Vapor

The title of this show had me expecting water misters and dry ice machines as I walked through the front doors of the relatively new galleries at San Francisco non-profit Southern Exposure. That didn’t happen of course, because that would have been silly and SoEx, as those in the know call it, isn’t silly, but a serious contributor to our community’s cultural life.

For those who may not be familiar, this scrappy paragon of San Francisco alternative spaces, has been mounting community gatherings (e.g. Monster Drawing Rallies) and innovative thematic exhibitions since 1974, at this point probably longer than many of the artists they show have been alive. You’re almost certain to be invited to participate in many interactive activities. In the current parlance, this is called “social practice,” and is a means of expression evident in much SoEx programming. At their best, these pieces accomplish through interactions what most great art does, they pull you out of routine and plant you firmly in the middle of a new perspective by making you do something unfamiliar.

Social practice is at the heart of Vapor.

You can borrow a bike and pedal your way around instead of driving to improve air quality, similar to a program tried in Paris on a much grander scale and in other cities around Europe. “Civic Cycle creates a temporary bike share program, a public bike pump, and a public forum on Saturday, May 3, 2008. This charrette [with artists Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine] will present existing city bike share programs and open a discussion to gather input on how San Francisco’s city bike program might look and operate,” says the brochure.

Futurefarmers, Civic Cycle

This is civic participation in real change that is badly needed and could catalyze similar progressive efforts elsewhere; it’s also quintessentially part of the larger cycle of programs and projects put together by Futurefamers, the moniker that Franceschini and Swaine go by.

The stated curatorial angle for guest curators Alison Sant and Jordan Geiger is to “survey [sic] new art, architecture and design that takes our declining atmospheric conditions as the subject matter, medium and metaphor for creative work.” So, it seemed to me, kudos galore to all these savvy and celebrated people (Franceschini won a much deserved SECA this last go around at SFMOMA); maybe their ideas will blossom and catch on and we’ll all be better off for the effort.

Artist Natalie Jeremijenko’s invited everyone to wear white cloth facemasks…yeah that’s right, so you look like you’re protected from SARS or bird flu. But I thought we still had comparatively great air here in San Francisco? All that ocean breeze and electric buses? Not so. These masks “blacken with contact to air pollutants to read ‘Clear Skies?’” Jarring! Fantastic! And I was certainly intrigued, maybe a little too frightened by how quick mine might discolor if I wore it around town. Jeremijenko’s design for a Greenlight was a beautiful living object and looked like something you’d see at the San Francisco Green Building Expo/West Coast Green each September (next year they’re going to move this mammoth event to San Jose). Many of the projects engaged with practical solutions to hidden problems with air quality and these came the closest in my mind to resonating with the show’s title.

Natalie Jeremijenko, Greenlight

Eric Paulos and Urban Atmospheres have designed a slew of objects “at the intersection of science and citizenry.” Repurposing signage and other everyday objects familiar to us in public places, they make suggestions around electronic networking (e.g. Bluetooth and wireless technologies) that would monitor air quality. Here’s a suggestion: Maybe these could translate into big signs that would sternly reprimand citizenry for driving gas guzzlers when skies grow hazy. “YOU THERE, IN THE HUMMER, PULL OVER IMMEDIATELY AND START WALKING!” Visit their web site and you’ll see the intelligence and humor of many of their projects.

Want to carry a combined GPS device and pollutant sensor around with you today? Preemptive Media’s got you covered and you can check out one of these box-like doohickies from the SoEx staff and freak yourself out all over town—even monitor what other networked doohickies are picking up in other “pollutant hotspots.”

Preemptive Media, AIR device, illustration

With Living City, David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, have created physical models and computer animation sequences to propose a city that breathes, not as sci-fi impractical as you might think. If the facades of buildings could somehow more fully come under control by city government (leases?), they could be designed to communicate air quality with one another across internet based networks. The result would be buildings that recycle their filtered internal air when smog prevails and open their gills to fresh breezes when the sky is clear. They’ve offered this platform as a proposal at www.thelivingcity.net. Fascinating stuff.

David Benjamin + Soo-In Yang, The Living City, prototype

So what’s Vapor really about? Well, it’s certainly about becoming more aware of the “invisible” (out of sight, out of mind) atmosphere around us. I suppose this is beyond laudable, more Bay Area art with a progressive agenda; it’s a survival prerogative that we all go beyond awareness to feel our own unique sense of stewardship for the natural world and that this sense becomes a kind of conscience related to the whole gigantic biosphere. This conscience can spur each of us to action, to changing habits and maybe help us all to breathe a little easier.

Vapor will be on view at Southern Exposure through May 3, 2008. Several Vapor-related events are taking place during the run of the exhibition. For more information visit www.soex.org

A note about biomimicry and related reading:
Architects, designers and engineers familiar with the latest trends call efforts to emulate ecosystems “biomimicry." You can learn more about it in a book by the same name, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine Benyus. If you’ve now opened your book wish list, you might also want to try Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolutions, a deeply inspiring and revolutionary volume by luminaries Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins; this one is a big favorite of Big Al Gore. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart is also worth a solid read for those interested in practical solutions to climate change (and the new thinking we’ll need to adopt).

Chris Johanson

Do you love Jack Hanley Gallery? For better or worse, in many ways Jack’s our King Midas, the only guy in the last decade to make a deep and convincing dent in the international art scene from a perch in “provincial” San Francisco (Paule Anglim deserves credit for doing this a decade or two earlier). Jack does deserves more credit here and especially among curators and other dealers for his vision and follow through; where many have simply complained or been pushed aside, Jack’s got things done and perhaps in some tiny way inflected the course of contemporary art history. Later this month he’ll be one of only two San Francisco based galleries at the super hip and exclusive Armory Show in New York (the other’s Ratio 3). His “Mission School” artists have gone onto some of the biggest and most important achievements of recent memory for artists that had their start here. Barry McGee was one of these and Chris Johanson is another.

Installation view at Jack Hanley Gallery

Johanson’s “big break” was probably his participation in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, though a SECA through SFMOMA in 2003 certainly helped boost his international notoriety as well. Like many recent talented Bay Area artists (very sadly) he’s relocated to Portland, Oregon, I’m guessing for great quality of life and cheaper cost of living. Where’s the city government subsidized work/live spaces for our most talented artists, Gavin Newsom? What happened to that big report on arts in the city and implementing your committee’s suggestions? OK, that’s a digression…

You and I were there, you and I are there, 2007
16" x 22.75"

Johanson’s current offerings at Jack Hanley’s unassuming Valencia Street space are best described as a chaotic installation of pounded 2 x 4 and plywood lumber punctuated by bright pictures. It’s a rats maze of surprisingly placed “paintings” in a naïve and erotic/quixotic tangle of color and vague forms, interacting figures and hard to discern activities. If you look for them, references to other artists seem to abound; Hockney in You and I were there, you and I are there and a wide range of Op artists in pieces like Contemporary Situation #1 and That no longer matters.

Contemporary Situation#1, 2008
31" x 44"

One thing you can often count on with programming at Hanley is that it will be dangerous, not like visually dangerous, but literally dangerous. To get through Johanson’s built up maze, you’re going to have to duck and step over lumber. There may even be a protruding nail or screw here or there. And you might get vertigo and wonder how he did that in such a small space. I wish he’d used a box of rusty screws and that the gallery staff would blithely offer tetanus kits as you leave. And this isn’t the first time they’ve gone for dangerous; Johanson’s recent A Collaboration with Kal Spelletich was full of buzzing, whirling and pounding machines that could really hurt somebody—it was huge fun to press buttons and play with them; kids were especially fond and parents had to closely supervise.

That no longer matters, 2008
37.5" x 45.375"

If you can sneak away at lunch from the 9 to 5, going in and getting disoriented by Johanson’s current project is certainly worth your time; you’ll walk away confounded at how he fit so many ideas and images into such a small area, and maybe you’ll even feel a little pride at his significant career which sprang from a launch pad right here in the Mission. And maybe you’ll bang your head on one of those gray painted 2 x 4’s.

Chris Johanson's work will be on view at the Jack Hanley Gallery through April 12th.

Psymulation: Reenactments of the Present

The Bush administration has made a fine art of creating and disseminating its own historical reality, driving the American public into either complicit belief or angry, uneasy doubt.

Psymulation, a group show at Hamburger Eyes curated by Chris Fitzpatrick, invites the viewer to participate in that anxiety-producing moment when we have to ask ourselves if the facts reported to us are truth or fiction. Should we believe the history unfolding before us on the TV or Internet? Each artist presents documents (photographs, video, mixed media and works on paper) that offer “evidence” of our post-9/11 world where everything is viewed through the prism of terror.

The show is prefaced by an actual tape-recorded interview between conspiracy theorist Dr. Armen Victorian and retired U.S. Army Major Ed Dames, a specialist in psychic espionage. The two converse in an atmosphere full of secrets and paranoia about UFOs, creatures from Mars and the US Army’s clairvoyant techniques. The listener might want to dismiss these two characters as fringe theorists, but their chatter sets a disturbing mood for the rest of the show.

Gerald Edwards III, Investigation into the Disruption of Power, It All Came From the Same Place, 2007

The composite photos of Gerald Edwards III use digital manipulation to create menacing, hyperactive realities. From the waiting room of a nameless airport, planes engaged in rendition flights swarm through the air, taking off and landing in impossible numbers. Men in ski masks stand against a background of celestial star fields, staring out through mouth and eyeholes, but they have no identifiable features, no mouths, no eyes, only anonymous, featureless skin. Another photo (whose title sounds like an urgent IT alert—Investigation into the Disruption of Power, It All Came From the Same Place) shows a Hazmat worker standing in a corporate office, papers strewn on the floor and a computer flashing: “You’ve been hacked.” Edward takes iconic images that call up our deepest fears—torture behind closed doors, random violence, technology and science as the bearers of viruses and toxic materials—and turns them into photos that are unsettling and very close to believable.

An apocalyptic film loop by video artist Squirrel throws out a steady stream of haunting images: Bush speechifying about nuclear holocaust, armies gearing up with gas masks, the iconic A-bomb mushroom cloud or young war victims with severe burns. Some images are plucked from our Cold War past while others are contemporary, and the mixture of old and new, creates a sense of déjà vu, a realization that the war on terror operates under much the same paranoia as the Cold War.

Brennan Hill’s photo, Threatening Chair only adds to the anxiety. The chair is simply an empty optometrist’s chair, a medical device, but we can’t shake the feeling that something bad might have happened here. Brendan Threadgill’s mixed media pieces claim to be fragments of car bombs, but there is no way to prove this. A mangled car roof sits in the middle of the gallery like some uninvited alien. Is it real or is it representation?

Psymulation successfully raises the question of whether in our current political climate we can tell reality from fiction. A nagging doubt runs through every piece in the show so that even when you exit into the alley, a cloud of unease follows. But better unease than complacency.

Bear Hunting

James Gobel has been portraying a subculture of the gay community for the past 5 years, a group he willingly decided to join when he got tired of the ubiquitous images of homosexual males. Bears are big men proud of their way-above-average weight and their hirsute dermis. Their most habitual garb is checkered shirts and jeans making them kind of urban lumberjacks, thus distancing them from the predictably stylish fag.

I Love You and I Always Will
72" x 60" acrylic felt, wool felt, yarn, & acrylic on canvas, 2007

Stylish but in a rather domestic way, Gobel’s paintings are made of very tactile materials that, while still 2D, make them spring out of the frame. The vivid felt and yarn he uses have a wholesome, grandma quality which, in a bizarrely perfect way, serves the purpose of depicting his subjects as burly odalisques amidst some gloomy yet colorful elliptical narrative.

Setting his images apart from what is commonly expected from gay artists, while retaining qualities usually associated with their craft, Gobel chooses to keep his subjects clothed because it is ultimately the outfit that bears the idiosyncrasy of his characters. Their hairy aura has been turned into a thick surface of rainbowy drama, you know, the kind that has kept Morrissey in the business for so long.

It is the crafting of this surface that reveals the queer antics in Gobel’s art: polished and meticulous, using a kind of patchwork technique of feminine associations to dress testosterone filled men who emote their masculinity rather explicitly via their massive humanity. Their specific quirks or kinks are earnestly hinted or blatantly exposed by their attire and affected poses, further defying the most conventional notions of male homosexuality.

Holding Tenderly To What Remains
35" x 28" acrylic felt, wool felt, yarn, & acrylic on canvas, 2007

Like John Banskton or the Spanish artist David Trullo, Gobel appropriates the labels that pervade the seemingly endless niches and cliques of contemporary gay men to create a bubble both eerie and joyful where the Sisyphean cycle of affirming an identity while reinventing the self is a never ending charade of dress codes, body modification and signal emission that can either scare away or attract so many epithets and monikers.

By fiercely owning the title of “bear” James Gobel manages to have fun and amuse his knowingly-or-not audience instead of whining about labels’ annoying ability to make everything easier to remember while shedding a tainted light on their grouped subjects.

Bear Hunting will be on view at Marx & Zavattero through March 29th.

Leonora Carrington: The Talismanic Lens

Leonora Carrington: The Talismanic Lens, showing at the Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco, offers a taste of the brilliance of the English-born painter Carrington who has made her home in Mexico for over 50 years. The exhibition includes eleven oil paintings, several gouaches, watercolors, drawings and spans forty-five years of her career. Carrington is 90 years old and is one of the last surviving surrealists. She was part of a magical circle of ex-patriot artists, many part of the surrealist movement that found refuge in Mexico after Word War Two and included Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, Luis Buñuel, and Wolfgang Paalen. Carrington reluctantly calls herself a surrealist because “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse. I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”

Bird Bath

Surely Carrington’s personal history influences her work. Carrington is a writer as well as a painter and draws from the Celtic fairytales her Irish mother told her as a child, the Italian painting she studied at boarding school, the experience of motherhood, and her friendships with other artists. As a young woman she went to live with a married Max Ernst in France. When he was taken prisoner as an enemy combatant, she had a nervous breakdown. Afterwards, they both arrived separately in New York, Ernst as Peggy Guggenheim’s husband, and Carrington with a Mexican diplomat who became her first husband and later took her to Mexico.

Untitled

The modest but beautiful sampling of her work featured in this show is able to transmit the truth and power of Leonora Carrington’s alchemical painting. Her personal language of signs and symbols: handwriting in reverse, (that can be read in a mirror), animals that serve as guides and spirits, and the themes of cooking, eating, and magic can be found throughout the gallery. Inspired by Whitney Chadwick’s seminal book Women and the Surrealist Movement, Raman Frey and Wendi Norris started collecting Carrington’s work as well as other artists from this circle several years ago. An introduction by art historian Susan Aberth to Leonora Carrington led to a personal friendship with Carrington that shows in the love and care taken with this lovely show. Her son, the poet and professor, Gabriel Weisz-Carrington suggested the title. Weisz-Carrington as well as art-historian Ara Merjian contributed essays to a 60-page catalogue that accompanies this show.

Leonora Carrington: The Talismanic Lens will be on view at the Frey Norris Gallery through March 30, 2008

Reconciling America: Miraculous Encounters with the Mundane

In an election year, it’s inevitable that Americans will tend toward solipsism with even greater ease. This is an interesting moment to investigate contemporary American identity while we are internationally reviled, in the midst of a seemingly endless war halfway around the globe, and divided into various camps of us and them (blue and red, recent immigrants and descendants of immigrants, etc.) Given our cultural disparities, including the vast gulf between most Americans and the art world, an exhibition attempting to come to terms with who we are as Americans can itself be problematic. Reconciling America: Miraculous Encounters with the Mundane, currently on view at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, is a compelling presentation of portraits of Americans, from artists’ family members to total strangers glimpsed on the web, and addresses the relationship of contemporary artistic practice to various strands in American cultural identity. Many of the artists in the exhibition attempt to valorize the everyday details and stories of contemporary American life but at times struggle with a patronizing ironic distance in relation to their subjects.

Some of the artists in the show use personal stories to examine the significance of the mundane in our day-to-day existence. Jennifer Durban’s audio work, I Met my Dad on Friendster, is set into the doorway of an unused elevator in a dark side alcove off of one of the galleries, giving one the odd impression of either worshipping in a small chapel or having trespassed into a creepy private backspace. The autobiographical narrative is reminiscent of an episode of This American Life, the National Public Radio show built around the narrative value of the fine details of everyday life. Durban intersperses her story of meeting her birth father through Friendster with recordings of testimonials by friends and family. It’s a tribute to the engaging nature of the work that I was left wanting more information from the story. The piece closes with her musing on the new possibilities of social networking sites not only to create deeper connections between people but also to produce new conflicts in managing the public nature of our private lives.

Ellen Lake and Zefrey Throwell are each tireless documenters of others’ personal stories. Lake’s experimental video shorts portray collectors of all sorts of mundane objects, from macaroni and cheese boxes to plastic straws. These portraits of accumulation poetically describe our efforts to define ourselves through our belongings. Zefrey Throwell’s radio show Frank Prattle is an energetic and prolific series of conversations between creatively paired artworld personalities. Throwell’s interviews are being conducted in the SFAC gallery regularly throughout the run of the show, and are archived at www.frankprattle.com.

Lynn Marie Kirby
34/400 (Standardized) Screen Tests, 2008
Two of 34/400 Screen Tests
Digital Video Still

In the rear of the gallery, behind a dark curtain is an elegant and somber video installation by Lynn Marie Kirby. 34/400 (Standardized) Screen Tests features video portraits of two adolescent boys, James and Paul, presumably Kirby’s son and a peer, who, given the title, seem to be auditioning for manhood. The hypnotic black and white video of the boys gazing, bored, into the camera is set off-center into a graphic white square outline on a black background, as if one is viewing them through a viewfinder or crosshairs. Close-ups of James and Paul fidgeting awkwardly are alternated with longer shots of them answering pointed questions posed off-screen such as “When do boys become men?” and “What is a hero?” The projection is accompanied by two framed essays, each titled “War,” and carefully hand-written by one of the boys. The texts, meditating on the nature of war in their childish scrawl, at times seem to parrot an adult’s perspective while also comparing battle to their personal experiences of arguments and video games. The piece reflects our deep anxiety about the fate of our children and calls attention to the ways in which mythic and heroic narratives circumscribing the gender identity of children are reinforced.

JD Beltran is also collaborating in a sense with her young son, Sebastien Bachar. Her vertical portraits of him from the Adventures series, which seem to portray a small figure within an almost oppressively vast sky of possibility above, are installed next to a few snapshots taken by Sebastien himself, suggesting the flipside of the quip "my kid could do that," namely, 'that kid's work has the studied amateur look that many contemporary photographers aspire to.'

Julia Page’s First Kills series of reproductions of newspaper photographs of children celebrating their first successful deer hunt looks at another way in which images of children are used. The circulation of these newpaper photographs reinforces this ritual as an important rite of passage. The original newspaper dot patterns throughout Page’s prints point to the images’ origins, but their recontextualization into the gallery environment carries an air of condescension.

Brendan Lott’s work originates as photographs uploaded by unknown individuals to a publicly accessible website. Lott then hires master painters in Dafen, China to reproduce the images, often snapshots of adolescent girls in provocative poses, in oil on canvas. (One exception to this is the piece “I Just Want to Run Out of Here Screaming,” the intriguing image used on the show’s postcard of a teenage boy with his hands in front of his face.) However, the fact that none of this background information is actually provided within the context of the exhibition and is only briefly mentioned in Lott’s artist’s statement, casts the sense of an elitist in-joke over the work. In commissioning the hand-made replication of digital images, Lott attempts to recast them as one-of-a-kind objects with a greater caché within the global capitalist market. However, one degree of separation from their infinitely reproducible context doesn’t remove them from a smugly exploitative Girls Gone Wild genre. Lott directly refers in his artist’s statement to this work as “the contemporary exotic,” placing it squarely within the very long problematic history of a white upper-middle class male portrayal of the other as an exotic object.

Both Lott and Paul Mullins refer to their work as “elevating” their poor, uneducated, working class white subjects. The patronizing quaintness of this formulation frames these subjects within a high vs. low culture divide. Despite any claim to elevation, the sense that it is only through the privileged position of the artists that the true value of these subjects can be revealed merely reinscribes them as the naïve purveyors of raw artistic material. Mullins’ hand-drawn pencil and acrylic pieces seem to be trying to inhabit both a position of irony and a slightly more sympathetic place. His human subjects are often peripheral to the frame while animals and machinery take center stage. The goofy nature of some of these pastoral scenes – a dog humping a football helmet for instance – imbues the work with a certain whimsical tenderness.

Tucker Nichols
We Do Smog, 2008
155 Grove Street store front

Tucker Nichols’ hand-written phrases on scraps of paper and cardboard retain the air of random analog-style eaves-dropping, appropriated from anonymous sources who are outside of the global image market. Collectively, the gleaned shards from the detritus of our everyday background noise, form a portrait of Americans preoccupied with lists and convenience which suggest an undercurrent of anxiety or anticipation, yet the message “lost bees” casts a note of despondency and the window painting at 155 Grove Street, “We do smog,” seems to shout in desperation.

Dina Danish
All My Life I Have Tried to Fit Cheese on Toast, 2007
Objects from Walgreens on Filmore and Haight that are the same size as toast
Digital Video Still

All My Life I Had to Fit Cheese on Toast, is a repetitive video by Dina Danish in which hands place objects purchased at Walgreens upon a slice of bread on which they fit perfectly. The slap-stick sped-up video robotically catalogs the seemingly endless parade of uniformity and consumability of all the objects in our everyday lives.

Richard Haley is an anomalous romantic within the show. His Bas Jan Ader-influenced piece is a more allegorical way of exploring identity, following a tragic hero in his quest for the sublime. His installation, Pre-Enactment of Being Lost at Sea, includes a handmade wood boat which features two holes in the bottom, fitted with threaded tubes and caps, and a video of two attempts to sink his boat at the same rate as the setting sun in what appears to be a small pond in the midst of suburban traffic and power lines. As in Ader’s projects, Haley’s simultaneous unlikely and nonsensical acts of rehearsing the process of getting lost and of chasing the sun are offset by the very real labor involved in fabricating the boat and rowing and the sense of panic in the handheld camera movement as the water rises.

The title of the exhibition also brings to mind the title of Ader’s project, In Search of the Miraculous, which ended with his ill-fated sea voyage. If the contemporary romantic quest ends with the discovery of the sublime within the everyday details of American lives, a balance must be sought between endless navel-gazing and projecting sublimity onto an ‘other.’ Without this, maybe Americans are just lost at sea in a small pond.

Reconciling America: Miraculous Encounters with the Mundane, Curated by Meg Shiffler, Joyce Grimm, Dana Hemenway, and Zefrey Throwell, will be on view at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery through March 11, 2008.