Tia Factor

I happened to be blabbing on my cell phone after leaving Mama Buzz in Oakland the other day and as I was jawing away aimlessly, my eye caught on something in the windows of the neighboring space called Keys That Fit. Meticulously painted branches with bands of bright colors leaned precariously against a wall of mirrors. The limbs seemed to be bleeding out intense pools of color all over the floor of the window box and the mirrors were overlapped on each other with intricate drawings inscribed all across them. As one tends to do when they are in mid-phone concentration, I spaced out for minutes on them before I noticed that there was someone else standing behind me looking as well.

Me -"These are pretty damn cool."
Stranger- "Thank you."
M- "Oh! They are....[yours?]"
S - "Yes, they are."

And so it was that I met Tia Factor and was invited into the realm of maps, mirrors, twigs, and modern Rorschach fantasy.

Keys That Fit opens into a studio for several artists, one of whom happens to be Tia Factor (although she made clear that the window display is not usually filled with her own works.) She led me to the back studio and cleared a space for me to sit as I took stock of the extremely organized painter and her works in progress. Small glass jars of enamel paint were lined up below a wall of nature scenes and abstract images. Each thing had its place in the studio and scrupulous ruler lines on the paintings correspond to a clear cut work and house keeping-ethic that is obiviously taken years to come to fruition. In other words, this lady has her shit together.

Zefrey- "What does the title of your show 'Spaceball Ricochet' mean?"
Tia- "It's the title of a T-Rex song."

If a gun were pressed to my temple in a dark alley and I were on my knees and asked to sum up Tia's work in a single word or my brains would become one with the human feces on the sidewalk, I would have to say, "Magical" or "Mystical" or ...(too late.) One of her pieces is titled, "From Here to Oregon". In this piece Tia drew out each and every road in NE Portland (which is quite a large area) and then used this grid as a framework for large organic shapes of green and flourescent colors to wander on. Straight edges meet with the morphic and organic flow of colors. Another piece in this vein has all the roads of California drawn out in bright pencil on a mirror. With just the artery structure of California before me, it is an eiry skeleton of the land that human beings stick to, our safe passage through the wild. Some of the smaller pieces tend to be a bit cluttered with images, but when she expands these out into the larger pieces, the full intensity of her vision strikes you.

She says her influences run the gamut, but the people that she has been looking at recently are Julie Mehretu, Franz Ackermann, Jim Lambie, and (one of my personal favorites) Neo Rauch. She claims her favoirte color (of the day) is lavender and that her immediate influence has been her friend's pancho which has Atari-like alien shapes on it. You'll have to catch this show or be out of luck for awhile because she is off to Argentina for 2 months.

As I walked my way back to the BART I thought, it's gems like this that make me wish I got off my ass and went to Oakland more, because it's cerainly worth it.

http://www.xaul.com/go_live_pages/KEYS/KEYS.home.html
Gallery address: 2312 Telegraph Avenue Oakland
Runs through June 1st
also see: www.tiafactor.com

Snapshot Chronicles

Snapshot Chronicles is a collection of album pages opened to a range of idiosyncratic moments, captured by accidental historians. In other words, while we can assume that these early point-and-shooters were aware of their role as agents of memory, some of them may have also been experimenting with a new medium. It is the tension between the vernacular photos and the carefully crafted page layouts that makes this show a exceptional one. This could be a result of the the curators having spent time in the trenches searching out the brillaint moments or it could be because the format (the photo album) suggested wonderful irregularities in its day.

The 50 or so albums in the show are splayed out in oddly updated vitrines and are generally grouped by form or content. The recurring formal identifiers of the white line on black paper, the stylized image cropping, the careful page layout and hand-written captions create the language for the show, and refer to a romantic (or at least archetypal) standard of the format. This language occasionally tells stories through sequence, and is translated or amplified in some of the more adventurous albums. These involve collage, patterning, and time-intensive illustration (at the margins of the images) and one of my favorites, an album that uses newspaper clippings for image captions. Some of the more eccentric layouts seem radical for their day if only because the photographs, so seemingly complete and perhaps even precious in their day, have been stabbed, sliced and shaped. This tendency is echoed in the profoundly beautiful publication designed by Martin Venezky who peppers the pages with visual taxonomies - a gridded page of bicycle wheels or arms bent and extended.

Traveling down from Reed College's Cooley Gallery in Portland, the emphasis of the exhibition has been shifted slightly to highlight images from the 1906 earthquake and fire. While this is ostensibly relevant for 2006, it may have turned a mysterious collection of apparitions into the didactic overview you might expect from a library. Two of the walls in the gallery are covered with images that have been blown-up and chopped down into tiles. On one wall these image-fragments include bits of transparent hand writing and the silhouetted edge of a landscape. While beautiful, this collection of panels reads too close to point-of-purchase signage in a upscale coffee shop or design boutique. The tiles on the opposite wall show enlarged snapshots from 1906 including wrecked buildings, cobble stone streets ripped open, and houses tilted and crumpled. For Bay Area residents these images are a sublimated anxiety made visible.

http://sfpl.lib.ca.us/news/exhibitions.htm

Rapid Eye Movement

Varnish Fine Art is a classy little joint, with exposed brick walls, industrial steel walkways, and a wine bar, tucked away on Natoma Street behind the SFMOMA and the Academy of Art University. True to its environs, Varnish specializes in marketable, illustrative art. I personally do not take issue with this, as the work is conceptually accessible and skillfully executed. Along with Lisa Dent and 111 Minna, Varnish is capitalizing on the nearby expansion of the Museum District and hoping to pick up some walk-through traffic. The spaces in this neighborhood are for-profit and it shows, but this seems appropriate for downtown. At the very least these venues are making the neighborhood a fair bit more interesting.

Rapid Eye Movement presents six painters and draftsmen whose comics-inspired imagery owes a lot to the Lowbrow movement. Attaboy, Chris Mars, Kevin Peterson, KRK Ryden, Sean Christopher and Dave Chung all work in the vein of the contemporary grotesque, pushing figuration into the realm of horror. Of the six, I found Chris Mars the most compelling. His oil on wood paintings and photographic manipulations show mutated leftovers of human beings, gathered in a postapocalyptic urban carnival that doubles as a charnel house. The black and white silver gelatin prints make the influence of photographers including Weegee, Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin apparent, but the images really come alive in the colorful oil paintings Consecration of the Tin Seer and Expelling the Mind Lilliputians (both 2004). The compositions are stilted—maybe deliberately so—and come to resemble a group of deranged family portraits. The beauty is in the details: alternately waxy and saggy skin textures and flayed zombie features, from which an uncanny freakshow sexuality emerges.

Kevin Peterson’s oil on wood paintings reduce human flesh to meat, sectioned like a diagram of a slaughterhouse cow. The effect may border on the obvious, but is nonetheless apt considering the callousness with which we accept both knee-jerk militarism and abject poverty in the midst of our affluent society. Peterson’s is a Surrealist practice that illustrates a psychosexual landscape, paying homage to the tradition on which he draws with The Exquisite Corpse (2006). Other works such as Balsamic Pompadour and Attitude Adjustment Hat (both 2005) combine graphic horror with tongue-in-cheek humor to a nice effect.

Attaboy, an established comics artist and toy designer, here presents a wall of ink on paper drawings of insects with vaguely human faces. My favorites among them are the series of feminized octopi, with titles like Octo-Fem: Hairy Girl Cephalopod (2005). Both gruesome and cute, they have tarantula fur and wide, almond-shaped eyes. Their pursed lips, nearly kissable, smirk tauntingly. The otaku’s simultaneous fear of and fascination with female sexuality has a new gollum in these images. (For those of you less obsessed with Japanese manga than I, an otaku is a person, usually a man, whose entire existence revolves around animated fantasy and who is frequently a shut-in and a social outcast in real life).

At its best, Lowbrow artists employ considerable graphic skill toward sophisticated allegories of the present. They make political statements without browbeating, and indulge sometimes extreme erotic impulses in a way that is safe for human consumption. At its worst, Lowbrow art all starts to look alike, like the fevered scribblings of teenage boys and skateboard airbrush artists elevated to fine art status. Even so, after fifty-plus years of contemporary art bridging the “high” and “low,” to the point where these categories are scarcely worthy of distinction, it puzzles me why these artists still seem relegated to a parallel art world of their own. This kind of work is often doubly criticized for being too commercial and yet not fashionable, but is quite popular once an artist has become established (see Barry McGee or Ed Templeton for proof). Emerging artists working in this vein have historically had a very difficult time breaking into the mainstream art market in San Francisco. For example, Robert Williams (arguably the father of Lowbrow) had to move to LA to be taken seriously as an artist. I fail to see what separates Varnish’s artists so vastly from Jack Hanley artists Keegan McHargue or Peter Saul, for example—other than the fact that they embrace their Lowbrow heritage and invest very little energy in directly chastizing the art market that feeds them.

Varnish has established itself over the past three years as a haven in San Francisco for contemporary artists working outside the Conceptualist mainstream. In particular, glass and metal artists, creators of functional aesthetic objects and illustrative draftsmen now have a consistent gallery. This is unapologetically object-based work bearing no sign of social practice, yet it requires a developed social network to exist all the same. In many ways, the work in Rapid Eye Movement is no different from the genre of Bay Area art that includes alternative-space fixtures Ezra Li Eismont and Oliver Rosenberg, but these two scenes rarely overlap. This underscores the compartmentalization of the Bay Area into a million tiny scenes, each one thoroughly self-interested and isolated. For such a small region, we don’t cooperate nearly as much as we should.

Chris Mars, Expelling the Mind Lilliputians, 2004
Oil on panel
29” x 39”

Homegrown: Bay Area Media Art

The other day I went out and braved the elements to go see "Homegrown: Bay Area Media Art" at the RX gallery on Eddy and Mason. It's a smart, well put together show. The show consisted of a variety of work based in and around electronic media.

There was just one little problem. Only about a 1/8 of the work can be turned on. It was pretty disappointing. I understand that electronic media can be fussy and difficult to set up, but the bugs can be worked out in enough time for a show. One also has to expect some things to go wrong during a show as well because that just happens, Murphy's law, but it's a problem if a patron shows up during regular gallery hours and nothing is on at all. I talked to the two individuals who were there at the time to see if we could get things going and only one work could be switched on. The rest of the work was functioning but the everyone present, including myself, didn't know how the pieces worked or how to turn the them on. Maybe this is a fluke and it was a bad day, which is what I am hoping, because I don't think this is how one should run a space and I think that if the artists knew how there work was being presented they would be very upset.

http://www.rxgallery.com/

Smart Ass

Despite the title of the current group show at Southern Exposure the work on view is, by turns, thoughtful, silly, absurd, self-effacing and sweet—none of the qualities that come to mind when I think of a smart ass. I count these as positive attributes because they keep the show Smart Ass, which is also sarcastic and irreverent at times, from being flip or arrogant. Instead the artists are premeditated, even sneaky, in their approaches. As with Giny Kleker's piece Luggage, wherein she "barrowed" a stranger's suitcase from an airport baggage carousel. Back in her studio Kleker photographed the contents of the suitcase and her wearing some of "Mr. Spence's" clothing and paired these images with deadpan observational texts. One such image features the artist in a colorful, over-sized print shirt holding an umbrella. The caption reads, "When Mr. Spence packed he prepared for rain or shine." Apart from the imagined inconvenience suffered by Mr. Spence, Kleker's piece is creepy, but it also simultaneously raises anxieties over personal privacy and airport security (the bag was returned to the carousel some three hours later as casually as it was taken).

Virginia Kleker, Image from the series Luggage

Before I get too far I should tell you that I personally know half of the artists in Smart Ass (I went to school with three of them). What's more, I like their work. I also have ties to Southern Exposure. So you can take it with a grain of salt when I say that Smart Ass is amongst the most successful exhibitions Southern Exposure has presented.* Much of the credit belongs to curator Kelsey Nicholson who put together a show that does not simply hold together around the stated theme of sardonic humor but is bonded more tightly by a shared interest in coping with the paradoxes of contemporary life. Like the phrase "You gotta laugh to keep from crying" the works in Smart Ass, which span the gamut of artistic production, use humor as a coping mechanism—a way to stave off despair. This gives Smart Ass an overall feeling of compassion, or at least understanding toward the human condition.

There are other similarities. Most of the works stem from relatively simple ideas or observations—ideas that came suddenly in the midst of doing other things (not, it would seem, while "making art"): taking a walk, daydreaming at work, looking at snap shots, watching TV. This last activity was the impetus (perhaps the inspiration) for New York artist Shannon Plumb's video Commercials, a collection of hilarious, manic spoofs of television advertisements shot in the style of Buster Keaton films. Amongst the physical comedy Plumb draws parallels between consumerism and Attention Deficit Disorder. In this way the work in Smart Ass is conceptual and personal. Here the ideas that are given form are nuanced and full of quirks. For me this allows the ideas to become visceral. Given this, it's curious to me how each of the artist's work in Smart Ass seems sealed off from the pieces that surround it. Imagine a sentence constructed entirely of parenthetical phrases.

I don't doubt that the works benefit from being in the same room together, but usually I find more specific harmonies or greater dissonance between pieces in a group show. With Smart Ass these tensions are missing, replaced with an awareness of imminent dispersal. As I said this is more a curiosity than a criticism. The lack of tension may have something to do with Ben Riesman's Visualize Sleeping Your Way to The Top, a believable self-help audioscape that satirizes the power of positive thinking to affect real changes in one's life. The soothing voice of the narrator, his repetitive phrases, and the ambient sound track produce a truly relaxing if not hypnotic experience. So much so that if it weren't for the gallery setting (which if you close your eyes as instructed you can block out) and Riesman's idiosyncrasies, Visualize Sleeping Your Way to The Top could easily be taken in earnest.

More likely the encapsulated quality of the works in Smart Ass is due to the sense that all the artists are far more interested in what lies outside the gallery. Even the sculptural objects in the show point to everyday aesthetic encounters and have a kind of self-sufficiency that could survive less rarefied environments. I'm referring to Ryan Thayer's large scale reworkings of homogenous office architecture (Ceiling Tile Wall, a modular acoustic ceiling, complete with fluorescent lighting fixtures and air conditioning vent, rotated 90º to become one entire wall of the gallery, or his claustrophobia-inducing office cube, Untitled (Experience of Place)) and Duston Fosnot's mesmerizing inventions that celebrate the otherwise abject materiality of Styrofoam (the two floor pieces, Snow Pit and Desert, reminiscent of indoor water fountains and fireplaces, are most successful in this regard, and really must be seen in person).

Ryan Thayer, Ceiling Tile Wall

Of course the off-site projects have a more literal reach into the outside world. Along with Klecker's Luggage, at the documentary end of the spectrum, are Susan O'Malley's self-appointed "residency" projects. Working in the front yards of suburban residential neighborhoods O'Malley announces her intentions to the inhabitants of the area and then proceeds with her ephemeral but unmistakable interventions. Vowing to use only existing materials and structures, and to cause no damage, O'Malley's fleeting gestures work to heighten the artificiality of the landscaping (it doesn't hurt that she also seems to be thumbing her nose at the likes of Andy Goldsworthy).

Susan O'Malley, Image from San Jose Residency

Also part of Smart Ass are documentary photographs of the subtle, often funny, street interventions of New York artist Dan Witz and the World's Saddest Song, a series of line drawings by German artist Kora Jünger.

Smart Ass will be on view through April 15th, 2006.

*This Summer Southern Exposure will relocate while the building that has housed the organization for the past 32 years undergoes seismic retrofitting. In the interim Southern Exposure is using the opportunity to expand its scope with a series of off-site and public projects scheduled to begin this September and run through May 2007. The gallery will close this June with plans to reopen in the fall of 2007. You can stay updated by visiting the Southern Exposure web site ( http://v1.soex.org/index.html ) and joining the email list.

Dave Lane

Dave Lane’s day job is monitoring the water system of California. His real job is to be a scientist of intuition, a mechanic of vision. He is by profession someone who is intimately aware of the land, what flows over it and what its succeedingly deep layers contain. People like Lane see time in very large chunks. They know that planets are systems of hot and cold materials butting up against each other over eons; they know that that is also true of the solar system, of the universe in fact. This grand awareness often culminates in a majestic cosmology—a particular vision of how everything invisibly impacts and is impacted by everything else. It can be lunatic and tedious; in Lane’s case it is the essence of mythopoeia—creating meaning and beauty through the stories we tell.

I cannot travel through space, nor time, but I do know that Dave Lane is going to be famous, and when he is he will be misrepresented as an outsider artist. For the record then, he is neither insane nor uneducated. He knows art and has studied art. He thinks about audience. What he shares with outsider artists is prolificacy and a vision that needs to be shared. At this point I need to indicate that this exhibition in Sacramento is one of the most original, moving, beautiful and inspiring exhibitions I have seen in many years.

It is in three parts: a very large suite of drawings that explicates how the universe works, and a series of medium-size metal objects, resembling tricycles, that, as I understand it, are the vehicles on which celestial bodies ride through space. The third element is a tour de force. The tiny gallery space strains to contain its sheer tonnage and psychological energy as your chest strains to contain your heart when you are feeling ecstatic. A floor to ceiling cage-like object, topped by enormous industrial light-bulbs, so visually rich and arresting that to stop looking, to remove one’s gaze, feels like a visceral tearing of one’s vision. This object is one of the machines that controls the universe and also enables space travel. I will always be glad to go where it’s going.

Richard Serra’s torqued ellipses speak about the frailty of human bodies and minds in the presence of titanic earthly power, and at the same time about how subtle those powers can be and how we as makers can have mastery over them. The steel objects of Dave Lane are the flip side of Serra’s work: his found industrial materials are commanding in their filigreed altered states, authoritative not by grandness but through pathos, tamed not through abstraction, by folding, but by incorporation into a saga of outsized proportions.

Exhibition runs through April 7th, 2006

Utopia, Utopia...

Beyond obsessive, BOMBASTIC! We are trapped in a bunker--10 seconds to implosion. Aesthetics spew and spew: Thomas Hirschhorn declassifies fashion victims as carriers of an imperialist virus. Wearing camouflage: style choice or signal of compliance with Bush’s war? Hirschhorn: “Anyone wearing camouflage clothing, puts him/herself in the situation of a soldier who risks being killed. Factually it means that he or she accepts being part of an army and is ready to kill and ready to die. The ultimate nightmare.”

“Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress” is more occupation than installation; it overwhelms, a glut of an exhibit accompanied by and visually incorporating an essay by philosopher Marcus Steinweg. Steinweg considers the role of the bystander or hypochondriac: “Hypochondriacs are those who want to be weak...The will to weakness is the will to non-will, to passivity and an essential will-lessness. The will-lessness guarantees the weak that they are unfree and irresponsible.” Hirschhorn sees hypochondriacs everywhere dressed in camouflage, unable to see each other, participants in dystopia.

Hirschhorn dismembers sections of Steinweg’s essay, spray paints them on banners or xeroxes them onto cardboard. Hirschhorn uses and reuses passages from Steinweg’s text and increases the viewer’s potential understanding by letting the viewer reconsider the writing in different visual contexts. Taped to the wall with collections of photos, passages narrate the incommensurable, existence, truth, love, the hyper-critical world. The collections of photos are hastily-reproduced snapshots that provide documentary evidence of the omnipresence of camouflage fashion. Shot: camouflage purse at airport. Shot: camouflage gym wear. Shot: baby camo. Shot: runway camo. Until the mid-80’s, Hirschhorn worked with Grapus, a communist graphic design collective. The exhibit is magazine fashion spread come to life.

Throughout the exhibit, a world war’s worth of special-issue camouflage tape menaces across globes and grows from surrogate child parts (eery mannequins carrying more text from Steinweg’s essay). The tape bulges in cancerous clumps, catching its breath only just below the top of uniform shopping bags. Camouflage thongs raid intimacy; wreckage of camouflage toys make playground battlefield. Again and again, Hirschhorn costumes the hipster shoe store, fine art, home decor, the floor, the ceiling. Hirschhorn is a (grim, manic) collector to rival Haane Darboven, Chris Burden, Andy Warhol and Dieter Roth.

Amidst the shrapnel, there is a glimmer of hope. To Hirschhorn’s thinking, philosophy creates an alternate reality, utopia to dystopia. Missy Elliot, clad in camouflage, plays pop mouthpiece for murder. Yet, Missy Elliot rejuvenated by theory could be Antigone, restlessly searching for truth. Hirschhorn turns down the sound on Elliot’s video and surrounds it with Steinweg’s essay. Hirschhorn condemns Missy Elliot and her peers for their martial moves, but by presenting an alternative text with the video, Hirschhorn allows a directive for change. The alternative, from Steinweg’s text: “Antigone is dignified insofar as she is this raving dreamer, a girl who tries to protect herself against the symbolic imperatives and temptations of the imaginary in order, in her poverty, nakedness and innocence, to develop a self-assured demand which is a kind of law of the lawless.” Steinweg on philosophy as utopia: “Philosophy is always a surpassing of the world, transcendence.”

Hirschhorn is most compelling when his details are as careful as his grand scale is audacious. At times, the details are touching. A humbly xeroxed section about the first military use of camouflage patterning from Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas makes a fitting signpost and refreshing shift of voice beside a hulking sculpture of a military machine carcass. The subjects in Hirschhorn’s snapshots are easily recognizable as anyone’s friend, family or self. The framing in cardboard is at once familiar (think San Francisco Mission School) and bizarre: out of what desperation for normalcy and in what impoverished airlift chaos does cardboard emerge as a suitable frame? Snapshots labeled with only a few words or in at least one case, just the name “Heiddeger,” are less effective; as are modernist-inspired camouflage tape compositions on panel or drawings on paper in camouflage patterns.

Hirschhorn’s embrace of the institution as sole mediator for his message is problematic. Hirschhorn's fetishistic attempt at omnipresence would read in airports, malls and storefronts. Why only exhibit in artworld venues? Steinweg’s essay, commissioned by Hirschhorn for the exhibit, collapses so many philosophers, at times it registers as only a fashionable philosophical hodgepodge. Ultimately, Hirschhorn opens up an important space, contributing an interesting addition to the literature on bystanders in a world at war. Sometimes Hirschhorn’s lack of restraint is ham-handed, yet his politics are welcome boycott of business as usual.

Exhibition runs March 10-May 13, 2006.
More info at http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2006/hirschhorn/