Sow & Tailor is proud to present Dingbats, a two-artist exhibition featuring paintings by Sarah Hotchkiss and reliefs by Jonathan Runcio. On view from May 4 to June 1, an opening reception will be held on Saturday, May 4 from 2:00 - 5:00 pm.
On the level of exacting formal decisions, self-contained logics, and individually determined vernaculars, San Francisco-based artists Sarah Hotchkiss and Jonathan Runcio meet through distinct moves of geometric and playful congruence. While Hotchkiss takes an optical approach, guiding the eye and mind through graphic maze-like compositions, Runcio’s low relief paintings of interlocking architectural forms are stand-ins for the built environment we inhabit. Together their quiet and strangely asserting works investigate grammar of ornament, facade, and design.
In high contrast and pure color, Hotchkiss’s flat, hard-edge paintings reference found designed objects like board games, maps, or book covers. Cheerful and orderly, her hand-rendered compositions in acrylic, gouache, and flashe contain puzzles that loop, fizz, and endlessly reset themselves. Systematic and seemingly mathematical, they invite viewers to partake in a visual experience that alerts our sensitivity to signs, pathways, and the possibilities of symbolic communication.
Storefronts, apartment buildings, garages, factories and gates become poetic abstractions in Runcio’s hands. Extrapolated from this everyday architecture, scaled down to maquette size, his balanced structures retain an undiminished power and emotion. Intuitive and layered color applications (oil on water-jet cut steel) speak to traces of time, decay, and exult the beauty of the visible and deteriorating material world.
Whether containers for play and imagination or placeholders for entire universes, the pair provide more questions than answers, encouraging viewers to allow their eyes to wander. “Dingbats” might be hurled insultingly on the playground or pejoratively describe a boxy apartment building perched perilously above a carport, but as an exhibition it offers a chance to ponder the ordinary—the architecture, language, and printed matter right in front of us—and collect our own connections through subtleties of shape, repetition, and flourish.
Don't blink. You’ll miss something, ya dingbat!
Sarah Hotchkiss (b. 1985) is a San Francisco artist and arts writer. From 2020 to 2023, she co-ran an exhibition space on a 6-by-12-foot billboard in the Inner Sunset called Premiere Jr. She is a senior associate editor for KQED Arts & Culture. Recent exhibitions include, ’NEOGEONEOGEO,’ a group show at Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco; ‘Altered Perception,’ a three-person show at the ICA San José; a two-person show at Marrow Gallery, San Francisco; and group shows at OCHI Projects, Los Angeles; Best Practice, San Diego; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; and Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in the San Francisco Arts Commission’s public art program and she has attended residencies at Skowhegan, Jentel, ACRE, KHN Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center.
