Text Me Later: Work by Mike Monteiro and Omar Lee

February 5 – February 28, 2010; reception date: February 5, 7-9 pm

San Francisco design store and gallery, Rare Device, is proud to present Text Me Later: Work by Mike Monteiro and Omar Lee. The work will occupy the Rare Device gallery February 5 – 28, 2010. A reception for the artists will be held Friday, February 5 from 7 - 9 pm.

Mike Monteiro grew up in Philadelphia and currently resides in San Francisco. He explores the junction of traditional techniques with new media in his monumental portraits of the Helvetica typeface, posing it in a succession of "found" costumes such as pop song lyric and colloquial verbal challenges. While alluding to the recontextualized maxims of artists like Jenny Holzer, Monteiro brings a personal, confessional element to his sometimes abrasive aphorisms. Throughout his work, he aims to problematize the easy identification of Helvetica with truth.

Omar Lee, a native of Los Angeles, cranks out his small, simple paintings by moonlight whilst earning a living laying bricks on the almighty internet and renting his illustrative services to various commercial concerns and editorial empires of all sizes. He is glad he moved to San Francisco six years ago, though everyone told him he was crazy for doing so. "My personal work is shaped by many of the same tools I have used in my professional life as an illustrator and designer: attention to detail, use of color, scale, and language," says Lee, who has always been interested in the relationship between the desire to simulate the allure of the hand-drawn image and the fast-disappearing dependence on hand skills in the service of defining a visual vocabulary or unique voice. "It is becoming increasingly difficult to detect work done entirely by hand or to recognize the footprint of an automated tool anywhere in the creative process," he explains. "It is my recent experiments with image-making and my exploration of an approach with a greater emphasis on process that has moved me further away from duplicating my illustrative style as a familiar means to a different end."

The work of Monteiro and Lee will be on display in the Rare Device Gallery through February 28, 2010.

Rare Device is a store and gallery that features functional experiments and original ideas in art, design, craft and fabrication. Owners Rena Tom and Lisa Congdon constantly seek out objects that are beautiful, evocative, well constructed and thoughtful. We are pleased to bring to our San Francisco store an ever-growing roster of local, national and international artists and designers for a truly "rare" experience.

Rare Device (raredevice.net) is located at 1845 Market Street between Valencia and Guerrero Streets. Store/gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 7pm and Sunday noon to 6 pm.