[split]

Dates: September 29 – November 10, 2018
Open Hours: Thursdays, 5:00-8:00pm; Saturdays & Sundays, 12:00-4:00pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 29, 12:00-4:00pm
At Ramon’s Tailor

Peeking over the wooden gallery walls and in every hidden corner of Ramon’s Tailor, you will find an archive various postcards, trinkets, and art objects. You may find yourself asking while looking at the art, “Is this part of the show?” For Taxonomy Anostalgia, this archive, collected over 7 years at Ramon’s Tailor, is the show!

Artist Alice Combs attempts to study the accumulated collection of artifacts as if it was a collection of biological specimens – grouping and rearranging them in the space based mostly on surface observations and partially based on the oral history of Frank Merritt, who runs the space. Come see the surprising findings and catch a glimpse of her uniquely analog analysis methods.

About the Artist
After a childhood spent in Rochester, NY and a young adulthood spent in Ithaca, NY, Alice Combs moved to San Francisco to pursue an MFA at San Francisco Art Institute. She graduated from the program in 2015 and now lives and works in San Francisco. She also holds a B.S. in Biology from Cornell University (2008) and an A.S. in Graphic Design from Tompkins-Cortland Community College (2013).

The impetus for most of Alice Combs’ work comes from the misinterpretation of rules. She then develops processes that employ tedium, humor, ready-made materials, and her own personal history studying evolutionary biology to make works that visually ignore those rules. Working in diverse media from traditional oil painting to ephemeral barely-there installations of hair, she highlights the weirdness of everyday rules and objects. Weirdness and humor are free to question oppressive systems of thought and action that are often invisible to those living within them.

At Ramon’s Tailor, she deals with the challenge of relating to the nostalgic items of someone else and how they may or may not facilitate memory. In the process of executing this project, Combs deals with the uncertainty built into analysis and ultimately with her own nostalgia for science.