Our visual arts pick this week is More Water, a show by Yarrow Slaps at State Gallery in the Mission. Yarrow is no stranger to the local art scene; his parents founded the Luggage Store Gallery almost 30 years ago. But this is his first solo show in San Francisco, and we were really taken with his concepts and style.
Part of the appeal here is the accessibility of it all. Slaps has a series of paintings of semi-well-known people in the local art scene — not showing them in the studio, or posing for portraits, but eating at restaurants around the Bay Area — and they have this childish innocence about them, like how he writes the names of the food around each dish. It’s like something you’d draw on your notebook in high school, but Slaps commits to it. There’s also another series here called Game Of Life; the way he puts it is it’s about the grind of late capitalism, and the hustle required to stay afloat in this economy.
The back room of the gallery shows off Yarrow’s curatorial side, with a group show by a crew of artists he’s calling the Art Figaz — we liked this just as much as his own work. Both shows run through June 16.