New space, new show!
Thomas DeMello
July 11th 2014
5 pm – 9 pm
1955 Julian Ave, 92113
Back in December of 2013 Bread & Salt, the new home of ICE Gallery, had an open house to show off all the hard work that had been done in the building over the past year. ICE had just barely finished putting up drywall and was in no shape to put on a proper exhibition. However, I decided there should at least be something within the newly demarcated corner space. The end result was a sort of found object installation which utilized the old rusted bread racks from the previous tenant of the building. It was only viewable for one night, so thank goodness my pal Philipp Scholz Rittermann got some great photos of it before all the paper was ripped off and the racks went away to a scrap metal grave.

“Paper and Steel”, 2013, steel bread racks, tracing paper, glassine, custom steel light fixture
More photos HERE
On another note, the new ICE Gallery will hopefully be having it’s first exhibition the beginning of July 2014 (fingers crossed). Details coming soon.
~Michael
In our last update we told about a new opportunity we’d been given. Well, here are the photos that show the results of that opportunity.
Four artists, 40,000 square feet, four installations.
Michael James Armstrong











Thomas DeMello










Joseph Huppert












Lee Lavy











To view A LOT more FULL SIZE photos click below to go to Michael’s Flickr page:

Ya know, just when it seems as though no one’s paying attention to you, along comes an opportunity out of the blue. Two months ago none of us knew anything about Jim Brown and his architecture firm, Public, or his newly acquired huge project, Bread & Salt. The latter being a 40,000 square foot building built in the early 20th century which was, until recently, a Weber bakery. Jim had apparently been silently paying attention to ICE Gallery and, just when we were about to be evicted from our space in North Park, offered us a spot at Bread & Salt! Wow, we’re so appreciative for the offer and the opportunity. Our new space will be much smaller, but it has a lot of potential and we’re extremely excited to get to work on it.

Not only were we offered a new space in a small corner of Bread & Salt, we were also given the opportunity to tackle the entire 40,000 sq ft building. The building is more or less still in it’s raw Weber bakery state, minus most of the heavy machinery. There’s a ton of work to do before the building is ready to be inhabited by it’s future art and design tenants. Perfect! That’s just the kind of space we hope for. It’s the kind of thing we’ve been talking about for the last few years (“Wouldn’t it be great to be offered an interesting space where you’re able to create anything you want?”) and now we’ve been given a shot.

The four of us have staked out our individual spaces throughout the building and are in the process of installing what is shaping up to be a very solid and diverse exhibition. We hope you’ll come join us and see it for yourself on Friday, February 8th, from 6-9. This one is a big deal for us and we’re anxious to show you the work plus the unique building that we’ll soon be a part of.
Thanks Jim and Isabel!
PS – check out this nice write up for the show in San Diego CityBeat
Even though ICE is in hibernation (soon to awaken by summer we hope), the ICE gang has been active. You can see one such example this Thursday, the 15th of March, by visiting an exhibition of new works by Lee Lavy at the San Diego State University Fine Arts Department in room 418C. We’ll be there from 5pm – 9pm and we hope to see you there as well.
Thanks to Joan and Reuben Baron for mentioning ICE and Michael James Armstrong in their Light and Space article for artcritical. It gives us a thrill to be mentioned in the same article as some of our inspirations. The whole article is a good read, but the best part is the last sentence of the 6th paragraph. 😉
In other news, we’re not dead yet. Plans are in the works to try and raise money to fix ICE Gallery. More info and photos are coming soon, we promise.


the two photos above are a view of Michael’s show that most people didn’t get to see.
More photos of the entire installation coming soon!


