The Q-Sides

June 5, 2015
The Q-Sides
June 5, 6pm – Opening Reception
DJ Daniela (Xica-Soul)
Lowrider car show of rides featured in the exhibit
July 3, 7pm – Closing party & artist talk
Galeria de la Raza
2857 24th Street @ Bryant

FREE
Visual Art

The Q-Sides is a photography exhibition that re-imagines queerness within lowrider culture through the re-staged, re-interpreted East Side Story LP album covers, a popular vinyl collection of soul oldies that is a soundtrack to lowrider culture. The photographs on each of the original album covers show a Latino homeboy with his posing with his ride, his lady or with his homies. The Q-Sides are Vero Majano, Brown Amy and Kari Orvik. The ‘B-side’ of a single is a song not expected to become a hit – the ‘Q-side’ is the flipside of the B-side – where queer homies are proud of their rides, their ladies, and their joto/a homies. Featuring “Homeboy” by filmmaker Dino Dinco.

BIOGRAPHIES

Vero Majano is an artist born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission district. Her work seeks to preserve memories of the Mission in San Francisco history through film, story-telling and found footage. Her short films include “Calle Chula,” “Two-Four” and “I Reminisce,” which have screened at the Guggenheim Museum, the DeYoung Museum, and numerous film festivals. She was co-director of the film “Why I Ride, Low and Slow”, and co-produced with Sandy Cuadra the exhibition “Two-Four Homegirls, Circa 1980”, a collection of personal photographs that featured the Tiny Locas, at the Mission Cultural Center. A resident at the Djerassi Resident Artist program, she has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Media Fellowship and the Puffin Foundation. Majano is a member of the Caca Colectiva, and co-founder of Mission Media Archives, which collects and preserves audio and 16mm films shot in San Francisco’s Mission district during the 1970s and ’80s. The Mission Media Archives believes that by sharing their films with contemporary audiences, we all collectively preserve a past Mission.
	Amy Martinez (aka DJ Brown Amy) is a DJ/musician who has been working in and around San Francisco for the last 9 years. She is co-founder of monthly queer soul party Hard French, which has been voted Best Overall Queer Party for four consecutive years of its five year stint, and spins some of her favorite 45’s the first Saturday of every month. A hairdresser by trade, she is also the percussive backbone of the powerful, all-women of color, psych-rock four-piece Queen Crescent. Both her DJ and performance practices have garnered international recognition and have allowed her the opportunities to tour the continental US, Canada and Mexico. When she’s not in the studio or digging through record crates, Amy is busy making connections between alternative music forms and global social movements, texting her mom and making taco salads.
Kari Orvik moved to the Bay Area from Alaska and became a photographer while working in affordable housing in San Francisco. She has set up public portrait studios in SRO’s, BART plazas, and on rooftops. Her work focuses on memory and change over time, which she explores through the historical photographic process of tintypes. From a darkroom made in the trunk of her car, she makes long-exposure tintypes of urban landscapes that document time passing in ever-changing San Francisco neighborhoods. Her work has been featured on the cover of San Francisco Magazine, in exhibitions at SF Camerawork and the Headlands Center for the Arts, where she held a graduate fellowship. She earned her MFA at UC Berkeley, and received grants through the San Francisco Foundation’s Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship and the San Francisco Arts Commission. A former studio photographer at Photobooth SF, she currently operates her own tintype portrait studio in San Francisco – kariorviktintypestudio.com.