Love is for Today, Programs are for Tomorrow

Exhibition Dates: Friday August 17- September 21, 2018

Opening Reception: Friday August 17, 2018 6-9pm

Exhibiting Artist: Tana Quincy Arcega

Love is for Today, Programs are For Tomorrow is a solo exhibition of new mixed media paintings by Tana Quincy Arcega. The exhibit features a series of paintings which employ her extrusion processes on substrates of household towels that envision spaces for the homeless. Stirred by Mother Teresa’s recently published writings in “A Call to Mercy: Hearts to Love, Hands to Serve,” Quincy Arcega invites us to contemplate how compassion can exist within our complex contemporary times.

Towels express tangible acts of caring– they touch bodies and scrub floors. Their humility and service know no bounds. In these paintings, their terry cloth textures, prints and embossments inspire an expanded repertoire of material rhymes. Household repair items such as spackling paste and wood filler are extruded through gridded substrates and sewn into the towels. Tana’s four years of work with the extrusion process culminate in a visceral yet delicate display of constructed textures which map the imagined floor-plans of interior spaces. Each of these gestures is an invocation that those literally marginalized to our sidewalks and streets will be invited back inside.

Mother Teresa’s actions were practical and immediate. She encouraged programs but knew her role was to simply do now. She said, “Love is for Today, Programs are for Tomorrow.”

*As an appropriate extension of this show, a portion of each sale will be donated to Lava Mae, to help expand homeless access to free shower services in San Francisco.

Artist bio:

Quincy Arcega explores contemplative themes through alternate materials and mark-making processes. She co-opts utilitarian products to develop new vernaculars in her painting repertoire. These items are mass-produced for maintenance work and not intended to draw attention to themselves. They play a functionally supportive role and almost always operate in the background. These paintings however, bring them to the center of the viewer’s gaze. She works intuitively to allow the materials to dictate her direction, looking for visual rhymes (correlations in texture, color, pattern, or luminosity) between disparate materials and pairing them together. Subtle painterly variations direct the flow of the work. Compositional choices are made in order to emphasize dialogues between substrate and surface. In her search for new mark-making vernaculars, she has been engaging a process in which viscous paint-like media are extruded through porous, gridded substrates.

She has a BFA in painting and sculpture from the University of Nebraska and an MFA in figurative painting from the New York Academy of Art. She has had several solo exhibitions at midwest venues including the Foundry Art Center and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. She has shown locally at CounterPulse, Root Division, and Adobe Books Backroom Gallery amongst others. Her mouth paintings were featured in Her Living magazine. Tana has worked professionally as a children’s book illustrator, muralist, and educator. She currently teaches adult continuing education and college art courses and works at her studio in the Mission.