Call Your Corners!

Art, drinks, and falling backwards into business. Artist and former bartender, Ryan Seng, brings his journey from bartender/artist to artist/business owner to you with a thinking exhibition. Featuring large scale oil paintings, drawings, and the budding story of Can Can Cocktails.

Gallery

Exibition Dates: January 23, 2017 - February 16, 2017

Artist Statement

In restaurants, you announce yourself to a corner that you cannot see around by calling “Corner!” This habit becomes life in a fast pace crazy restaurant. If you forget to call your corner the person that is whizzing around that corner, with arms full of expensive dirty plates and glasses, will not know your there and they will crash into you because you did not announce yourself… and it is your fault for not calling the corner, and you have to help clean up.

With this art show I decided to “call my corner” and air out all of my issues of going from artist/bartender to entrepreneur. Can Can Cocktails is a company that I started about a year ago from a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign. We launched our first product October 2016. High quality cocktails in a can, made in Sacramento. Currently we are selling at some of the best bars in town, the Golden 1 Center, and Nugget Markets. Can Can Cocktails is a culmination of everything I have been working on in my adult life, how to bring art out to people that usually do not go to art shows. I plan on using other artists on the labels once I get this moving. This company will become a platform for artists to get their best work out to the public, the plan is not for artists to make illustrations for the can, but to showcase some of their best art in an exciting way.

Can there be an art to starting a company? Is business art? Can business be art? Is the definition of art the actual opposite of the definition of business? In this show, I want to illustrate how my work with oil paints traveled from canvas to label and how that journey can become a brand for a company. I am exhibiting; trial and error attempts at the labels, oil paintings that are in the labels, drawings, short stories about the work, photographs of my latest mural in Grange Restaurant, and an installation where I just let it all out for four days in the gallery and see what happens. Art for me has always been about just making and responding then looking and examining later.

This is a “thinking exhibit” to show how a creative thought process can be used to solve some pretty practical issues. Who knows if it works out in the end, but it is exciting to be all in and to be using all of my skills to try and solve big issues.

—Ryan Seng