Track 16 Gallery is pleased to present “Five Stories Higher,” selected works from the careers of five prominent and influential artists: Burt Payne 3, Rachel Lachowicz, Monica Castillo, Douglas Perez, and Don Ed Hardy. Five Stories Higher runs from January 13 through February 10, 2007, with an opening reception on Saturday, January 13 from 6 to 9 P.M. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 A.M. to 6 P.M.

Burt Payne 3 was the first artist to show his work at Track 16 Gallery for its inaugural exhibition in 1994.  Using familiar, and sometimes discarded objects, Burt Payne 3 provides, in his words, “an access point for viewers, giving them an opportunity to engage in the conceptual layers the works have to offer.” Laced with wit, his work aspires to “recapture a disinterested public, commenting on current social issues, accessible through humor.”

Rachel Lachowicz’s work makes radical incursions into the canon of art history, reconfiguring famous works, from the Renaissance through Minimalism, from a post-feminist perspective. She has produced a body of sculpture that includes lipstick-covered Michelangelo’s and Richard Serra’s (‘Red David’; and ‘Sarah’); a burned and charred Wassily Chair (‘A Charcoal Breuer’); as well as Warhol flower redux’s made up entirely of small colored make-up pans (‘After Warhol’). These diverse détournements of art history, represent a much more sophisticated strategy than mere deflation or denunciation, however. The persistence and depth of Lachowicz’s samplings reveals a complex relationship to the art of the past: part critical unpicking of masculine-centered canon, part tongue-in-cheek tribute.

The work of Mexican artist Mónica Castillo explores the genre of self-portraiture from an informed and deviant point of view. Part of a generation that has had to reconcile the mythology erected around Mexican and Latin American art when it was internationally relaunched in the eighties, the work of Castillo severs the self-portrait—a mode cultified by the Frida Kahlo craze—from its convenient and voyeuristic biographical meanings.

Cuban artist Douglas Perez’s work has commented on such subjects as colonialism, race, and history from his unique perspective. Framed by the “Periodo Especial”—the period of economic and political upheaval that has followed the failure of perestroika—his work emerges from the unique ambiguity, complexity, energy, and desperation that characterize daily life in Cuba.

This exhibition marks Don Ed Hardy’s sixth at Track 16 Gallery and we are continually amazed at the output and evolution of this important artist. California native Don Ed Hardy–determined to be a tattoo artist from the age of ten–has been tattooing professionally since 1967. Fusing Asian aesthetics, traditional Japanese art, Western art history, and the aesthetics of surf culture, hot-rod art, and California funk, he has been instrumental in developing tattooing’s artistic potential and fueling the late-century international tattoo boom. Currently in its second printing the “encyclopedia of Ed,” Tattooing the Invisible Man pays homage to his extraordinary lifetime of work.