Lightning Room @thegreathighway Gallery
The Great Highway Gallery presents LIGHTNING ROOM, a two-person exhibition and installation by San Francisco-based artist couple Mel Prest and Andrew Kleindolph. Please join us for the opening reception, Saturday, October 17th, from 6-9 p.m. Additional events will be announced.
The harmony and play of this installation arises from the artists’ many years of parallel art practices. Both artists carefully consider color, form, meditation, and movement in different but related ways. The interaction of Prest’s kinetic line and color meshes and Kleindolph’s organic glowing forms create an optically and literally charged field. Mel uses a tiny brush to create intimately-sized and room-filling paintings of visually electrifying hand-painted pathways. Andrew’s newest works include folded metal and colorful mixed-media tabletop sculpture, illuminated LED pieces, and internet-connected, occasionally changing sculptures. The front window installation will include a site-specific painting by Prest on the wall and Kleindolph’s electronic sculptures on the floor.
In San Francisco’s Sunset neighborhood, The Great Highway Gallery is a great place to support local art and business. Gallery owner John Lindsey also runs the Rusty Ladle restaurant next door, which serves some of the best clam chowder (and other soups) in town. A sizeable parklet out front keeps the party going in the fog and ocean air.
Mel Prest - Biography
I am an abstract artist whose work is focused on color and perceptual visual relationships. My work is inspired by the color and flow of nature and non-visual phenomenon. I create Kinetic two-dimensional works using responsive materials, such as fluorescent or metallic paint and mica that flickers, glows, or darkens in different light conditions.
Prest received her BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (1991) and MFA from Mills College in Oakland (1999). Her work is held in museums, private, and public collections internationally. Her work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, New York; The Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Durham; IS Projects, Leiden; Saturation Point, London; Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo, among others. Prest’s first solo museum show: Mel Prest: The Golden Hour, was held at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon and featured a catalogue essay by John Yau. Prest has been awarded residencies at The MH deYoung Museum; The Ragdale Foundation; The Sam and Adele Golden Artist Foundation; Willapa Bay AIR; The Wassaic Project; and Vermont Studio Center. She is represented by Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX and K.Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco, CA.
Prest is an advisory board member of Root Division, a non-profit arts organization in San Francisco. She has served on the advisory board of The Art Monastery Project, Calvi della Umbria and Labro, Italy from 2007-2010 and on the artist advisory board of Trestle Gallery in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York from 2012-2021. As an independent curator, Prest has organized shows from Amsterdam to Zagreb. She is a founding member of Transmitter, a collaborative curatorial gallery initiative in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Mel Prest lives and works in San Francisco, CA.
Andrew Kleindolph - Biography
My studio practice gravitates toward 3D work that employs abstract sculpture, craft, and industrial design. I look for quirky, poetic ways to combine dissident themes—meditation, malfunction, spirituality, inefficiency, political data, danger, and asymmetry—into carefully crafted, often electronic, objects. My illuminated sculptures blend digital manufacturing with the unpredictable beauty of organic materials. Beginning as iterative sketches, each piece evolves through 3D modeling, prototyping, and circuit engineering into an organic, full-of-personality form. They provide light, though the participant doesn't always control the color or how it changes.
I've also made work that might first read as decorative but reveals data intended to feel surprising or thought-provoking: a planter displaying an ongoing conversation between two plants, an e-ink display using the language of comics to report air quality, a recalled children's unicorn boot surfacing Consumer Product Safety Commission recalls, and an interactive panel that gives you terrible advice. These pieces could live in any living room or home office, yet each is provocative and may lead to unexpected conversation. They are both decorative and political.
Iowa-born, I studied painting at the University of Iowa before pursuing graduate work in interactive electronic art at Mills College in Oakland. I've exhibited at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Root Division, the Santa Clara Museum of Art, Dominican University, The Intersection of Art and Technology(TIAT), the Schneider Museum at Southern Oregon University, and the School for Poetic Computation in NYC. Highlights include a Creative Code Fellowship with Gray Area and Stamen, an Artist's Fellowship at the Eyeo Festival, and a residency at 72 and Sunny in Los Angeles. Some of my illuminated work is available through Open Editions in San Francisco.
Open Fung visits the Sustainable Design class
Did you know that there’s some amazing folks running an Oakland non-profit dedicated to bringing fungi tools and techniques to the people? Open Fung co-founders Philip Ross and Rachel Linzer visit the Sustainable Design class to talk about the unique possibilities for artists, designers, and engineers to use fungi as a building material. Students passed around everything from buoys for the bay to leather to filled wood panels, all made with mushroom roots. Ideas are growing!
Broken Sky at Flourish
Broken sky shines a changing, colorful glow upward to the heavens, while drop-shaped wood flows down to misty metal rings floating on layered purple felt. The shape resembles a cloud delivering strange weather, or maybe a chalice of the gods overflowing with ether. When you notice the sky is broken, turn this piece on and do a little healing.
This piece will be for sale in the upcoming Root Division Flourish event on Thursday, March 12. https://rootdivision.org/flourish/
Piece in upcoming group show at TIAT!
On Friday February 13th 6-9pm, come by TIAT for the 💻 ❤️ Computer Love 💻 ❤️ exhibition. Computer Love explores love between computers, love from computers to humans, and the love humans develop for machines—romantic, parasocial, devotional, transactional, and strange. RSVP here. I have a piece in the show that will give you all the bad sex, art, and financial advice you might need right before Valentine’s Day.
New Piece: Termitarium
https://www.extrasleepy.com/work#/termitarium/
Slice up a pest-eaten piece of wood, embed a gradient of LED light in the center, and you might end up with something like this illuminated sculpture. Termitarium features wooden levels fragmented with CNC-chewed tunnels, creating a map-like pattern that catches light in unexpected ways. Two LED sources, projected at each other, gradually change color to create a Turrell-like gradient throughout a frosted glass tube in the center of the piece. Each diffusing layer is painted a different pastel color, giving the piece a colorful sculptural presence when off, and adding to the reflected color variation when on. The cast concrete base sits on thin felt, while a pierced river rock weighs the light blue power cord in place—adding another natural sculptural feature. Slide the slightly hidden switch, and be reminded that natural deterioration often provides the most compelling visuals.
What Dreams Are Made Of: Upcoming show at Dominican University (San Rafael)
Upcoming exhibit in the Barbara D. Goodman Gallery Dominican University of California (San Rafael) alongside some amazing folks
Amy Nathan - Tiffanie Turner - Helia Pouyanfar - twfive
Curated by Marrow Gallery
https://www.dominican.edu/academics/archbishop-alemany-library/alemany-library-galleries
https://marinarts.org/event/what-dreams-are-made-of
New Piece: Limitless Bad Advice
2025
Acrylic, 3D printing, Raspberry Pi, LCD monitor, various electronics
Limitless Bad Advice confronts our contemporary faith in artificial intelligence by leaning into the dubious nature of its advisory capacity. Rather than offering solutions, this piece provides deliberately flawed counsel on three aspects of human existence: desire, creative expression, and finance. The device feeds a compulsive need for guidance while acknowledging the challenge of authentic advice from systems incapable of genuine understanding.
Operating on local infrastructure via a Raspberry Pi running Google's Gemma model through Ollama, it deliberately abstains from the vast networked intelligence of cloud-based systems. This technological isolation serves both practical and conceptual purposes: greatly reducing environmental impact while creating a closed system that can only recombine its limited training data in increasingly absurd configurations.
Step up and press a button, this device has got Limitless Bad Advice for you.
Winter work
Flouret Obscura is a set of wall-hanging air plant holders made of painted 3D-printed plastics and CNC wood. When hung, they can be oriented in two directions to support a medium-sized plant. Show here together; these are three individual pieces. The three were created for an art auction to support the Transgender Law Center.
Panel 004 is a wall-hanging painted cherry framework with various 3D-printed forms that fiddle between organic and mechanical.
Wordbub is about remembering that someone is always thinking about you. This magnetized circuit board lights eight times per hour. If you happen to see the lights glow, you'll be reminded of the individual who gave you the piece. Beautiful right? It utilizes the deep sleep of an ATtiny microcontroller to last multiple months on a single coin cell.
Fall 2024 Analog and Digital Class Projects!
I can't hold back the variety of designs I get from my Analog and Digital classes at LWHS. The main project is to build (Bluetooth) amplified desktop speakers. Students start with essential electronics prototyping and printed-circuit board design, and in my mid-semester, they are designing a 20-watt amplifier board with a partner. The final step is to build a unique enclosure using primary digital fabrication (laser cutting, 3D printing, CNC cutting). My colleague Jeff jumped in to teach one of the sections this year. Here's a sampling of the final projects from our classes. This set includes Talia, Nola, Matthew, Lily, Stuart, Marcel, Lucy, Kaelyn, Avery, and Safiya.
Adaptive Technology Club
I wanted to share some images from this project I've been supervising. This student, Ilana, has been working in the special needs office in the Oakland Unified School District to adapt toys for students with special needs. Standard interfaces exist for folks with bodily mobility or motor-control differences who need adaptive tech, but the options are limited and very expensive. Ilana and this club of students have been shopping for toys that can be easily hacked to have a specific connector. Once that connecter is installed a variety of interfaces, from large buttons to breath-controlled actuators, can be attached to the toy. Ilana and the group have been helping Chantal, the assistive technology director, build a library of adapted toys for students and families to check out. Here are some images from an adaptive tech club workday in November, where we adapted about 40 toys.
New Pieces Summer 2024
Inspired by the product design section of SFMOMA's Art of Noise exhibition, I decided to get a little funky with my amplifier design skills. Decent Vibrations (yes, a nod to the Beach Boys ; )) is a small portable Bluetooth amplifier with a large on/off switch and a giant lumpy volume knob because why not? The base is cast concrete, and the body is texture-painted 3D-printed PLA. The piece is rechargeable, lasting many hours, longer than an unedited drone-metal double album––way longer.
https://www.extrasleepy.com/tangent#/decent-vibrations/
Sometimes, you need to lump around and take in a little abstract art. And what if that abstract art was a little lumpy, too? Even better, what if it changed every six hours so you could contemplate a new maze of lines and shapes? Lumpstraction provides all that. A CNC-cut wood texture-painted sculpture with an embedded black and white e-ink display, this piece will delight your abstraction appetite without keeping you awake at night (Literally, there's no illumination).
https://www.extrasleepy.com/connected#/lumpstraction/
New Pieces Spring 2024
Moon Sample
More about Moon Sample: https://www.extrasleepy.com/#/moon-sample/
Sable Block
More about Sable Block: https://www.extrasleepy.com/#/stable-block
Inspired! Learning To Teach Creative Technologies with Generative AI
I just took a professional dev day to attend my 2nd "Learning to Teach Creative Technologies" conference, organized by De Angela L. Duff and hosted by NYU Tandon. If you teach creative technology, I can't recommend this conference enough. I was able to listen to over 25 different teachers talk about how they're using AI in their classrooms, curriculum, and ideation processes. I'm totally inspired, with loads of tools to sort through. While I'm already using some AI tools in my spring Device Invention class, I plan to expand my thinking on this subject across the board while developing my teaching. Here's a summary of the "unsymposium." #LTT2024
Student Work from the Fall 2023 Analog and Digital Class
A sampling of final projects from my fall Analog and Digital class at Lick-Wilmerding. The project is to design and build portable amplified Bluetooth speakers. Students design and build every part, from the printed circuit board to the custom enclosure. This set includes work by Emma, Kyra, Manu, Natalie, KaiL, KaiS, Nico, Olivia, KaiD, and Taran.
BIG BUNDLE!
These times are uncertain and full of reasons to band together and provide people with a little extra support. With the press of a switch, Big Bundle is a reminder to reach out to your crew when you have the capacity and hopefully find yourself at the center of the support bundle when you most need it. Huddle tight, keep growing, and keep glowing.
Big Bundle's light sequence, composed of 16 programmable LEDs, fades at random intervals, in a random order, through meditative warm and cool tones. This piece can operate plugged into a USB outlet or charged for four or more hours of untethered operation.
Black-stained cherry, UV-coated SLS 3D printing, microcontroller, RGB LEDs, li-poly battery.
You can have one: http://www.extrasleepy.com/#/big-bundle
Bid on Soft Thoughts!
This piece is available at this year's @rootdivision auction. It's called Soft Thoughts, but don't let your thoughts go soft when it comes to supporting one of the best art non-profits in the city. This friend lights up when you touch the conductive aluminum button on the front. After that, you just don't know what's going to happen. Bid, maybe win, and find out.
https://rootdivision.cbo.io
100% of the final price goes to supporting RD. Bidding ends October 26th 2023.
Black-stained cherry, milled aluminum, UV-coated SLS 3D printing, microcontroller, addressable LEDs.
Opening and installation images from the INTUITIVE NATURE:GEOMETRIC ROOTS & ORGANIC FOUNDATIONS
Opening and installation images from the INTUITIVE NATURE: GEOMETRIC ROOTS & ORGANIC FOUNDATIONS @schneidermoa in Ashland, Oregon. Curated by SMA Executive Director @scottmalbaurn.
On View: October 5 – December 9, 2023
Exhibiting artists:
Jason Stopa, Anna Fidler, Iván Carmona, Mark Sengbusch, Jan van der Ploeg, Heather Day, Courtney Puckett, and Andrew Kleindolph
Group Exhibition at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland Oregon.
On View: October 5 – December 9, 2023
INTUITIVE NATURE: GEOMETRIC ROOTS & ORGANIC FOUNDATIONS
more information here
Soft Thoughts!
2023
Black-stained cherry, milled aluminum, UV-coated SLS 3D printing, microcontroller, addressable LEDs.
Need some Soft Thoughts? Touch this fellow's mouth, and the glowing object displays its delicate thought process in light. This tower of glop whispers through a random sequence of blues, purples, and whites projected in light onto its pillow-like mind. Slightly bigger than handheld, this bright friend nudges any space towards peace and, in the late hours of the day, might soften the thoughts of those around.
This piece slow-fades in or out by touching a rounded rectangle on the front. Its power comes from a USB outlet. The wood base and aluminum touch switch are milled with the Bantam Tools desktop mill. The controller runs on CircuitPython. The body is modeled using Rhino 3D.
A short video of the piece
Dimensions: 4”w x 7.5”h x 4”d (102 x 190 x 102mm)
