Six Pack

Encouraging Art (What I do is a bit different…)

It’s been only recently that I heard SECA, liberated from its acronymic form, sounded out in all its mouth-filling glory; Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art.

Upon recovering from a private moment of taking the phrase literally (imagining physical pieces of artworks being given a pep talk), I realized SECA is actually a misnomer that means to say, “Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Production.”

But, in keeping with my initial, prima facie notion of SECA actually encouraging art objects, I thought I’d take it upon myself to do just that – after all, while I may not be a member of the secret, black-van escorted Society that does so, I do encourage contemporary art nevertheless.

As it seems the winners of SECA’s biennial prize don’t really need any additional encouragement, I thought I’d direct my efforts elsewhere, towards artwork included in a different group show found in the Bay Area – the Six Pack show at the LAB.

A Message to the Pen and Paper Drawings of Sarah Applebaum: Keep it up! It’s quite nice how you tickle my eye, producing slight optical effects that suggest movement and depth. It’s clever that you seem to be composed just as much by your delicate pen-marks as by the absences around and between those variable black swishes. Your polymorphous, quantum forms seem to crystallize right there before me, similar to the way a school of fish can suddenly resemble a shape. You’re whimsical and somehow remind me of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, that great Post-Impressionist painting from the late 19th century. Maybe that’s because your little marks, in what seems to be an exercise of black and white pointillism, never seem to touch but cohere anyhow into something wondrous.

A Message to the Paintings (sometimes sculptural) of Sarah Bereza: What a sense of humor you have! You seem to suggest there’s something rather perverse or even grotesque about femininity at this particular moment in cultural production. I suppose one need not look much further than the regular humiliation of teenage women proffered by MTV to find sufficient evidence of that! Tell me, is that Pepto-Bismol you are painted with, Pillow Fight 1, 2 & 3 (2004)? Your nauseatingly pink quality does, ironically, play well with the women pictured pillow fighting. While it’d be great to transition towards a more nuanced portrayal of womanhood, your painted Styrofoam frames, complete with antlers and horns (aspects of a series from 2006), are a witty, if gratuitous, take on the Hot Topic imagery consumed by countless mall-going, SuicideGirls.com-visiting teens today.

A Message to the Sculptural Drawings/Installations of Matthew Cox: Well hello to you, too! That was shrewd, the way one of you (Why is a vulture following me?, 2005) physically came alive upon my entrance to The LAB – you must have a motion detector somewhere! As a smartly drawn, pencil-rendered sky-scape eerily scrolls behind a little rubber vulture spinning in a perpetual circle, I see in you the beginnings of a much larger (and exciting) investigation – maybe into the mood surrounding the increasingly rapid rate of technological obsolescence? This being so, Static (2005), as a television-set whitewashed and repurposed into a platform for drawing, you compliment the other work rather well. There’s something recognizably uncertain, though surprisingly fun, about your relationship to technology – I like that you’re almost entirely black and white!

A Message to the Collages of David King: You seem to have been produced with the utmost precision and, as you are all collages, I whole-heartedly applaud your sharpness and acute edges. What is this terrain you depict? From what I can tell, you all have a deserted landscape as your foundation, yet the scene is made strange through the application of tiny, pixel-seeming squares of color or peculiar clusters of diamonds and pearls. This produces a delightful and slight visual effect that pleases just as much as it disorients my sense of time and content. It’s a great background for the figures you feature, retro-looking exercise models, posed to resemble reliquary figures or Bodhisattvas. You’re all nicely constructed and read like little metaphysical riddles.

A Message to the Photographs of Meredith Miller: It’s difficult, these days, to be a photograph – one often needs a solid thematic or concept to really engage viewers that feel they could, otherwise, make you themselves. That being said, the weighty bodies you respectfully showcase appear powerfully fleshy, like figures painted by Michelangelo or Rubens, rather than obscene or grotesque exaggerations, the way thicker bodies are generally imaged these days. You’re quite soft spoken and don’t pander attention by way of shock. Instead, you feel genuine and produced out of love and understanding rather than morbid curiosity. I truly appreciate this about you.

A Message to the Paintings of Joseph Rizzo: Have we met before? You look pretty familiar to me but I could be mistaking you for some other work I’ve seen around the Mission District. Sometimes I fear there are too many others just like you out there and that each of you will need to better individualize for me to tell any of you apart. That being said, you do show a lot of promise and I never fail to crack a smile upon encountering your kind of quirky imagery.

And, Finally, A Message to The LAB: I’d like to thank you for holding this group and have always appreciated your exhibitions and programs that certainly prove there are, indeed, a breadth of practices alive and well here in the Bay Area.

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

Rick Guidice, Space Colonization Modules, 1975.
(Photo courtesy of NASA.)

This scrappy, provocative group show requires some effort to parse its logic. The themes are ambitious—the ability (or inability) to effect change, the ways in which we engage our surroundings, the construction of realities of all stripes: temporal, spatial, scientific, fictitious, local, global, utopic, dystopic. Yet no curatorial statement accompanies the exhibition, which is to the detriment of the artists and audience alike. In its place is a brochure excerpting the Philip K. Dick essay from which the exhibition’s title is derived. Certainly Dick’s essay is illuminating, but it hardly serves as an adequate alternative to a cogent account of the project and the artists’ work included in it. The main gist of the essay is that individuals such as writers and artists and those in power (the media, government, corporations, and religion are some such entities cited by Dick) all build universes, or construct realities, and that there might be something to be gained, for Dick at least, in letting those universes fall apart in order to precipitate change. Who could argue with that? As a thesis, however, the Dick essay is broad to the point of being a blanket statement for most creative endeavors. Almost all artists build universes or critique those that exist, from Andy Warhol to Joseph Beuys, from Martha Rosler to Thomas Hirschhorn, from the Surrealists to the Constructivists, and so on, ad infinitum.

What, then, binds these artists together? Why this group as opposed to some other? The work included is wildly diverse and all over the map, in terms of quality, argument, and scope. The exhibition’s online press release provides a starting point: Projects by Bonnie Ora Sherk and Rick Guidice, along with the Dick essay, are the show’s foundational statements, all, significantly, originating in the 1970s—the show’s temporal touchstone, along with the future, perhaps. From 1974-80 Sherk was the driving force behind Community Crossroads (The Farm), a social and ecological alternative space underneath a San Francisco freeway interchange. A utopic vision made real, if only on seven acres and for just a few years, this experimental project included gardens, a theater, community programs, performances, and informal gatherings. Sherk’s wall of ephemera often appears in rounded wooden frames that give the sensation of being in the family den. It’s an uncanny and irreverent effect that speaks to the show’s clear and commendable mandate to capture in its sweep art and social practices not usually on the radar of the art world and its institutions.

Also in this category are Guidice’s drawings, made around the same time but for another purpose entirely: they illustrate various NASA design proposals, primarily authored by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill, for the United States colonization of space. This information, too, is nowhere to be found in the exhibition space; neither is mention made that Guidice currently lives in Los Gatos, California, and that the exhibition’s curator, Will Bradley, envisioned the show as an exploration of California’s utopia/dystopia paradox (on this see also, for example, Mike Davis’s City of Quartz) and had, in fact, mounted a version of this show a decade ago (this information was taken from the internet, so perhaps should also be taken with a grain of salt).

Despite their shared origination in the seventies it’s difficult to find two conceptual benchmarks as far apart as the undertakings by Sherk and Guidice. And yet they provoke a number of intriguing questions when set against one another (they physically bracket the show as well, with Sherk near the beginning and Guidice closer to the end). The massive shift of scale and feasibility in these visions of sustainability—from backyard to outer space—begs the question of where in this continuum artists and activists situate their efforts. The work in the show does indeed fall scattered all over this spectrum. One notable point of tension is a specificity of place, or lack thereof, as certain works are indelibly linked to sites to which the artists have clear commitments. Solmaz Shabazi’s film Tehran 1380 (2002) is one of the strongest of this group. The film focuses on the gargantuan and self-contained Ekbatan apartment complex in Tehran, built in the mid-seventies and now housing some 75,000 residents. Lurking behind comments to the camera praising the complex—with malls, gyms, and youth cafes, there is no reason to leave, one young resident claims—is the sense that this ultra-planned universe, a distention of modernism’s ideals akin to Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, poignantly allegorizes the restrictions of contemporary life endemic to Iran.

Also committed to place are William Scott’s strange and yet entirely friendly urban planning proposals for his neighborhood of Hunter’s Point, a marginalized and primarily African-American area of the city now a prime location for city development and an attendant gentrification. His optimistic near-advertisements for a future San Francisco appear opposite a wall painting by Glaswegian artist Toby Paterson depicting an architectural schema of a “Fun Palace.” Against Scott and, just a few feet away, Sherk, the drawing feels oddly cold and rather out of place. The abstract, schematic, or fantastic universe often abuts work more concretely grounded in the sociability and politics of a given place. Guidice’s drawings are adjacent to Andreas Dalen’s psychedelic renderings of what might be the fantasy world of an adolescent boy of the Atari age. Gitte Villesen’s photo and text essay portraying a homeless man in Chicago intent on recycling and reusing small bits of wood is placed opposite Eileen Quinlan’s formal photographs of smoke and mirror tableaux. Smoke and mirrors, no doubt, point to something illusory, and perhaps therein lies the link to precarious universes, but the conceit is flimsy—not to mention old hat, as artists such as László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray were playing stunning formal tricks with photography decades ago.

The inclusion of two younger San Francisco-based artists, Shaun O’Dell and Nate Boyce, in this international group show extends a long-standing and critically important commitment of the Wattis to contextualize the work of local artists. O’Dell in particular is a revelation here. For several years now, he has honed a complex pictorial vocabulary aimed at an excavation of American myths and ideologies. Here he has broken new formal and conceptual ground, expanding his repertoire to include, for example, the fraught history of the atomic bomb. His tight grid of drawings and abstract works alike have a visceral tautness that speaks to the innumerable and yet fragile ties that bind any universe together, and which threaten to break at any moment.

November 28, 2006–March 24, 2007

This review also published in ArtWeek

Kottie's 2nd Annual Show

The contents of an apartment can tell us a lot about someone. According to two social psychologists at the University of Texas, clues found in personal spaces create impressions that are surprisingly accurate. In 2002, they conducted studies of visitors to bedrooms and offices – asking them to construct evaluations of the occupants based on objects in the space. It turns out the clues scattered around our homes elicit similar impressions from independent observers, and that the impressions of multiple observers evaluating the same space have a surprising level of consistency and accuracy (when compared to the self-evaluations of the occupant). When applying these findings to an apartment show things get a bit more complicated.

Apartment shows are a conflation of the idiosyncratic miscellany of a subjectively constructed private space and the controlled formalization of a semi-public gallery space. In other words, the space in most cases has been at least partially converted, cleared out or transformed. As such, an apartment show can create impressions only in relation to what the occupant allows to be seen. However, depending on the kind and format of exhibition, the artwork on view might also give us cues about the occupant re the ideas they value, their aesthetic sensibilities, and perhaps even the company they keep. Like Andrew McKinley's recent exhibition at Adobe Books, one might intentionally or accidentally map out a personal social network through images.

Kottie P. Feel Good's 2nd Annual art show and open house party went down last Saturday night in a 3rd floor apartment on Market Street. The show was given no title, theme, premise or context – nothing other than the raw fact that these artworks were given to Kottie for his show. According to my brief phone conversation with Kottie, it was intended mainly as a way to get an extended group of friends and artists together. A step up in scale from last years event, Kottie presented drawings, sculptures, paintings, videos and photographs from almost 60 artists – an impressive feat for a one-room studio apartment. He also framed all the flatwork himself (a perk of his day job) and set the stage for the event by painting the walls with a faux wallpaper of peach ground and rose pattern, giving the space a strange homely aura. The show itself is comprised of mostly small works by a familiar array of Bay Area artists, including Sean McFarland (who had a beautiful "Tornado" diptych), Sean Horchy, Johnee Hattori (whose "Cooking Portraits" video was set in the kitchen among the dishes), Chris Sollars (who made a promotional video for the event), Suzanne Husky, Chris Cobb, Jarrett Mitchell and Chris Corales. It also included many young hopefuls such as Jay Nelson, Paul Wackers (who offered to trade his painting for a "Nice Tent"), and Brian Pedersen (whose flag-size replica of a pair of "Tighty Whities" snapped and flipped on the wind as it hung from a pole out the window).

Ultimately, the party overshadowed the art, but I don't think there was any pretension to have it any other way. Unlike both 667 Shotwell and Ratio 3, apartment spaces that carefully curate their programming, Kottie's free-for-all (keg and 2-buck-chuck included) functioned as an inclusive maelstrom of sociability. In other words, the show was more interesting as personal offering, a way to get to know Kottie and perhaps each other. That said, mega curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who will be speaking at CCA on March 2nd, had his humble beginnings making an exhibition for a kitchen...

Photos by Chris Cobb

Juried Annuals in East Bay

Group Shows in East Bay Display Talent, But the Question Still Remains: To What Benefit is the Survey Show?

Two survey/group exhibitions are currently up in the East Bay: the Pro Arts Juried Annual 2007 juried by Berin Golonu in the Jack London District of Oakland, and across town in North Oakland is the short running CCA Alumni Centennial Exhibition Number One juried exhibition at the Tecoah Bruce Gallery. Both exhibitions include artists either currently working in the Greater East Bay (as in Pro Arts which culled artists from its artist membership) or who are alumni from the California College of the Arts (and not all artists from this exhibition are residing in the Bay Area anymore, nor studied on the CCA Oakland campus). That said, these two exhibitions do well to survey raw talent, technically masterful artworks and some few in-between grand ideas…yet, there is something lacking from both shows, something close to—and I hate to say this—purpose.

Pro Arts Gallery View

On view at the Pro Arts Juried Annual 2007 (January 26th through March 11th, 2007) are roughly 50 works of art by 41 artists. This large selection of work includes drawing, painting, photography, sculpture and video, but the scale is greatly unbalanced towards drawing and painting. Nonetheless, the drawings and paintings on display are excellent, with many styles and genres for the viewer to choose from and appreciate. Figurative artwork dominates overall.

What is most interesting to this reviewer in regard to the juried work by Berin Golonu is the sense of cohesion within the show, although the exact parameters of the curator’s vision remain unknown to me. Maybe Golonu didn’t have any more than an educated hunch when selecting the work, which is strong enough in itself…or, it could be that the artwork itself is of a certain high quality and each piece retains its own presence even when amongst a crowded gallery. On that note, I do want to point out that the layout of the exhibition is deftly handled and the artwork—although quite close together throughout the gallery—and isn’t more than minimally distracting, since neighbor artworks linger at the edge of your vision as you contemplate any single piece.

Mark Martin

Anna Vaughan


Jerad Walker

There are few standouts: Mark Martin’s work titled Life Sized Self-portrait with Egg is a finely drawn ink-on-paper work of art. In this piece, Martin has taken the simplicity of medium and contrasted it with borderline insane detail, and the viewer is left to absorb an image that both speaks to the universe as well as the individual self, as in self-portrait. Or, the drawing asks: does the artist dream visions of the cosmos or does he sit in the astral plane? Ah, sweet contemplation. Another subtle, juicy work on paper is by Anna Vaughan who in a small watercolor and pencil drawing—inconspicuously hung in the gallery—that presents a bizarre horizon where a dance between a set of antlers and its shadow doth wage war. I can only imagine that this one work is a single view onto a much larger series, which I would once seen gladly let lure me deeper into this artist’s imagination. Lastly—but not excluding all the fine work in the exhibition—is the reduced monument to the power of wealth: All the Pretty Ways I Learned About Insanity, by Jared Walker. Simple as this piece is constructed—a backlit pile of miniature gold bars stacked in a lumbering pyramid—simple temptation abounds to grab a bar and run! Is the artist super-fixated on wealth, or the power of wealth…or maybe it is a comment about the power of art based on its economic/market value? Furthermore, this piece asks why we value things, for either their constructed/personal significance or from their shear beauty.


CCA Alumni at the Centennial Gallery View

The CCA Alumni at the Centennial exhibition (January 31st through February 16th) is a near mirror to the Juried Annual at Pro Arts. Again, there is a variety and range of mediums, style and size, but the exhibition is laid out with much more breathing room. The CCA Alumni show is a juried show as well where the guest curators sought to include works of art that speak to a certain technical finesse with material while realizing a presentation within set limits established by the size of the Tecoah Bruce Gallery on the CCA Oakland campus, as well as to include a group of artists that span previous decades of CCA (or should I say CCAC…) graduates.

Two things I immediately noticed are: one, more than fifty percent of the included artists are graduates from the last ten years; two, there were no “big name” artists in the show, such as Nathan Oliveira, Squeak Carnwath or Wayne Wang…but then again, alumni had to apply, and I’m sure this exhibition was under-the-radar of longtime established gallery artists. So, in many ways, a viewer of this exhibition should appreciate it for showing work by possibly emerging, undiscovered or underground CCA alumni artists…and mark their notebook to keep an eye out for a rise to recognition. Additionally, I also had to wonder whether there is a dramatic dive in active, professional artists after ten years out of school…hmm. And, I get a warm feeling from thinking about how an art school like CCA that charges $26,000 a year for tuition finally takes a direct hand at promoting its own, especially after reaping such large monetary amounts of money for education in one of the worst paying professions in existence…I hope this becomes a tend in CCA’s future exhibition schedule…but I digress.

Alison Petty

In the Alumni at the Centennial, there are some lovely standouts: Alison J. Petty, a 2004 MFA graduate, is represented by the work Congealed, a pedestal-incorporated sculpture of an interior lit pod remnant. It is hard to describe what it is, but the reference to a scientific-organic-micro-macro creature is hard to ignore. I wouldn’t call it cuddly. Stephanie Dean, A BFA graduate, is represented by a single photograph titled While Walking Dogs (from the Sleeping Men series). First, artwork that makes you chuckle, not to mention laugh out loud and/or smile for hours down the road, is difficult and often overlooked. This photograph was gladly received for its capture of a spontaneous moment, not to mention the ongoing question of whether the scene is “real” or was it posed? Tia Factor, a BFA graduate, is represented by two drawings from a series of work referencing places/spaces of West Oakland, possibly where the artist either lives and/or works. The spacey, super-collider controlled by acid-dozed technicians and video game explosions uber-combination is a prominent style seen around the Bay Area, but Factor manages to include the personal in the scale and attention to detail, and both aspects bring the work away from generalities and ground it in an certain seriousness. Playing is good, but balanced free-form/control is better.

Stephanie Dean


Tia Factor

This is a perfect place to segue back into the beginning statement about purpose after seeing both these concurrent exhibitions, and try and answer, just what are these survey shows good for, anyway? A general, critical comment is that both exhibitions only sit as a celebration of the art object, and the already known reality that artists are busy making images and objects. Granted, both exhibitions display masterfully drawn/painted/sculpted artwork. And, both exhibitions touch on medium-as-the-message as well as the message-is-the-medium. However, where is the clear evidence of the edge of the sword that great works of art are cut from? In what way could either of these exhibitions put spin on the consideration of modern life, recent events, historical significance or even post-modern deconstruction?!? Essentially, I am forced to ask: where is that chaotic, uncontrollable, risky substance that leaks outside the edge of the cleanly lit white box and seeps into our lives and our future actions? How does the properly lit and displayed artwork stand opposite the viewer and attempt to NOT give all the answers, but as itself, asks more questions than we were to expect? In that regard, the CCA Alumni at the Centennial was far too clean, and the Pro Arts show could have benefited from actually showing more iterations of refinement from what is on display.

In general, this is where survey shows have a tedency to fail…but each individual artist can always re-emerge through another theme or context in the future—a rebirth possibly situated on the tip of the edge…





J u r i e d A n n u a l 2 0 0 7 - Pro Arts Gallery
Selections by Berin Golonu of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
San Francisco, CA

January 26 – March 11, 2007
Free Admission

Selected Artists include: Diane Abt, Steven Barich, Fern Barker, Julia Bradshaw, John Casey, Rita Coury, John Ferdico, James Gayles, Yana Goldfine, Miya Hannan, Emanuela Iuliana Harris-Sintamarian, John Hundt, Joel Isaacson, Toby Kahn, Rebecca Katz, Sahar Khoury, Mary Anne Kluth, Eric Larson, Stephen Linden, Caroline Lovell, Monica Lundy, Mark Martin, Bill Mattick, Jill McLennan, Dave Meeker, Eileen Starr Moderbacher, Tom Mueske, Steven Polacco, E. Marie Robertson, David Ryan, Jenny Sampson, Zachary Royer Scholz, Anna Morales Simson, Anna Vaughan, John Vias, Antonio Vigil, Jerad Walker, Judith White, Dona Wilson, Susan Wolf, Edmund Wyss.




Alumni at the Centennial
January 29–February 16

Oliver Art Center, Oakland campus
Reception: Jan. 31, 5:30–7:30 pm
Gallery hours: Mon., Tues., Thurs., Fri., 8:30 am–noon and 1–4:30 pm; Wed., 1–4:30 pm; Sat., 10 am–4 pm

A juried exhibition of work by alumni from around the world, across disciplines, and spanning generations.

The exhibition will feature works by Maria Anasazi, Jennifer Banks, Garry Knox Bennett, Thomas Clayton, Deborah Corsini, Adele Crawford, Stephanie Dean, Patrick Dintino, Dana Driver, Tia Factor, Kathrin Feser, Gioia Fonda, Stephen Funk, Bryson Gill, Alisa Golden, Sarah Hinckley, Desiree Holman, Felicia Hoshino, Katrina Hude, Sarrita Hunn, Gary Hutton, Mongkolsri Janjarasskul, Corey Jones, Sarah Kennon, Tari Kerss, Kin Kwok, Jane Lackey, Eric Larson, Kristina Lewis, Sarah Mays-Salin, Eileen Starr Moderbacher, Benjamin P. Moore, Donna Mossholder, Rebecca Niederlander, Charles P. Overton, Miel-Margarita Paredes, Ahndraya Parlato, Nicholas Pavloff, Hilary Pecis, Alison J. Petty, Thomas Plagemann, Curtis Popp, Richard Posner, Florence Resnikoff, Christopher Russell, Jeremy Chase Sanders, Tara Tucker, Jan Watten, Ann Weber, and Christine Wong Yap.

Lucky Day

I like saying “lucky day.” The words have an infectious upbeat quality that rattle in my mouth. As a title for a visual art exhibition, Lucky Day is only somewhat less gratuitous sounding, but it sparkles none-the-less. As if to suggest that this Lucky Day could belong to anyone or, more acutely, that the exhibition, which basks under the bright umbrella of these words, is sure to surpass expectations.

Though the exhibition does have some surprises in store, SFAC gallery director Meg Shiffler had something entirely more personal in mind when organizing the show. It turns out that Lucky Day was, at least in part, inspired by the Tom Waits song of the same name. In it he sings of returning home “some lucky day.” Implicit however is the knowledge that the place he remembers from his childhood has continued to change in his absence—returning home has become an impossibility.

The group of artists in this exhibition possesses a similar knowledge in relation to place, though it is made more complicated by their active efforts to resist or record the passage of time. Individually, each has cultivated personal relationships to place and they have developed equally personal ways of documenting and reconstructing those places—attempting to capture the most fleeting of experiences. Thus the show’s title takes on new meaning for me, changing from an unlikely confluence of positive external forces into a self-determined outlook, as in “I’m just lucky to be here.”

It’s not quite as rosy as that, but the work in Lucky Day is life affirming. For me the process-oriented works in the exhibition best embody this sensibility. They also comprise the most interesting and quirky offerings. For example Chris McCaw used homemade large-format cameras to produce the ghostly gray landscapes that make-up his Sunburned series. Using photo paper rather than film, McCaw directs his lens toward the sun and opens the aperture all the way up. The magnified sun solarizes the image and eventually burns a hole through the paper, making a unique artifact of place and time. Though this is difficult to detect without a little foreknowledge the images are quite beautiful on their own.

Chris McCaw, Sunburned GSP #008, 2006.

Michael Anderson also makes his work in situ. For an ongoing project entitled Denver, Anderson surveys the natural world in search of exact matches for the individual hues that appear in the universal television color bars. When he thinks he’s found the desired color he sets up video equipment and sends a live-feed of the landscape to a monitor where the color match can be verified. If it’s a match he’ll mix a corresponding paint color and quickly coat a board before the light and weather conditions change. As if this project needed another layer of interpretation, the whole process is documented by a photographer. It’s a marvelously convoluted undertaking that points out much ambivalence towards the natural world, technology and our own senses.

Michael Anderson, TV Color Bars (L), Elevation Blue, 2006 (R).

As a meditative, lo-tech foil for Anderson, Spencer Finch’s series of “color-swatch drawings” entitled Maine Landscape with Passing Dragonfly (August 8, 2006) hangs near by. The five works on paper were made over a six-hour period in which the artist, sitting in a meadow, recorded the subtle shifts in color of the elements around him: a tree, a rock, the grass, the sky, and a dragonfly. Each subject is represented on its own sheet of paper by several unassuming blotches of watercolor, the corresponding times of day written in pencil below each blotch. It sounds a little precious but the overall effect is surprisingly disarming—reducing painting to its most basic elements: perception and representation.

Other works in the show are less engaging to me. Gretchen Bennett’s meticulous cut outs of vanishing urban façades, while impressive in their scale and detail, don’t succeed at creating a palpable sense of place and Claude Zervas’ digitally manipulated video series, Forest 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 & 3.6, depicting images of old growth forests slowly decomposing into abstraction and back again, evoke screen savers more than changing wilderness. To be fair this impression may have to do with the presentation (a flat-screen monitor atop a pedestal).

Particularly disappointing was Euan Macdonald’s The Shadow’s Path. Shot from a helicopter, the nine-minute video shows a bird’s-eye view of the earth’s shadow enveloping the landscape as the sun sets. Admittedly, I had some expectations here. Macdonald’s other video works exploit the tension between accident and intention to surprising and humorous effect. By comparison The Shadow’s Path comes off as an earnest, but failed attempt to capture the mind-blowing fact that the earth is an object in space. Perhaps herein lies the humor.

Lastly there is Daniel Tierney’s Predator and the Eternal Return. Installed in the Grove Street storefront, it is in many ways the inverse of the other works in Lucky Day. Tierney’s installation is about virtual space/places rather than real ones, and it is site-specific rather than self-contained. It’s also the most visually pleasurable work in the show. Approaching from a short distance a crisp digital world becomes visible, just out of reach from our own—the storefront window a gigantic screen. Up close one can see it’s a wire-frame landscape composed of red cord and spray paint, inhabited by large wads of crumpled paintings. The loose, ad hoc nature of Tierney’s construction contradicts the inhuman associations I have with digital media and virtual worlds and somehow makes a place, however temporary, for me.

Daniel Tierney, Predator and the Eternal Return, 2007.

Lucky Day will be on view at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and 155 Grove Street through March 24th. More info can be had at http://www.sfacgallery.org/

Kim Frohsin: Two Minutes and Counting

You have to move in to look closely because Kim Frohsin’s tasty women on
their small sized canvases are whispering messages you don’t want to miss. I
have no idea why, but it’s not frustrating when you realize their messages
are incomprehensible. Unexpectedly, that’s reassuring. Like Rita, the
waitress in a Ray Carver short story, Froshin’s women seem to be thinking
"My life is going to change. I feel it” and as you look, it’s satisfying to
pick up on that feeling.

Carrying on the commitment to the figure started by David Park, Elmore
Bischoff, and others in the Bay Area Figurative Art movement, Froshin has
developed her own challenges for this show :(1) Impose a two minute time
limit on herself to capture a woman in one particular moment through a quick
life drawing. (2) Then, without losing the immediacy of the drawing, add
color and background to set a mood and call to mind the big idea— that what
is most personal is most universal. Each painting alludes to an entire
lifetime in a single pose giving just enough information to get your
imagination working. Reminds me of a quote from somewhere…”there are no
answers, seek one lovingly”. Labled as a third generation fig (Bay Area
Figurative Artist) Frohsin’s smoky atmosphere’s and faceless women are
vulnerable, lusty, mischievious, irreverent and don’t care what you think of
them, therefore you’re seduced into thinking about them.

One of my personal favorites is Blue Stage, worked in gouache, ink,
watercolor crayons and dry pigments. The woman sits pensively, one hip
jutting out provocatively, chin resting on hands, looking where? Up? Down?
Straight at you? No doubt, deep in thought. I enjoy the sense that she’s in
transition, that anything is possible. Pass the word.

Is Frohsin a revoluntionary painter or derivative? Derivative sounds snarky
but who can argue with her process of honoring, reshaping and moving the
figurative tradition forward? More names that pop up as influences are
Diebenkorn, Olivera, Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Carver and Frank Lobdell but
like Olivera, Froshin does not seem on a mission to create works that are
uniquely new. I think the woman in Blue Stage illustrates Olivera’s idea
that arts function is to, “simply reaffirms our presence and the depth of
our existence on this earth.” Froshin’s work is strong in part because it is
linked to the chain of interest in women’s experiences and like Carver or
Oates manages to capture a moment in short and palatable bites.

February 1-24th 2007

http://www.dolbychadwickgallery.com/

A Rose Has No Teeth, Bruce Nauman 1964-69

There are landmark exhibitions. Sometimes it’s because the curator pulls together a group of artists, slaps a name on what he thinks of as their commonality, and that is how their work and they are forever thought of afterward. (Peter Selz did this 35 years ago in his Funk show at Berkeley). The other kind of landmark exhibition marks a psychological or historical turning point for an institution or a region (think Helter Skelter by Paul Schimmel at LA MOCA in 1992 that galvanized an LA aesthetic). Bruce Nauman’s show at Berkeley, organized by Constance Lewallen, is the latter kind of event. It is the culmination, professionally, of at least a decade’s worth of projects by Lewallen that resuscitated the work of conceptual artists of the Bay Area who had been in danger of being overlooked by art history: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Paul Kos, Ant Farm, and now Bruce Nauman. Of course Nauman doesn’t belong on that list, his work having been internationally acclaimed practically since the day he left school, but there is a profound way that he does belong on that list as well. That is that it is little known or understood that Nauman produced an enormous volume of work in his years in Northern California, both in graduate school at UC Davis (disclosure: where I work) and afterward living in the Bay Area, from 1964 to 1969.

I’ve often felt, especially after visiting the Philadelphia Museum where so much of his most important work is held, that Duchamp laid out in essence a century of research and practice goals in the arts, and the art world spent a hundred years filling in the blanks that he left. In a similar vein, seeing Nauman’s show, it felt as though he had laid out his whole career in those five years in Northern California, and has been filling in his own blanks ever since. The body-centeredness, the embrace of new materials and forms, the performative essence, the neon, the video, the humor, the creepiness, the utter originality: it’s all there. So it’s a landmark in thinking about Nauman. But even that is not exactly or completely what struck me at the exhibition.

I felt that it was a turning point in the Bay Area’s understanding of its place in contemporary art. This region has nurtured so many artists whose work is of the utmost value and importance, yet for the usual litany of reasons, it is rarely acknowledged as an important art center in this country, let alone internationally. So what is landmark about this exhibition is an assertive celebration of what we have accomplished and contributed organized by one of our most important curators, and that will go on to demonstrate that contribution in stops in both Europe and America. Furthermore, there is a bit of a culmination of something as well, as Nauman and his teachers are now in their 60s and 70s, (I saw both Jim Melchert and William T. Wiley at the opening for example) and are our old masters, beloved and esteemed.

Let me conclude by actually talking a bit about the work. There is very little so sad as revisiting an esteemed film, or book, or art work, after a long absence, and finding it dated, its spell broken. There is little as amazing as the opposite, discovering that such material is as fresh, profound and meaningful as it was the first time it was encountered. The latter is the case at A Rose Has No Teeth. In fact, seen as a body of work (in a very sensitive installation), the coherence is overwhelming, the logic of the work, if more familiar, perhaps more clearly impeccable.