Mind Spring Art Exhibit featuring Chuck Sperry, Chris Shaw, and Ron Donovan

Moonalice poster artists Chuck Sperry, Chris Shaw, and Ron Donovan have been busy creating new paint­ings, instal­la­tions, and lim­ited silkscreen editions for Mind Spring, the newest exhibit at Varnish Fine Art in San Francisco. In the piece Mind Spring, Sperry creates an icon of the Worldwide Occupy Movement and it’s antecedent in the Arab Spring. The figure wreathed in blooming spring flowers is a representation of the surprising enlightened humanism, the opening mind, the broadened socio-political possibilities which has swept the world in 2011.

Lend­ing rock and alter­na­tive music a form of visual expres­sion in sync with their urban envi­ron­ments, Chuck Sperry, Chris Shaw, and Ron Dono­van embrace, alter, re-assign mean­ing and re-contextualize images until they become the medium-the sub­ject emerg­ing, used purposely–irreverently or reverently–to trans­form ephemeral events and expe­ri­ences into a lex­i­con of shared cul­tural visual memory. “Dono­van, Shaw and Sperry have made their liv­ing cre­at­ing expres­sive con­tem­po­rary prints and posters for both the col­lec­tor and the gen­eral pub­lic whose capac­ity for images is not just at its max­i­mum, but tee­ter­ing on over­load. Ded­i­ca­tion to their craft has rewarded them with a mas­tery of color the­ory, com­po­si­tion and print design that cre­ates a lan­guage that can be seen, per­haps almost heard, amidst a visu­ally com­pet­i­tive, urban envi­ron­ment. Never known for fol­low­ing the con­sen­sus of any art estab­lish­ment, these three have a strict loy­alty to their craft, and have become lead­ing inno­va­tors of the rock poster art form. Their sus­pi­cion and dis­dain for main­stream Amer­i­can pol­i­tics often char­ac­ter­izes their approach to mak­ing art. With a sin­cere ded­i­ca­tion to a broad pub­lic audi­ence, they reflect a social con­scious­ness and draw much from the imme­di­ate urban envi­ron­ment.” – Renee de Cos­sio, cura­tor SFMOMA Many were in attendance at the Artist Recep­tion, including Moonalice artists Carolyn Ferris, John Seabury, and Alexandra Fischer who took some wonderful photographs pictured below. [scrollGallery id=13] Chuck Sperry and Chris Shaw talk about their art for Mind Spring in the above audio clip. The complete catalog is available to view online at VarnishFineArt.com. If you are San Francisco, the exhibit continues until February 18, 2012.