Three Years and Counting

Some kind of unstructured modifications/Tart elastics

This show suggests a kind of psychological analytical theatre, a stage set full of poignant ‘props’ (that quietly talk to each other, their own script, part improvisation, a devise for multiple conversations), a memory time machine flipping between the past and the future. It is, on one reading, a confrontation of the recent history of this gallery space and a springboard for future developments; it is taking stock and moving forward, a new blank page but with erased marks, traces of its past thoughts and ideas, discarded or rewritten or reassembled, rethought to understand the spatial and conceptual and rational dimensions of the gallery, the headspace, connections, impulses and thoughts it generates, the vision it offers, its motivation to present.

Three Years and Counting features a range of artist who have presented at the gallery in its short history, it is a fusion and distillation of its curatorial conclusions and processes, it is shaped by a kind of special interrogation at specific previous shows and hopes to offer up a challenge to their origination and their intent in order to move forward. It is, in short, a kind of internal critique by way of severe scrutiny and self-criticism in order to manifest its future as a gallery. It is a difficult show; it’s a difficult set-up full of tense humor, beautiful anger, flamboyant details, nervous affection and is strengthened by its process of self-deliberation, its motivation to understand itself. (It is a model and procedure other galleries might consider before switching themselves on to the next big things, the next fashionable rising stars.)

A number of film and video artists appear on a crown set monitor (as if to suggest the significance the gallery places on video): Graham Fagen, Duncan Campbell, Torsten Lauschmann among other screen work that ripple outwards: voices, songs and images that find root and corresponding values with the objects, drawings, paintings and media works situated around the space. Special mention to Oliver Farley’s performance document and drawings, violent and joyful, restrained and explosive at the same time; to Museum of Viral Memories’ cheap maquette of a silver submarine replete with rubbish handwriting and silly stickers; to Eric Doeringer’s Richard Prince painting, a controlled and respectful fakery; to Daryl Waller’s video animation that pierces the space with rhythmic projectile precision; to Meredyth Spark’s silver tape black and white rock and roll figurative ‘removal’ and to a sub-plot of Spiritual America, which colors it with a sense of the poetic, romantic and political.

There is the sensation of a celebratory mode in this show, which despite it being selections of past presentations, stands on its own merits as a sturdy collage of actions, complexities and experiences. There is also a simmering insistence to the work, from magnifications of near-invisible fleeting moments and surfacing thoughts to profound considerations on themes of war, abuse and death. It, in its convergence, has vibrant texture: it’s like elastic—sharp, controlled, flexible, it pulls and stretches back towards the past, springing forward towards to an evocative future.

September 14 - October 12, 2007
http://www.tartsf.com

New Prints and Paintings: Toru Sugita

Chapeau

This month the Newmark Galley in San Francisco is featuring a show by Japanese artist Toru Sugita. The 20 pieces include black and white prints using etching, wood cut, aquatint and drypoint techniques, and colorful oil paintings.

Sugita grew up in a small city in Central Japan, where he studied art in Kyoto before leaving Japan to travel around the world. He settled in California over 10 years ago, where he came into his own as a printmaker at the Kala Institute in Berkeley, and where he honed his skills as a painter while living in San Francisco. He is currently living and teaching in Colorado at Mesa State College.

Sugita’s work is infused with the spirit of Shinto, the traditional religion of Japan which teaches that every rock, every tree, and every building—in other words every living and nonliving thing contains a “kami” or spiritual essence. Even in his large scale oil paintings of freeways and urban lanscapes, the buildings, bridges, and roads seem to vibrate with life. In the same spirit of Shinto, a small wood engraving, Red Rocks and Stick depicts his young American–born daughter exploring her world.

Something in Sugita’s work reminds me of Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist, whose lonely 20th century mindscapes refer to both Japanese and American cultures. Murakami spent time living in the US looking at his culture from the outside before returning to Japan where he is often percieved as being more Western than Japanese. Murkami blends traditional Japanese values and images with modern Western signposts and cultural references which lead to the unknown. The emotional resonance in both Sugita’s and Murakami’s work reflects cross-cultural experience and modern feelings of loss and alienation.

In Sugita’s work shadows are often used to show the fleeting nature of time. Sugita says that “in the process of printmaking there is a plate, but the plate itself is not the artwork. The print that is generated is a secondary image—like a shadow. I find I can express my feelings best using the tones of black and white”. A large format etching called Chapeau (hat) shows a man crossing the street while being obscured by the shadow of a tall building. Sugita uses the contrast between black and white to create dramatic architectural spaces, while the human figure is lost in darkness.

Many of the paintings and prints are nostalgic and autobiographical in nature. A small oil painting called Empty Street refers to a street near Sugita’s hometown in Shiga, Japan. This is a street his father walked for many years going to and from the train station on his way to and from work. According to Sugita,these days the street is empty because many of the younger people have moved to big cities and, in his case, to America. Many of the paintings and prints were inspired by Bernal Heights, a neighborhood in San Francisco where Toru Sugita lived for many years and one which features the mixed architecture styles and the winding streets of a typical San Francisco neighborhood. Sugita’s work asks the viewer what is beyond the curve—the next bend in the road? Where are we going? And where have we been?

New Prints and Paintings by Toru Sugita will be on view at Newmark Gallery in San Francisco from September 6th through 29th

Olafur Eliasson: Take Your Time

I was greeted by a familiar yellow glare when I stepped off the elevator into Olafur Eliasson’s survey Take Your Time. In the fall of 2003, I had the pleasure of seeing The Weather Project, his seminal work that was a commission for the Tate Modern’s massive Turbine Hall. To say it was impressive is a pale understatement: upon arrival, my friend Jen and I followed the glow of that yellow through the museum entrance, and when we rounded the corner into the hall, she clawed my arm and gasped “Oh…My…Lord!” (she’s Texan). At the end of the five hundred-foot-long hall was the sun, or rather, an artificial construct of it made possible by bright, yellow lamps behind a semicircle screen positioned against a mirror ceiling towering ninety feet above our heads. The mirror completed the circle and doubled the viewers’ perception of the space, so that the audience could see their own reflection from an unusual, lengthy vantage point. Eliasson even crafted the air and atmosphere of the hall: fog was continuously pumped in and the sodium lamps he chose made everyone and everything appear duotone—like an aged Chaplin film, we were all soft yellow and shades of black. The collected sum of all of this artifice created a natural camaraderie among the viewers. People laid on the museum floor facing the "sun" as if at the beach, and sometimes twisted their bodies together to form words in the mirrored ceiling above. The scene felt reminiscent of other gatherings for natural phenomena, like sightings of an eclipse or the aurora borealis, and perhaps that is why we all so willingly participated in the elaborate staging.

At SFMoMA, Eliasson's trademark yellow light is once again at the threshold of the exhibition. His installation Room for one color (1997), however, yields the opposite effect of The weather project—it’s more like standing on the sun rather than basking in it. A Frenchwoman who stepped off the elevator with me shielded her eyes and grumbled “Merde!” The entryway near the elevator that contains the installation is quite small and the glare from the light is intense, so everyone is a yellow-and-black-Kenneth-Anger polarized version of themselves. People walked through quickly to escape its severity. The disparate physiological reaction of the audience to the same yellow light is an excellent example of Eliasson’s nimble mastery of the space-light medium.

Room for one color (1997), installation at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden

Room for one color is the median in terms of the size and scope of the works on view (rest assured, it is the only pointedly uncomfortable work). Perhaps it was unfair to begin this review with a description of a work that you will not see, but it is precisely Eliasson’s seminal, grandiose works that are missing from this exhibition. Most of his important works demand space, and that is only made possible by large-scale institutions. SFMoMA certainly belongs to this category, and the absence of these in his survey is puzzling. Instead, Take Your Time primarily consists of modest, room-sized installations selected from his body of work from 1993 to the present, including a commissioned kaleidoscope tunnel for the 5th floor turret bridge. I recommend thinking of these rooms as small vignettes for the larger picture not seen.

There are benefits to the exhibition’s scale, because what it lacks in ambition, it makes up for in intimacy. The works require a patient eye and an awareness of how one is physically situated in space, so obey Eliasson’s instruction in the title and take your time. The commissioned tunnel is only one of five kaleidoscope structures and the others conjure precious moments of solitude by only allowing enough room for a single viewer. You can get lost in the serial dramatic angles of your own face interspersed with slices of light and reflections of your surroundings.

Beauty (1993), installation at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Eliasson’s adeptness at influencing our senses and physiological actions is most sensational when coupled with notions of beauty that emulate nature. This is not the forum to argue about universal aesthetic truths, but there seemed to be a consensus amongst viewers on his installation Beauty (2003), an appropriately titled work consisting of a curtain of mist under a spotlight in a dark room. By moving around the room, you can find a rainbow. Viewers were literally whispering "ohh" and "ahh". Another example is 360º room for all colors (2002), a circular room that slowly changes hue through the entire color spectrum. Some of the colors brought about very specific memories for me—like during the slow transition from white to blue that reminded me of that dawn morning after a snow and no sleep on a mountain in New Mexico. I had never been enveloped in that color again until now.

Eliasson makes all operations of his fantastical installations apparent by showing the water faucets, the light fixtures, the exterior constructions, etc. I appreciate his strategy to show both the Great and Powerful Oz and the man behind the curtain—it dutifully quenches the postmodern need for transparency. But I must admit that after I visited the 2nd floor and experienced Anthony McCall’s You and I, Horizontal, an installation of three-dimensional beams from a projector, I was grateful to be able to completely lose myself in an illusion.

Lastly, while the museum may have not shown the ambitious breadth of Eliasson’s oeuvre, it does not disappoint in scholarship. The catalogue for the exhibition is exceptional. It includes appropriately distributed essays and a catalogue raisonne of his projects from 1991-2001. Here you can see full page spreads of all his accomplished works not seen here, including excellent documentation of The Weather Project.

Alternative Exposure Grant

On the eve of Shotgun Review's 2nd anniversary, Southern Exposure has awarded us a grant through its Alternative Exposure program. These funds will be used to pay the featured review author each month through 2008. It will also be used to support the continued mainentence of the site, general promotion, and future printed publications.
For more information on the grant see: http://soex.org/alternativeexposure/

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto stays true to his reputation. As he takes photography through the eyes of a large format, the effect is so consuming that it overwhelms your vision. One can hardly describe how space is encopassed in the four corners of the prints. The sizes are evidently larger, and are executed magnificently.

The Dioramas and Portraits investigate the irony of photographing inanimate objects that mimic life itself. These are so odd and compelling. The paradox of the existence of documented objects through photographs reminds me of Barthes' Camera Lucida—we live in a society in which the private is consumed regularly in the public. As photography reverses the course of the thing, we are lead to his concept of "Photographic Ecstacy".

His Seascapes are photographs of vast panoramic bodies of water. The series almost gave me sea sickness and tricked me into thinking that my feet were not firmly planted on the floor of the museum. It made me realize how much water is out there and what it would feel like to be surrounded by it—no land in sight.

The Sea of buddhas is documentation of an impressive collection. As I was going through the whole wall of bodhisattvas I found that some of the photos were not aligned. I lost my train of thought and mostly focused on the flaws of the installation instead of contemplating the "afterlife." Although it's account of history is impressive and the photos are marvelous, I felt the execution of this piece was the weakest of the works on view.

The Theater pieces are one of the most important works on display. I was anticipating to see this body of work at the beginning of the exhibition. To me, these photos are iconic in the realm of "conceptual photography." On a side note, Sugimoto prefers to be called a "pre-postmodern modernist" rather than a conceptual photographer. But more importantly, the Theater photos transcends the essence of reality. The focus of each photograph is the Theatrical detail of a cinema while on the center is a brightly-lit screen that is blank. One ponders on the questions pertaining to what has been? or what will be? The cinematic subject becomes a searing blank abstraction -- almost the antithesis of filmic art.

I found the blurred Architecture pieces very intriguing. Sugimoto tests the focal length of his large format and finds out that "superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography." I came to investigate what he meant by "superlative architecture" and how it related to photography. I realized that the connection could be found in the relationship of light and shadow. I then concluded that his concept of superlative architecture is defined by the shape/form of an object and its relationship with time and the passing of light. I saw architecture in a whole new light.

His photographs of the models indicating mathematical forms were a bit cerebral in my opinion. Since the forms are scientific models, and calculated, the photographs would naturally be seamless. He mentions, "art resides even in things with no artistic intentions". His flawless photographs of the figures, the mathematical equations labeled at the bottom - where again, portraits of man's quest for constant scientific exploration.

I found some flaws in the site preparation of the exhibition, but the trip was worthwhile. I love visiting the de Young and walking through the contemporary exhibitions and garden sculptures. I also always make it a point to go inside James Turrell's installation. For some reason though, I always find flaws in their site preparation. However, Sugimoto's reputation as a photographer with the highest technical ability makes any flaw in the exhibit seem like a miniscule detail.

In the exhibition, It is obvious that Sugimoto continuously challenges himself in revealing the passing of time in one click of the shutter. He possesses immaculate compositional precision, creating concepts in aesthetics that are both scientific and provocative.

More images can be viewed at http://www.sugimotohiroshi.com

Propagation

Mitra Fabian slices paper window blinds, repurposing them into organic islands for her current show, Propagation, at San Jose’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Concrete becomes water, as these islands spread across the gallery floor. Among other works, the Ventilation Series forms a rich tension between hand-made repetitive structures with manufactured functional items. Mitra’s art is in the altering of the meaning of propagation—imbuing paper, scotch tape, and glue with fertility. Her work comments on the proliferation of found or machined materials with a prescribed function. She disregards their utility, but maintains the notion of mass production in reassembling them into frenzied compilations. The dense multiplicity in Ventilation as well as in Cluster, (obsessively arranged binder reinforcements) gives the sense that these manufactured items could reproduce or replicate on their own.

Cluster, for me, conveys the propagation concept best in its uneven areas of intensity. As if certain areas inside the corner of the wall were better suited to breeding or depositing of eggs. Hole or binder reinforcements gather in fluffy batches climbing the angle of one corner of the gallery. The use of the quarter inch binder paper circles in such a large-scale piece gives the viewer a chance to experience Cluster from a distance as well as intimately. Individually, they are three reinforcements triangulated into a bent neutron-like shape. White, cold, smooth binder circles huddling together as if a wasp or other insect wove them together and tended them in some unseen way.

Multiplicity, hollow glue balls stacked in a corner, feels like a remnant of replication, a collection of gooey afterbirth membranes hardened into lovely rounded vessels. They are egg-like and yet are a skin more than a shell, open at one end. This piece, like much of Propagation requires closer inspection. Ms. Fabian chooses a very intimate scale with her work, the viewer is enticed to experience each piece as a child might: imagining a world within a very small structure.

Plot gives us candy-colored glow spots inside pale scotch taped forms grouped in a corner of the gallery. This piece diverges somewhat from the paler colors of Ventilate I-III, Cluster and Multiplicity, but uses manufactured materials in much the same way. The small flower-like wall growths can be seen as pretty blooms or happy spores beginning their invasion. Like colors emanate from the tape forms, they are likewise infected internally by the bright flowers. Scotch tape built bulbs gather and spread in a similar fashion to the netted wall dimensions of the piece. Stacked yellow plastic cones branch out in pointy agave or ocotillo growths from the floor interspersed with the scotch tape elements. The yellowy-green tapered fingers of these plant forms reach over three feet in height and are made of three-inch sections. Many small elements make larger forms here, and again point out to the propagation theme of the show.

Mitra’s work evokes a quietly determined spirit at work to humanize and personalize the manufactured, the mass produced, the humble material. In making these forms, she mechanizes the process somewhat, evenly cut pieces of tape, cleanly consistent measured heights and repeated forms. In her making the manufactured organic, she is as well mechanizing a process of formation. She works to cut, mutilate or build the machined objects into organic forms, as well as taking basic construction materials and forming organic shapes. There is a hive-like quality to much of the work in the Propagation series, busy hands generate a quiet, intense and flourishing world of small objects.

Propagation will be on view through September 29th. More information can be had by visiting the San Jose ICA web site. More images of Mitra Fabian's work can be viewed at her web site.

John Dwyer: Super Poor Friends

OHHH did you SEEE IT?

I did, and if you didn't you missed out on supporting one of SF's finest local Artists' spaces Queen's Nails Annex and one of SF's finest musicians, John Dwyer. John arrived in town roughly 9 years ago, had nothing and made something happen, and is continuing to make it happen with THEE OH SEES. While developing vibrant new Visions and Fuckin' Rockin' Hip Swayin' Music, John has been simultaneously developing these visions on paper and in a variety of media.

The installation consisted of drawings hung all over the walls. There was a painted orifice on the bathroom floor, a painted log on the floor next to a large red dot with a wolverine rug on top, a cobra dressing screen in the corner, and flat black paint blotches that came out of the drawings, went all over the wall and door, and back into the paintings.

Rhode Island born and bred, you can see John's roots in Providence but they mix with the San Francisco signage and imagery to form a unique visual language and style. The images are graphic and Popy, not like recent Pop Images, but a throw back to early 20th century images of Victorian buildings and child toy graphics, Japanese drawings, and patterns that all morph into each other. Text is utilized like lyrics and signage which is often overlayed or written on top of previous thoughts and text. There are also enough orifices to wonder where he is going to stick his thumb next.

Images and text all have dual uses, multiple meanings, and suggestions. The visions are a mix of images that morph back from abstractions and patterns into faces. Butt cracks turn into faces. Orifices turn into eyes. The background shapes become foreground, the foreground recedes into the background. The positive and negative shapes, dark and light marks, are in constant flux and continuously in conflict, which adds a physical richness to the viewing experience, and new discoveries are abundant.

There is some strange shit goin on—its weird, and seductive. The humor is there, the playfulness is there and John's hand and intention is getting stronger. Super Poor Friends gives us a broader scope of John's thinking. And like his music the art produces a physical reaction on and in the viewer. I am excited for the future when John jumps out of the paper and into our space. John shouldn't be workin a job just makin art and music period.