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.
