Managing Dylan

The friends over at ABV Gallery in Atlanta will be hosting Sean Desmond’s “The Tenderloin Project” starting this friday. If you have to be in Hot-lanta the next couple weeks, be sure to check out ABV Gallery.

http://www.vimeo.com/12623749

Medicine Agency is proud to present the first official exhibition of photographs by San Francisco based photographer Sean Desmond. The show will feature a collection of 35 photographs from Desmond’s ongoing Tenderloin Project, a portrait in film and photography of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. To many, the Tenderloin is a poor and stigmatized area, to be avoided if possible, rushed through if necessary. As a point of departure, Desmond and the Tenderloin Project withstand such stereotypes and enter the neighborhood with eyes open and active intent.

http://www.vimeo.com/10518751

The images that emerge transcend a mere documentation of what we could all see if we only looked. We witness the Tenderloin through Desmond’s interaction with it, a process explicated in the Project’s films and evident in each photograph. Portraits of the neighborhood’s marginalized dwellers stand alongside portraits of the streets themselves, all—dwellers and streets, alike—caught in the act of living. The starkness of the black and white photography upholds the starkness of the locale, while magnifying the countervailing warm welcome of the subjects and vibrant animation all around. The viewer enters the Tenderloin with Desmond, with the objectivity of an outsider, and is left with the tension of intimacy, raw and tender.

Desmond’s San Francisco show will mark the first official exhibition of his work from the Tenderloin Project. The show will then travel to select U.S. cities, where Desmond’s penetrating images will give broader audiences a personal introduction to understanding what life is like in the Tenderloin.

A portion of proceeds from the show will be donated to Hospitality House’s Community Art’s Program, the only free-of-charge fine arts studio for homeless and poor artists in San Francisco. Promoting and giving access to art in the Tenderloin, Desmond feels, will allow his project to live on in the community for years and generations to come.

The show will also feature collaborative pieces by a variety of artists from the Bay Area and beyond, including Mike Giant, Greg Mike, Mark Bode, Apex, Oliver Black and others, with an exclusive silk-screened show poster by Sean Desmond with Mike Giant.

SF-based clothing brand Black Scale will also be releasing their second run of t-shirts and first run of pull-over hoodies featuring original photographs from the Tenderloin Project.

For the past few months I have been working on raising money to send 10 Willie Mays Boys & Girls Club members to a Giants spring training game at the end of March. The trip is a memorial for a club member who was an innocent victim of gang violence one year ago. The original idea has grown so that the trip now includes a college visit to Arizona State and an Arizona State baseball game against the California Golden Bears.

Medicine Agency is holding a silent auction fundraiser this Friday, March 12th, at the gallery on Mason & Jackson Street. Auction items will include autographed memorabilia, Giants regular season tickets, and Oakland Athletics luxury boxes. Their will also be artwork created by the club members themselves available for sale.

The purpose of the trip is to give club members a chance to get out of the gang-ridden hunters point district. All the members who are making the trip are a part of the Jr. Giants baseball league, and are passionate about the sport of baseball. All the money raised will go towards the Giants tickets, the trip to Arizona State, transportation, and hotels.

If you cannot make it out on Friday for whatever reason, you can donate online here. All donations (large or small) are appreciated, and are going to a great cause. If you have any further questions feel free to contact me.

We had the  Serge Gay Jr. opening at Meds the other night, and as always it got wild. Check the rest of the photos from the night here, shot by Meds own Sean Desmond.

It seems pretty egotistical to start a website with your best friends name in it. Worse than that, when your best friend is your first “client,” it seems like a bad combination. But I knew Dylan Bartolini - Volk when he was borrowing one of his roommates cameras to take his pictures. His “bed-room” and “office” looked more like a story - board than anything else. He had all these 5 x 7 photos printed out all over his wall, and I’m pretty sure all of them have sense made it in the trash.

I sat Dylan down one night in the “office” at my house. He had just started working over at Bebe for photographer Cavan Clark. Dylan had spent the summer learning the in’s and out’s, I had just spent the summer working in the District Attorney’s office. When we sat down I knew at that point I didn’t want to work in an office, for someone else, again. At that point he knew he had found a true passion. I looked through the work he had been doing, and saw something unique. Here was a kid, 20 years old, shooting raw digital photo’s, but that’s not the unique part. The unique part is that Dylan somehow captured so much life in his photos that it blew me away. The rest is history.

I started this blog to document the stages me and Dylan went through. He was trying to focus his passion, I was trying to bring a business sense to his passion. At this point Dylan has been published in several magazines, shot dozens of parties, worked on ad-campaigns, and booked his first solo show, Deeper Than Digital. Deeper Than Digital will take place on February 6th at Medicine Agency.

I have worked with Medicine Agency for the past two years, and Dylan has shot several of our campaigns, so it seems only appropriate that he hold his first solo show at Meds. Even better, Dylan will be allowing people to “contribute money” for his photos, rather than set a price. I advice coming to this show so you can get your hands on his photos before you cant afford them.

At that point I’ll be saying “I told you so,” and Dylan will be well on his way to the top.

http://www.vimeo.com/9187100