Bulk

Tony Labat's exhibition Bulk opened to throngs of art students, smoking and drinking on the sidewalk. At first, the event seemed like any other gallery reception. However, as a show focusing on the manifestation of social relations in an art event, the students hadn't come to see anything in particular, but to rather simply be with one another. With the gallery's main space converted to a bar, complete with amateur bartenders, swill cocktails at criminal prices, and makeshift wooden tables; Bulk turned Queens Nails Annex into a speakeasy, one built like a cheap theatrical set. Wheat-pasted on the gallery walls are lines of text on that evoke the subject headlines of spam email, such as "You can get a bigger erect member”, "Viagra no dr visit needed", "Alexis wants you to see her new toy", and "Thanks, we are accepting your refinancing debt request". With the sexuality of the words made tepid by their bulk anonymity, they surround the participants in the exhibition, seeming to privilege the gallery as a place where social connections can be made that thrive amid the morass of meaningless communications in our daily lives. In this setting, Labat interfaces with the viewer through a calendar of social exchange that ranges from late-night poker and domino tournaments, performance nights, movie screenings, and private dinners. Perhaps some readers participated, as we did, and contributed their time into the labor of the work. We also heard the humorous, gossipy, and ribald accounts from our friends and acquaintances.

The show's premise expands the focus of most openings – socializing and drinking- into the fundamental fabric of the exhibition, sparking the all too common discussion about partying and fashion being the driving forces of contemporary art. The idea that the construction of exhibition, and subsequently art history, are largely facilitated by social networking and inebriation is neither new nor revelatory. Situating these events in a gallery context adds little to their meaning or enjoyment. In this redundant and flimsy play with relational aesthetics, it's apparent 'the emperor has no clothes'. Without any critical development, Bulk comes off as just another party. The events remain formal and literal, fully lacking the agitation, objection, and contestation that make social practice such a spark of possibility. Bulk's events have drawn together those who share in a common perspective - art students, gallerists, curators, etc.- participating in their prescribed roles of social exchange and power dynamics, as if the events had a written script. The exhibition doesn't challenge itself to compose the audience, who provide its labor, or translate their efforts into meaning. Any examination into the relationship between the mechanics of audience as a means of production, and how it conditions the possibilities of interpretation, is absent. Without intervention, the events emerged as expected; codified and rigid. Creating work that fosters social relations shouldn't reduce an event to the calling together of a coterie, turning the artist into a socialite of aesthetics whose practice would be a chain of well-hosted shin-digs. Bulk is emblematic of this festivalist, lackadaisical attitude that's far too common in contemporary art.

As Bulk extends into the month of December, cleverly overlapping a second solo exhibition at Galerie Paule Anglim, the aims and principles of the exhibition have become apparent. It's an extraordinary stunt, a collision of wishful thinking, brash marketing, and personal bravado, displaying the kind of risky management contemporary art now unabashedly demands. The move has caught many eyes, as both exhibitions have drawn celebratory reviews, reaffirming Labat's position as one of San Francisco's foremost artists. It would be easy to applaud Bulk’s aggressive stylings, but an art exhibition that employs you and your friends as its sole means of production reveals itself as a lazy studio practice. While Labat's local hero status has certainly kept the events lively, it's unfortunate that the activities that compose Bulk actually work best at home or in your local pub, without the social practice script muddling your beer. We certainly don't want to discredit Bulk as a valid work of art, but there's the feeling of an endgame in this manner of practice. It is one thing to be widely permissive in exhibition-making, but it is entirely another to let practice drift into a state of post-critical atrophy.

Written by Marc LeBlanc and Brian Andrews

Michael Arcega

Okay so who comes to mind when thinking of Bay Area contemporary artists who use language brilliantly to decode cultural meaning, from the point of view of communities of color? Hank Willis Thomas and Guillermo Gomez-Pena come to mind quickly, and so does Michael Arcega, who has a one -person show as part of the De Young Museum’s ongoing series of Collection Connections exhibitions. This series, inspired by the breakthrough work of Fred Wilson who has been deconstructioning museum collections for some two decades, offers artists the chance to demonstrate how their work compares and contrasts to the canonized work in the encyclopedic museum’s holdings.

Arcega chooses in large part to invade the museum using assault ladders made of linguistic and visual puns. Chief among these is the word club, which could refer to war club, night club, social club, or men’s club, to name just a few. War clubs from Oceanic cultures are well represented in the De Young collection; Arcega chooses to make these the centerpiece of his project. With several fearsome-looking objects filling one vitrine, the artist juxtaposes several others with his own contributions to clubbing. These of course place Arcega solidly within his identity as an American: each of his clubs ends not in a lethal knob but in a fragile miniature of modern warfare—fragments of warships rendered in Arcega’s signature perfectionist style. Each tiny detail of a warship is painstakingly rendered in wood. Others are perfectly recreated miniature dance clubs sited in hotels, bars, and restaurants; some even have music and lights coming from inside. The title of his show, Homing Pidgin, reinforces the nature of this kind of exchange, in which immigrant culture and new culture merge to create a new, hybrid and stylized pidgin form.

Arcega has two more sections of his show. One is a large number of window treatments at the top of a major staircase, and a few more for good measure in his gallery, that similarly synthesize Island people’s culture with Western traditions. Made to resemble stained glass, the vinyl applications are traditional indigenous designs of a spiritual nature in red, blue and green. While rife with clunky jokes—“take one look at the world through my eyes”—what is equally of note is how few museum visitors note this site-specific work’s presence, and so the intervention goes unremarked.

Finally, he has amassed a notable collection of touristware from the Phillipines and elsewhere in the Pacific. These are painted or carved, often outsized, forks and spoons that serve as inexpensive kitsch souvenirs of one’s trip to the Islands. Arcega has trumped these efforts and upped the scale of cultural inversion by making a gigantic, tiki-scale spork out of carved wood. The combo fork and spoon given at some fast-food outlets awkwardly merges two functions(read: cultures). The artist’s gigantic version is a quasi-religious symbol—inevitably suggesting a crucifix—at which we can worship colonial power and its absorption by the colonized as an ongoing joke on itself. Not only is it a synthesis of religious iconography, but in the way this ridiculous item is carefully mounted and displayed it gently critiques museological culture’s ethnological dilemmas as well.

You See: The Early Years of the UC Davis Studio Art Faculty

“You See” gathers the work of five faculty who were instrumental in making a name for the UC Davis Art Department in the 60s and 70s – an anomalously avant-garde core of teachers at a rural school, then chiefly noted for its veterinary and agricultural programs. The group – Manuel Neri, Roy DeForest, William T. Wiley, Wayne Thiebaud and Robert Arneson – created idiosyncratic work largely independent of the dominant art fashions of the time. They raised the fumes of glazes, plasters, oils and thinners alongside the university's antiseptic tang of formaldehyde and the methane emissions of cattle.

Full disclosure: I recently graduated from the MFA program at UC Davis. I went to the exhibit to acquaint myself better with some of the history piled up invisibly in the air I was ignorantly traversing, in the circuit between studio and classroom. What follows are some impressions of the work on display.

MANUEL NERI
Neri has several lifesize bronze sculptures in the show, human figures in various states of elision – two sets of legs, with torsos cut off in the middle; another figure that rises to the shoulders before the head and arms (which seem to have been upraised) are lopped off; another figure that makes it more or less to its extremities, though the whole body seems charred, burnt. A triangular shape is affixed to the back of this one’s head, suggesting a flattened Egyptian headdress.

All the surfaces are gouged at, scraped away, textures and wounds that appear to come from a process of subtraction. The whittling is very different from the whittling of Giacometti; in Giacometti’s case, there was something incorporeal about the approach, reducing the forms to essences or – failing that – to shadows. Neri’s gougings seem less about essence than violence, but perhaps this is a projection of my own skepticism toward classical beauty. Neri’s bodies are classical bodies – the fact that they’re truncated actually reinforces this – and the classicism begs an erosion to make it modern, current. Whether that erosion derives from the assault of time or the artist’s hand seems immaterial. In this context Neri has performed pre-emptive sculpture. Which is in step with the impatience of the now.

ROY DEFOREST
Deforest has an abstract painting with a figurative title, and several drawings done in his playful, mark-besotted style: hermetic cartoons with obscure intimations of story or myth, sunday funnies whose punchlines are private jokes. His trademark scrawly dogs are in most of the images, but two kennels in particular stand out.

“Red Dog” has a group of hounds in a scraggled landscape, where a hanged man and a chopped-off leg are strung up in a tree: William Steig does Goya’s “Disasters of War.” The dogs here seem entirely non-mystical, one mildly curious at the hanged man, snout up and tongue lolling, the rest of the group entirely oblivious, snarled in marks that seem an extrapolation of mange. A nearby untitled silkscreen, on the other hand, seems entirely devoted to the canine mystical: the central dog is riveted all over with open eyes, unblinking along his flanks and even spilling out into the space around his body, where open lines sometimes corral them into further doggish shapes. The main dog’s “normal” eye – the one that’s properly in his head – is ejecting a comet or cloud, and his shadow (scored over with red and green lines, and with an unblinking eye of its own) seems as alive as its solid “master.”

WILLIAM T. WILEY
Of Wiley’s work, the pieces that use the rhetoric of maps are the most alluring. He has a wonderful, worried line that throws up topography in its wake. In the print “Unititled (Self Portrait as Mr. Nobody),” the landscape formed by his scribbling is somewhat flattened out, with no set horizon, so it undulates a bit, convexities and cancavities swapping places – as if it were a blanket thrown over a dimly understood shape. The hole in the center of this “blanket” is an empty outline of Wiley’s body, and at the blanket’s edges there is a scattered hemorrhage of words and puns (“universeotease,” “there’s always room for Miss Understanding”).

Even more suggestive is the lithograph “Hide as a State of Mind,” which is more explicitly maplike, coastal space receding from water in a torn patchwork of gentle earth tones. Cryptic remarks at the margins (“God only knows what we were expecting”) fail to aid any navigation; the word “Hide” lurches up from a plateau like a geologic formation. If there were a map whose function was to direct you toward getting lost, it would look something like this.

WAYNE THIEBAUD
Thiebaud continues to teach at UC Davis on an emeritus basis. I had the pleasure of taking a lecture course of his, which was organized as a leisurely tour of a quietly articulate person’s pressing enthusiasms. His work is here represented through the kind of formalized edibles that, in a happy pop-art misunderstanding, made him famous: an array of lollipops in color aquatint, an etched breakfast (eggs sunny side up), pastel birthday cakes that extend the disk-play of the lollipops into a more vertical, columnar space. His formalist interest in shapes is perhaps most naked in a pastel of a hand-stapler which, through the attention paid to reflective surfaces, to the interplay of straight and curved edges, seems to shed its utilitarian origins an become a piece of modernist sculpture.

His most delicious pieces in the exhibit are two small paintings, one of a cup of coffee and one of a basket of lemons set next to a basket of oranges, worked over with that gliding, liquid stroke that seems to turn the paint into frosting. Does the phrase “austere hedonism” make sense? Probably not – but there’s a fertile whiplash between the humble subject matter and the sensual pleasure invested in its depiction. It’s a hedonism without the gratuitous overabundance of decadence, at least – the objects are isolated, set against their luminous blue shadows (as if cast against a field of warming snow). What doesn’t come across in the catalog reproductions is how sculpted the negative space is – those congealations of white and cream and just-barely beige, rising from the canvas so that the coffee cup and fruit baskets seem to be impressed into their pillowy surface. The negative space is as enticing as the ostensible subjects – edible space.

Rounding off the selection of his work is one of his forced-perspective San Francisco streetscapes – sliding the eye down the vertiginous drop as if the eye were feet and the street were ice – and a small, lovely portrait of a woman, done in pastel, that deviates a bit from his known manner. His usual authoritative outlines (marking edges hard in electric colors that read as figments of reflected light) are present in the shoulders of the woman, but once the face is reached, the outlines disappear, and her expression resides in a foggier scumble of tones. I was reminded of a remark Thiebaud made in his lecture class, about Vermeer – how hard it is to find the edges of his subjects when you look for them.

ROBERT ARNESON
The dominant personality in the show is Arneson, and not just because the most imposing piece belongs to him – “The Palace at 9 a.m.” – a glazed earthenware portrait of his Davis house, 118 inches across, assembled in glazed sections puzzled together like courses of a gigantic, glistening buffet. It’s equally impossible to avoid the direct address of “A Hollow Gesture,” a lithograph of Arneson’s face five or so times its actual size, sticking his tongue out at you. The image is incredibly solid, though it’s built up on layers of very free, slashing marks (the marks are loose and unrestrained enough that he slips a whole doodle of another man into his left cheek, and you barely notice). The protuberant tongue is almost shockingly expressive; there’s a surprising dearth of expressive tongues in the history of visual art. There are myriad expressive hands, eyes, feet, mouths – even expressive knees – but the tongue is strangely reticent (one exception perhaps being Blake’s “Ghost of a Flea”). In “A Hollow Gesture” the tongue is a muscle as obstinate as a fist.

Equally aggressive in its own way is “A Monolith for J.P.’s Final Drive,” a black bronze slab that tells the story of Jackson Pollack’s automotive smash-up. On the top of one side of the mound, Pollack is at the wheel with his two passengers, the car foreshortened in the manner of a bas-relief; on the other side the car is flipped, the tires thrusting skyward like the legs of a dead dog laid flat on its back. It’s a kind of no-bullshit memorial, where instead of carved angels we have gossiping devils at the base, running commentary on the wreck, stopping just short of a Jack Chick “HAW! HAW!”

But a winning belligerence wasn’t his only mode. His “With Full Force” is a real mysterioso object, a porcelain brick with Arneson’s name stamped on the front side, and a collaged porcelain figurine and overturned container affixed to the top surface. The back side of the brick is open, revealing a weird diorama inside the hollowed brick itself, laid out like a secret cave or backstage lacuna. Liquid from the tipped container up top leaks through, collecting in a pitcher labeled “GIZ.” Looking on is a cluster of grapes formed into a leering face. The window into this self-named brick reveals an id that isn’t just bristling and combative – it’s also irreducibly strange.

CONCLUSION
So what’s the common thread between all this work? Curator Renny Pritikin teases out some connections in his catalog essay, without pushing it too far. Certain tics or sentiments do seem to travel, though never across the work of the entire faculty. There’s an evident interest in the fallibility of the body – though this leaves Thiebaud out. There’s an ease with a sort of cartoonishness – though this leaves Neri out. The overlapping commonalities amount to fragmentary magpie echoes, or sympathetic vibrations. A tune overheard and then carried somewhere else. If there’s something they all shared, it’s a surface accessibility, a lack of pretension – but this was an attitude and not an ethic, or an ideology. They were a “school” in only the most literal sense. And for about a decade, that was more than enough.

Displaced

Displaced involves two extremes of location: the individual in their immediate environs and the zoomed-out to cruising altitude map where all life is reduced to the size of dust. This pairing of macro and human-scale views, of continents and bodies in space, points to two ways of locating ourselves in the world and for the exhibition, establishes distance as context.

A series of watercolor drawings of stow-aways enclosed in an audio speaker, compressed into a glove-box or car seat, remind us why long-time Bay Area artist Julio Morales has found international success. These surreptitious vessels made transparent equate human cargo with contraband, outlining the complications of border politics. Frank Ebert's pencil drawings situate antagonistic relationships between the isolated spectacle of guitar wanking rockers with ax wielding lumberjacks and other workers. Jonathan Callan's magazine tear-outs erase identities by drawing with sandpaper, leaving only the mouth or eyes beaming through cloud-like apparitions. Callan's coal-black silicone coverings of land masses read like a cancer, opaque and sticky. Also reconfiguring existing material, Gabrielle Teschner's map cut-outs use the jargon of navigation but defunctionalize through mislabeling. Armando Miguelez's map tracings of border town streets are fragmented by the artists own travel.

What I haven't mentioned are Callan's sculptures in vitrines; not because they don't fit within my original near/far binary, but because they speak a different language. They are of objects imposing their material on other objects. In one, a book is invaded by the same tar-like silicone that covers the maps. In another, perhaps a model for a full scale public project, a concrete tower sits upon a Police cruiser. It is both a potentially mobile monument and one that suggests a containment of the law.

This defiantly contemporary exhibition will itself appear displaced to anyone familiar with the decidedly investor safe line-up at Berggruen gallery. While it's ultimately a drawing show with a few small sculptures, it's one of the most adventurous offerings from the gallery who brought us "New Work," "Sculpture and Form" and "Decorator Showcase." Needless to say, Displaced is the most curatorial vision Berggruen has seen since the 90s. Unfortunately this exhibition is artist/curator Mike Bianco's first and last initiative at the gallery.

Nathan Lynch: Everything's Going South

The relationship between nature and man (as far as the two entities can justifiably be separated) is often somewhat of a bad marriage. Inextricably dependent on one another, each wields immense destructive power over the other. Lynch sides with nature, questioning man’s tendency for claiming ownership over the natural world, yet focuses his criticism on the subject with both humor and great sensitivity.

Image from Everything's Going South on Bunnywax

One room of the exhibit is entirely occupied by heavily abstracted bird sculptures resting atop wooden installations that appear to be docks. Their bodies are modeled in a graceful but general way and painted either solid black or white. Visually appealing but nondescript, they direct attention to the heads of the birds, which rest on thin wooden stalks. The beaks are held to the heads by a wire like masks, which stands out for two reasons: First, the hard line of the wire is immediately noticeable as it rudely interrupts the smooth organic shapes composing the rest of the bird. Second, it is the only part of the piece where Lynch makes his process evident, yet the beaks are too heavy to be believably tied in place so easily. Thus, the use of wire comes across as especially deliberate and therefore, significant.

A few of the birds have broken or bizarrely shaped beaks, which reads as both funny and sad as though these few were incompetent in fooling us. Alone, the bird series is hard to assign specific meaning to; that they are disguising themselves gives them a human quality that makes them seem like vehicles for the portrayal of certain emotions, especially where two birds are conjoined at the body but their heads face in different directions. The next room, however, elaborates on the animal theme. More bird heads line the walls, though these have no bodies and appear more like hunting trophies. A bar, complete with beer tap and stools is installed against an entire wall, drink coasters painted to resemble bulls-eyes, tap handles replaced by a piece of bone and the butt of a shotgun. Especially compelling is a small frame mounted on the wall behind the bar containing the flattened bodies of several mosquitoes arranged painstakingly into lines. Compared to the bigger game surrounding it on all walls (including a life-sized moose head), this seems a bit juvenile; the bug collection of a little boy hung beside his father’s hunting trophies. Yet all the pieces in the second room are related by a human presence. They are all parts of nature being claimed, manipulated, and put on display.

This brings a clearer meaning to the birds, who now read as potential trophy heads for the collection in the other room. Their beak masks are disguises, as each species of bird attempts to fool the hunter into mistaking it for another type. The birds, not knowing which is most valuable, try on an amalgamation of all different beaks. On the wall in the next room, however, some of the cleverest disguises (i.e. a bird with an amorphous chunk of wood strapped to its nose not resembling a break at all) appear on the mounted bodies of the trophy birds. This speaks to the arbitrary rules that seem to govern what is valuable to a human predator. The hunting and killing of an animal sometimes appears to be an expression of superiority and power (the gigantic mounted moose head), sometimes an assertion of ownership (the framed bug collection), and sometimes a sort of competition (gold medallions with fish carcasses preserved inside). Lynch humorously but critically exposes all of these motivations, most notably and extensively through the birds with whose human-like masquerade we sympathize.

There's No Place Like Here

Director Michael Schwager's curatorial statement for the show There's No Place Like Here, begins with a definition of place: place (plās), n. 1. a particular portion of space, whether of definite or indefinite extent. 2. the specific portion of space normally occupied by anything. 3. a space, area, or spot, set apart or used for a particular purpose. 4. a region or area. Within this broad definition, the various works of the show approach place from a number of strikingly different directions.

Elliot Anderson
Genesee Falls, 2007

Elliot Anderson makes stratified light boxes by taking iconic depictions of singular locations and layering them through time, using custom computer software. Val Britton extends the language of mapping into the realms of memory and metaphor. Through selective obfuscation, Kristin Bly drains maps of their use, formalizing previously informational structures. The team BULL.MILETEC presents videos of disparate urban landscapes from around the globe unified in all being captured through the windows of rotating restaurants. Russell Crotty, in his paper-covered globe, conflates the experience of the horizon with the spherical form that produces it, implicating the mediated complexity within our understanding of place. Lewis deSota reproduces floor plans of past homes taking into account his memories and desire to forget as much as the physical layout. Anthony Discenza manipulates film and television footage raising critical questions about suburban sprawl and consumerism. Todd Hido's photographs depict quintessential American landscapes newly tinted with despair. Nina Katchadourian's installation of snow-globe-like map-domes and audiotape sonically maps the serendipitous space of 10 European countries. David Maisel's stark aerial photographs unflinchingly document the urbanization of landscape. Jeremy Mora's miniature landscapes manipulate physical and psychological scale to produce an effect both delicate and massive. Julia Page's video installation, informed by survivalist discussion boards on the Internet, explores the potential use of everyday spaces as survival shelters. Lordy Rodriguez reconfigures maps of the United States, to reflect personal and imagined geographies. Leslie Shows works loosely within landscape, creating collaged geographies populated with symbolic implications and suggestive structures. Tracey Snelling makes poignant miniatures of banal environments, such as convenience stores and motels, which evoke specifically resonant universality. Yin Xiuzhen's suitcase installation playfully presents a version of home that can travel.

Nina Katchadourian
Surface Spoils: Concrete Music from Europe, 1997

As this litany of artists and works belies, the show is strikingly diverse. Michael Schwager must be credited for effectively stitching together this variety into a show that is cohesive without being monothematic. The pieces in the show run the gambit from sculpture and installation, to video and digital constructions. They range in scale from imposing to minuscule. The artists, while somewhat locally focused, hail from as far away as China and range from internationally known to locally emerging. I knew of several of these artists before and attended graduate school with three of them (Britton, Maisel, and Shows), but there were many that were refreshingly new to me.

The only serious issue I would take with the show, which otherwise is a resonant amalgam filled with great talent, is the matter of titling. A trivial thing perhaps, but titles establish the tone of a show, like a hand on a tiller. My objection is not to the title's literary/filmic reference, whose tone I quite like, but to the particular substituting of "here" for "home." The insertion of "here" positions the title at odds with much of the work in the show, work that does not engage explicitly with the space that viewers occupy. In fact, most of the works in the show express distinct relationships with locations displaced in space or time--locations that are, if anywhere, elsewhere. I don't mean to beat up on Michael Schwager who has put together a commendable grouping of work; I just wish the title had been more in tune with the cohesive voice I so clearly felt while walking through the gallery.

Tracey Snelling
Switchboard Motel, 2006

Each work in the show opens into a missing location, a geography or landscape that is in some way elsewhere, physically or temporally fragmented, belonging to the past, or a space only existing within the parameters of the work. Generally, the pieces convey a sense of loss produced by this displacement. In some it is quite strong: chaotic and dreamy in the work of Val Britton, willful and crushing in the prints of Lewis deSota, bodily remembered in Tracey Snelling's structures, post-apocalyptic in Jeremy Mora's miniatures, reassuringly naïve in Yin Xiuzhen's installation, and leadenly pervasive in Davis Maisel's photographs. In some of the works the loss of their displacement is actively combated: Nina Katchadourian unifies geographic gaps through sound, Lordy Rodriguez heals personal fragmentation by reconstructing maps, Russell Crotty unifies spatial understanding by conflating perspectives, and BULL.MILETEC makes the foreign familiar by highlighting cohesive similarities.
The work in the show does not easily fall in to two cleanly defined categories: one sorrowful, one proactive. In each work the duel impulses to mourn and heal, are intermixed; optimism band-aiding still unhealed wounds. In every work positivism is tempered, sadness softened with a smile. The voice of the show is eloquently whole. And, while it is difficult to separate works out from this general effect, the ones that resonated most strongly for me were those whose engagement of space bore a distinctly personal edge.

One such work is Val Britton's work Continental Drift. Constructed using ink, graphite, tape, and paper, this sprawling collaged and incised expanse occupies one of the biggest walls I have ever seen outside of a museum. The size of the towering wall heightens the delicacy and fragility of the marks that congeal within the work into vaguely felt landmasses of memory. The logic of mapping structures this work, but rather than expressing concrete features of a intelligible landscape, Britton's work uses mapping to explore ephemeral regions of memory and speculation. Britton has expressed that this work, and the body of work to which this piece belongs, spring from her longing to connect to her father, a long haul truck driver who died more than a decade ago. The longing for this connection has poured itself into the work through her desire to find the past and fill in the parts she says she can never know. The restive voids in Britton's work are filled with a seductive mystery similar to the blank spaces at the edges of old maps. As specific as Britton's impetus for these works may be, they ask for no explanation. The honesty and earnestness of her seeking imbues the work with a force and structure that sends us each down our own half remembered paths of meaning and memory until they fade away into the unrecoverable.

Val Britton
Continental Drift, 2006

Like Britton's work, the works on view by Lewis deSoto spring from his past. Unlike Britton, who seeks to remember through her work, deSoto seeks to forget. The works, Prince Albert (Memorium), Sixteenth (Memorium), and West Seventh (Memorium), may look at first like minimalist monochrome prints, but all three depict the architectural footprints of houses where deSoto lived at various points in his past. The floor plans are subtly telling in their simplicity. The modest layout of walls and rooms are rendered in darker tones of the fields of color on which they are set. The legibility varies between the three. The line and background of one are so similar in color and intensity that the image is almost invisible and remains elusive even upon close inspection. The other two, while more visible, remain perpetually in soft focus. Learning more about the work, I discovered that the legibility of the lines corresponds to the degree to which deSoto wants to remember what happened within these homes. I like that this extra information amplifies rather than changes the sense of intentional forgetting conveyed by the work. I respect deSoto's restraint in not relaying the specific acts, events, or conditions that have caused him to want to forget but has left these floor plans empty to be filled with our own pasts.

In contrast to both Britton's and deSoto's meditations on the loss of the past, Yin Xiuhen's Portable City--Shenzhen actively combats the act of forgetting. Xiuhen's work consists of an open suitcase whose cavities are filled with a miniature stuffed-fabric version of her hometown skyline. From beneath the city, which fills the case zipper to zipper, emanates strains of Chinese popular music. This physical and aural re-creation sits on the ground in a blue-painted corner of the gallery on whose walls cities have been mapped by cartoonish giant yellow buttons. These button-cities are linked together by yellow string that stretches across the corner like a cats-cradle gone gigantically awry. The buttons mark all of the locations where the work has been exhibited and the string traces the path of its journey between them. There is something so childishly beautiful about this piece that it is hard not to like it. The buildings of little Shenzhen's downtown are not made to meticulously look like buildings but are chunkily constructed out of fabrics with distinctly textile patterns; florals and the like. Rather than being ill suited, the patterned silks add another distinctive texture of the place that this totem seeks to encapsulate. Like a favorite stuffed animal taken on vacation by a young child, Xiuhen's work functions as a comforting touch-stone, a little bit of what has been left behind that magically keeps it from being gone. I particularly like how this work suggests the way that each of us carries with us a sense of home and the places that have shaped us to every destination we go.

All in all, There's No Place Like Here achieves an impressively nuanced effect for such a diverse show. While I have my favorites, the show is solid through and through. The pervasive feeling that the show left me with is so closely in tune with my own nostalgically brightened geography of homesick memory and bittersweet recollection that I have to say Bravo...what ever it is called.