Fuck Forever, an exhibition debuting new work from San Francisco-based artist Erin Allen. Producing his first solo show, Allen independently transforms MANIAC into a territory of miscellany, in lieu of a stagnant exhibition, closely consulting with the basis of Allen's bizarre world of 'Very Dark Sunday' (Shitty Legacies), a blackened world where icons and insignias of the past thirty years within the American psyche become visual subjects of reexamination and emblematical matter.

While working across the traditions of painting, drawing and mixed-media installation, Allen's content is inherently informed by a specific lineage of music, pop-idolatry, and fallen-luminaries, a linage that seeks thrashed media personas as icons while incorporating elements of the generic and the debased to temper the universality of cultural misnomers relating to well-known social symbols. Allen's vision is noticed most heartedly in the spontaneity and energetic flesh-out that his work carries. Revealing a crowded intellect that anticipates the worst has already come and gone, treating logic as lucky regard, and inciting a cynicism that is far from conclusive, Allen's sensibility creates a dimension where nothing and everything is recognizable at once.

Rather Be Dead than Cool, a program presenting the early work of four emerging artists from the San Francisco Bay Area. Working in diverse, yet traditional (by contemporary measure) mediums ranging from painting, drawing, and installation, the development of these four young artists from the Bay Area offer an illumination and specific message of personal interiority to the overly abundant flash and brass of the current contemporary art world as the public has come to know it over the most recent years.

With 2007 hosting the largest numbers of art fairs in history, the notion of the contemporary art world has taken on a new definition in terms of being the most assessable (physically and visually) and the most inaccessible (origin and context) at the same time. The current-contemporary art world's strong linage to themes of instantaneous visual gratification (design friendly, fashion savvy) has lent a particular 'gloss' or 'glitter' to the contemporary art world that has multiplied quantity over quality in certain circumstances, and presented quandaries regarding the definition and relevance of fine art in the 21st Century. Compounding the message of the contemporary art world reaching a breaking point of saturation is the noticeable move away from the celebrity of the current contemporary art world by early-emerging artists for a further internalization working with conscious and personal content matter.