I Like You Cause You Like Me, 2009 by Mike Monteiro

As you can probably tell from our endeavors both online and off, community and community-building are things that we strongly believe in at JBP. We strive to create and be attuned to opportunities for growing this community of artists, art-appreciators, art-collectors and anyone else that wishes to somehow participate in this ever-expanding conversation about how all of these things can exist and thrive in the present.

So it's especially thrilling when we see that happening organically amongst our artists and friends, like with 20x200 artist Mike Monteiro showing his Irony-is-Dead, Long-Live-Irony!-esque works in Lisa Congdon's San Francisco design store and gallery, Rare Device. (Lisa herself is another 20x200 artist.)

Text Me Later
Work by Mike Monteiro and Omar Lee
On view at Rare Device, February 5 – February 28, 2010
1845 Market Street between Valencia + Guerrero Streets
San Francisco, CA

Mike Monteiro's work reflects that of someone who is engaged with a great many things: he's an artist, a designer, one of the great-heaping-masses-of-humanity (you should read the local political commentary on his blog), and, echoing the tagline of personism, he's someone with opinions...lots of them. Monteiro has been described both here and elsewhere as everything from acerbically talented to putting the "gauche in gouache," and we have a lot of love at JBP for his uncomfortable truths. He's been in multiple shows at Jen Bekman Gallery and is also a AAA artist on 20x200.

My favorite recent example of how far and whither the mind of Mike Monteiro strays was his crowd-sourced artist statement for this show. There was a winner chosen among the submissions to Mike's blog, and it made it into the press release:

Mike Monteiro grew up in Philadelphia and currently resides in San Francisco. He explores the junction of traditional techniques with new media in his monumental portraits of the Helvetica typeface, posing it in a succession of "found" costumes such as pop song lyric and colloquial verbal challenges. While alluding to the recontextualized maxims of artists like Jenny Holzer, Monteiro brings a personal, confessional element to his sometimes abrasive aphorisms. Throughout his work, he aims to problematize the easy identification of Helvetica with truth.

If you can't make it to the show in person, a full online viewing can be seen on Rare Device's gallery exhibition page.