Frey Norris Gallery presents Rodney Ewing's first exhibition with the gallery, Public Safety, comprised of three thematic series that will display throughout our space: Disarm, Countermeasures and Meditations. Public Safety examines devices and methods ostensibly designed to protect citizens. Ewing re-structures them as tools that might provide an alternative kind of security, tools that subvert the original intentions of the represented objects' creators. The redesigning of these instruments and re-application of these techniques will appear as cable-hung and wall mounted images, light boxes and installations.

Ewing grew up in a highly mobile military family. His father was a non-commissioned officer in the Air Force and they lived, over many years, in Louisiana, Virginia, Maryland, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, the Phillipines and at Lakenheath Air Force Base in England. The artist received his MFA in printmaking from West Virginia University and has appeared in exhibitions in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and most recently at our gallery in 2006 as part of "Who's Afraid of San Francisco?" His art has been featured at Pro Arts and Swarm Studios in Oakland and Lisa Dent Gallery in San Francisco. Ewing routinely spends summers teaching art to teenagers in underserved parts of the world, such as a refugee camp in the Palestinian West Bank and an orphanage in Trinidad. He was a finalist for the 2007 SECA award at SFMOMA.

The exhibition at Frey Norris Gallery will be accompanied by a 20 page catalogue with an essay written by Ewing's friend, the artist and creator of the widely recognized "All Over Coffee" comic-strip for the San Francisco Chronicle, Paul Madonna. In 2007, "All Over Coffee" was anthologized and published under City Lights books.

On Saturday, June 14th at 4:00 in the afternoon, Ewing will offer a slide presentation and gallery talk that will examine popular media discourse on issues around public safety (and the anxieties that fuel them and attempts to mitigate them) and how these intersect with his artwork and studio practice. This event is free and open to the general public.

About the Art

Disarm: Disarm features a group of drawings based on target silhouettes. The targets, as they are normally used, contain information to gauge accuracy with a firearm, a topic the artist knows well from his time as an artillery sergeant in the Army National Guard. The targets are characterized as featureless bodies. Ewing's compositions also use these silhouette techniques, but instead of being marked by reference points for gun fire, these targets contain messages for the viewer/shooter based in poetic empathy or reflection.

Countermeasures: Countermeasures includes light boxes based on the full body scans that are employed by some of the major airports as a way of quickly discovering which passengers are concealing weapons. These scans work so well that they can see underneath an individual's clothing and give airport security personnel an anatomically correct version of what a person looks like naked. For some, this device breaches their sense of security more than it relieves their fear of physical danger, and the information gained from the scans tells nothing about the character of the individual being observed. Ewing uses images from the scans accompanied with selected text to illustrate the distance between a supposedly clinical and generic image and the nuanced individual behind it.

Meditations: The content of this series is comprised of mandalas, created from objects that are used mainly for destructive purposes. A mandala is a generic term for any chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos, metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the universe from the human perspective. A mandala, especially its center, can be used during meditation as an object for focusing attention and spurring epiphanies.

One of the objects Ewing uses to great effect is a cutaway of a B-2 Stealth Bomber. The geometric beauty of the plane lends itself to the process. But this mechanism, in addition to many others, plays a central role in our defense. Given the huge cost of creating and sustaining these systems, meditation on the mandalas should shed light on the protective value of their contents and the associated possibilities of their literal disassembly.