Artists
Maria + Yoshi47
Maria Allocco is a half-Korean half-Italian writer with a fondness for bubbles, swing-sets, menus, and diner conversations, and a distinct lack of fondness for pretentiousness, inorganic over awareness, guilt, and puddles of ants. Minus these, she is all for celebration. Vocally trained in opera for eight years, she now sings jazz in her shower and apartment for hours. She has been published in the Monday Night Literary Review, Fusion Literary Magazine, and was a 2003 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize for best undergraduate poetry. She is currently a teacher at an alternative private high school in the Tenderloin to students she loves.
Yoshi47 is does graphic design, motion graphics, film, painting and all things he needs to do for his art concepts. Originally a student from Japan’s Nanzan University, An accomplished artist, Yoshi traveled to UCDavis to pursue a career in Californian Break Dance. When he broke his shoulder, he began to pursue his art and is now exploring the art world in the Bay Area. He has produced work for Stussy, Kid Robot, Tokyosexydreamers, SF Montage, Pacific Art Collective and Urbanology and has had recent exhibitions in San Francisco galleries AAnno Domini, FIFTY24gallery, the Canvas Gallery, Future Primitive, Luggage Store Gallery, On Six Gallery and Red Ink Studios. Yoshi47 welcomes you to his Utopia, where people have a right to pursue happiness.
(http://www.yoshi47.com)
On their pairing:
There are certain people who can tell you a story about something ugly, and leave you with something beautiful. Maria and Yoshi do this -- in poetry for Maria, and art for Yoshi. Maria: “We begin at a park. We both have brought something to eat. The sun is out. We picnic on grass.” A simple set-up for an organic story of discovery. Yoshi sent us a little comic book that began with a boy on a bike in a fog city. He discovers a door marked, “Utopia,” and inside he finds a girl, and they talk about how to play games, feeling and fruits, war and cheese, chaos and the tango. Maria and Yoshi are storytellers of the most innocent kind – they sweep us off our overly-educated, opinionated and cynical feet and take us back to a world where we see things again for what they are, both ugly and beautiful, and utterly honest.