Low Maintenance - Since 2008 Jeff Canham has been working out of Woodshop, a space in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood that he shares with three other craftsmen; two make furniture and the third makes wooden surfboards. He has a small studio where he creates artwork and paint signs, but spending time around the woodworkers and their tools gradually moved him to expand into three-dimensional forms. The plants in this exhibit started out as tiny add-ons that sat on top of his paintings, and over the years they’ve grown (pardon the pun) to be their own standalone objects.
Most of the plants are made with off-cuts of my shop-mates’ custom furniture. Although these remnants are never the same, there’s often a curve or twist that suggests a plant to me, and each piece of found wood gradually becomes a design puzzle that needs to be solved. So the remnant wood gets chopped up, bent, trimmed down and refined until it resembles something suitable for potting. Many of the finished plants maintain the flat graphic forms that can be found in my art and design work; I try to keep them simple and playful. I want the finished plant to be warm, maybe humorous, hopefully charming, and potentially thought-provoking.
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Opening Reception with Artist and refreshments Saturday, April 22 from 6-9 pm.
Jeff Canham is an artist, designer, sign painter, and amateur woodworker who lives in San Francisco, California. He grew up in Hawaii, left to study graphic design at the University of Oregon, and afterward became the Art Director of Surfer magazine in Southern California. In 2005 he moved to the Bay Area and began apprenticing at New Bohemia Signs where he learned the traditional art of sign painting. He currently shares a studio space called Woodshop with three other talented builders. Jeff’s work has been shown around the globe, in New York, California, Australia, and Japan.