tendril wild: a collaborative art project & zine

I could not be happier with tendril wild, a collaborative art show and zine currently at Fayes Video & Espresso Bar, 3614 18th St, SF, CA. On view May 1-31.

Paintings by me (Alicia Dornadic) / Words by Tomas Moniz

Installation view. Work is available for purchase through Fayes. We believe in affordable art. Prices range $45-150 for original artwork and $10 for the zine which includes all 14 fruit poems and images.

Yesterday was the opening reception: Saturday, May 7th 4-7pm

Huge thank you to special guests Courtney Cerruti, Ajuan Mance, & Baruch Porras-Hernandez for sharing their work with us. 

Select works from the show:

Artist Statement:

Paint the same fruit every day and you’ll discover a different story each time. I watch how a banana turns from starchy green to bright yellow to spotted brown and this changes my interpretation of it. I mirror this constant change with the loose sketchy quality of my watercolors, which also suggests studies that are never quite finished but merely represent this one moment in time.

In my life, I deeply associate things that we grow with certain people, places and times. Sweet peas are my grandmother tending to her garden; pomegranates are my mother in autumn. Painting each fruit evokes these memories and relationships. So it seemed natural to me that fruit imagery would then lend itself to storytelling, to recounting the past, and as such, would complement Tomas’ writing.

Even the language of fruit – bruised, ripe, spoiled – implies a link to bodies and our experiences. Fruit gives us moments from the past that explain our scars and show how we are marked by those we encounter. They reveal deep human connections. Blueberries are “like nipples after breastfeeding / fat & bursting / like earlobes after a warm bath / gushy & innocent” or figs, “purpled skin & pink fleshy insides / tasting the coldness of february during the dying heat of october.”

These collaborative pieces clearly show two hands at work, contrasting washes of paint that run into grids of tight scratchy text. The viewer’s eye passes from words to image and back, where each changes the interpretation of the other. I could never achieve this dual nature by myself, so I am grateful that Tomas overcame his ambivalence towards his handwriting and saw that it is in fact idiosyncratic and beautiful.

Finally, for me, the collaborative aspect runs deeper to include other artists who have depicted classic still-life subjects – flowers and fruit – over millennia. A lineage of oranges, of irises, reinterpreted time and time again, changing our associations with the subject and our understanding of ourselves.

See more on Instagram: @adorndesign #tendrilwild