Pittsfield Tracks III

Spoke Art is San Francisco’s newest art gallery and publishing house. Following a year of pop up exhibits in New York City, San Francisco and Oakland, we have finally settled down into our new permanent space on Sutter Street in San Francisco’s dynamic Lower Nob Hill neighborhood. We specialize in emerging new contemporary artists with a firm emphasis on figurative and illustrative works. Our regular exhibits open the first Thursday of every month, and we specialize in connecting collectors with secondary market works namely in the fields of pop surrealism, low brow and street art. Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints. Spoke Art is pleased to present “Fade and Finish”, a new solo show by San Francisco-based painter Jessica Hess. Following her successful solo show last year at White Walls gallery, and two person show with Kevin Cyr there the year before, Jessica Hess will be debuting a new body of original paintings this September at Spoke Art gallery in San Francisco. Known for her photorealistic paintings depicting the sprawling graffiti-laden landscape, Hess’ work combines traditional and formal technique with contemporary subject matter. The result is a documentarian snapshot of her ever changing environment, a moment of time perfectly captured and recorded in between the flux and constant states of change that are an ingrained aspect of the street art world. In elevating the observation and celebration of graffiti and street art to a fine art medium, Hess’ work delicately balances the more stagnant traditional landscape formula with contemporary urban art, resulting in a compelling body of work that bridges stylistic and generational gaps for a dynamic and contemporary expression of the world around us. For “Fade and Finish” Hess has departed from the oil on canvas works for which she has become known, pursuing instead the medium of gouache, a notoriously difficult vehicle