psychedelic digressions, rhythmic improvisations, and biomorphic figures. Of this quasi-self portrait, in which Takeda represents himself as multiple monkeys with paintings, he states, “the monkey to me is like a mirror in the round; a mirror with two arms, two legs, and a head. It's a projection of myself as an animal-humanoid-body in space. The small paintings are the pause, the things to stare at to stop the constant chatter in my head; pictures to calm a monkey.” Playing with perception, Takeda defines a spatial rhythm in Grizzly Grizzly by peppering the space with sculptures low and high, hanging from the ceiling, “with the monkey’s faces right side up no matter what side is down.” His own guitar amplifier doubles as pedestal while generating an ambient low frequency soundtrack for the entire exhibition.

Scott Hewicker is an artist, writer and musician based in San Francisco. He has an MFA from Stanford University and has exhibited his work at [2nd floor projects], Gallery 16, NIAD, Ratio 3, Jack Hanley Gallery, Deitch Projects NY, Galleri Christina Wilson in Copenhagen, ICA Philadelphia and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He co-curated the exhibit Hauntology at the Berkeley Art Museum with Larry Rinder in 2010, and played in the bands, The Alps, Troll, and Aero-Mic’d. He is a contributing columnist for Open Space, the SFMOMA blog, and a music reviewer for Aquarius Records in San Francisco. With Cliff Hengst, Hewicker co-edited and illustrated the book, Good Times, Bad Trips published by Gallery 16 editions in 2007. He currently teaches at California College of the Arts, is a member of the artist collective Right Window (SF, CA) and has an upcoming exhibit, Golden Prison at Gallery 16 opening in November.

Clint Takeda, born in Kanagawa-Ken, Japan, is an artist and musician residing in Philadelphia. Raised on U.S. military bases in Okinawa and Tokyo, Takeda found his calling in sculpture and drawing studying with Ann Hamilton at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and went on to earn his MFA from Rutgers University. In Philadelphia, he has had solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; Bridgette Mayer Gallery; Vox Populi; and the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial (Challenge Exhibition). He has exhibited at Arcadia University Art Gallery, The Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Space 1026, and Temple University Art Gallery, all in Philadelphia; Longwood Arts Project, NY; Lump, Raleigh; Galerie Califia and Galerie A.M. 180, Prague. Takeda is a founding member of Philadelphia’s psychedelic rock band, Bardo Pond, which continues to release records and tour after 26 years. He also contributes to various side projects such as Curanderos and performs on occasion as Double Wig. Bardo Pond’s next record is due out this fall on Fire Records.