New Image Art is pleased to present, Get This Power, an exhibition of new work by Yarrow Slaps. This will be Yarrow’s first major solo exhibition with New Image Art.
As an underground San Francisco hip-hop performer Yarrow Slaps has been honing his musical chops for a handful of years now playing at local venues and art shows alike. This interest and participation within hip-hop culture has very much influenced Yarrow’s creative output both on the mic and with a paintbrush.
Yarrow Slaps funky poetics radiate out of his most recent body of work, including large and small scale painting, installation, and photography depicting various niche hip-hop influences and urban ephemera. A Bay Area native, Yarrow grew up in the heart of San Francisco as a child the “Mission School” aesthetic. Yarrow was reared in the mists of the SF underground culture before the Bloggers and techies took over. Before the rents soared in SF and back when it was still a place for broke artists to be left alone and create. As a youth he observed the city from different angles and applied the various perspectives to his craft both sonically and visually.
Get This Power is about a young mixed raced artist in a culturally diverse world expressing his views about today, tomorrow and yesterday. Through tense eyes and a “Coastal” sense of style you begin to read a narrative. The many that have inspired him are often delicately placed on concrete colored backgrounds. The over-spray backgrounds and murky pallet capture a feeling unique to San Francisco’s fog lit afternoons and damp evening nights. Mixing concepts of race, class and identity, Yarrow’s paintings have a cheeky upbeat appeal even when commenting on the social climate within today’s urban environment. His process imbues a “low-tech kitchen table aesthetic” (in fact that is where most of the art is made) that resonates with sophistication and naiveté. Building upon pre-existing SF creative culture, Yarrow Slaps continues to evolve artistically and present work that is both authentic and relevant.
