Figure Below: Nickolas Mohanna

I am certainly biased, but there is something great about a solo show that could be mistaken for a group exhibition. Rather than offering a one trick pony collection of ho-hum iterations, such shows present a network of varied artistic production that can, when successful, weave a spell far more complex than the standard frontal assault. Admittedly such shows are risky, and can fail disastrously if they are too disparate to gel. Also, the lack of redundancy in such exhibitions requires more precise and patient attention from viewers. However, if the show is good, the investment is usually worthwhile. Figure Below, Nickolas Mohanna's solo show at Eleanor Harwood, is one such exhibition that I found worth the effort.

installation view

The show consists alternately of three works or twenty-two, depending on how you count the large grid of framed works on paper. Each of the 20 mid-size ink and watercolor drawings employs a varied language of striated accretions akin to morphed sedimentary rock. Their double-row-of-ten hanging reinforces their layered logic and introduces a horizontality that tugs against each individual work's portrait orientation. Counterbalancing the gravitational heft of the works lithic structure is the fluid openness of Mohanna's inky textures and the tranquility of his line work. The interplay of mass and lightness within the work is reinforced externally by the tension between the stolid grid formation and delicate white wooden frames.


U

To the left of the grid, Mohanna's 2nd/21st work, titled U, "leans" against the wall. I say it "leans" because, while it stands angled against the sheetrock like a John McCracken plank, the weight of the triangularish protrusion, bulging from its center, pulls it forward into space, so much so that it needs to be screwed to the wall to keep it from falling. It is constructed from stacked plywood layers that, if you turn your head to one side, look a bit like a pyramid or anthill. The profile of this mass has been ground and sanded into a surface that looks more weathered than fabricated. On its tip a small rectangular mirror glints. The piece would look innocuous if casually tucked away somewhere in a workshop, but standing in the gallery it has a deliberate and austere presence. Its layered and eroded form wonderfully employs a geologic logic similar to the neighboring grid. However, its potency derives largely from its awkward leaning/pulling relationship with the wall. The tipped orientation of the work wonderfully negates the stratified weight of its layered construction, like a cartoon mountain being picked up and looked under. The dumb honesty of screwing the thing to the wall deflates any slickness, while simultaneously making present and palpable the work's tragicomic desire to go crashing into the room.

During the opening the work included a projector that, as Mohanna describes it, shot "a condensed 16mm transferred to video onto the center of the 3x2 square/mirror, which then produced feedback onto the ceiling." Though I never saw it installed with the video, I conceptually like the additional layering of the projected film and reflection displaced feedback. Knowing about its earlier media enriched existence complicates my appreciation of its current state, which is sufficient and substantial on its own.


Ground Cloud & video still from Ground Cloud

The final work in the show, and the largest, Ground Cloud, fills the space between wall and floor along one side of the gallery. A thigh high rectilinear mass, it hulks menacingly in the corner. Its surface, which looks to be sheets of mud-encrusted steel, like those used to cover road work in progress, is punctured along its front by two pyramidal arrangements of small rectangular openings, and in its top by an opening for the screen of a monitor. The punctures reveal little of the interior and the inset monitor screen, wreathed in black trash bags, displays a looping video. The structure of the videos swirling inky images seems related to the ink markings of the works on paper hanging opposite, but are more fluid and watery. The placement of the monitor is awkwardly near the gallery entrance and I had to stand nearly in the doorway to watch it, but I very much liked the odd earth-clad feel of it. The barely audible sounds coming from inside it intrigued me as did the faint light seeping out from the holey pyramids. I learned later from Mohanna that I should have stood on the Ground Cloud. The sounds on the loop within it are in large part sub audio frequencies that resonate the box and occasionally shake the debris on top. Standing on top of the box I would have felt the vibrations, and not have had to stand in the doorway to see the video. I also learned from Mohanna that at the opening sound artist Jim Haynes played on and with Ground Cloud using instruments and contact mics that he dragged over the work's surface.

L: That Hath A Core And Not A Code C: Exiting From A Flue R: Tephra Fill

Though lukewarm on openings, I wish that I had made it to Figure Below's inaugural night. Much as I like U the way it is, seeing it with its mirrored projection would have been nice. Similarly I would have liked to see Ground Cloud function as both stage and instrument. Regret aside, there is another part of me that is glad that my encounter with this work was in the quiet restive space of an empty gallery because much of what I like most about these pieces would have been lost in the hubbub of an opening soirée. While it is a little frustrating that the work that I encountered in the gallery and the work that was at the opening are so different, the fact that these pieces adapted to thrive in both mayhem and stillness is admirable. Admittedly, the density of such multivalent work can be difficult to unravel, but being easy is not always a virtue. In a landscape saturated with so much soft-serve ice cream it is refreshing that Mohanna's work requires mastication. Whether what you get after you have chewed and digested it is worth the effort, is up to you.

Figure Below will be on view at Eleanor Harwood through May 9, 2008.

When Hell Freezes Over: Lauren Davies

Ever since I saw that animated polar bear slip off that bit of melting iceberg to its watery doom in the movie An Inconvenient Truth icebergs and polar bears seem to be everywhere. It is therefore not so strange that Lauren Davis solo show, When Hell Freezes Over, at Gallery 16 contains both bears and bergs. What is however strange, and wonderful, is the deft way that Davies weaves these topically pertinent subjects into a quirky and complex tapestry inflected with humor, sadness, and nostalgia for small town charm.

Twillingate Bear

Much of the back-story pinning this show together comes from the small village of Twillingate in Newfoundland where a young polar bear was shot, stuffed, and placed in the tiny town's museum. Davies has produced her own life size version of the Twillingate bear which, as a juvenile, is a bit undersized. Sheathed in shimmering white fur the bear stands in the middle of the gallery on a plinth draped in night-sky blue fabric dusted with fake snow. Eerily the bear's white fur is seamless, lacking nose, mouth, and eyes.

Snowball Fort

To the front right of the bear a "snowball fort" balances. Not for protection, but rather, delicately made out of tall towers of frozen orbs. The wonderful pun of this construction aside, the gently undulating spires vibrate with the tenuous energy of a Bill Dan stone stack and the humorous bluntness of David Hammons' snowballs for sale. In front of the fort, in a high-school-play-set-like lump of snow is jabbed a flagpole whose banner whips motionless, frozen mid-ripple. The flag marks its patch of gallery broadcasting the shows title, burned into it as if by a Boy Scout.

installation view

Ranged about the bear, the snowball fort, and the flag are a number of curious objects. Hung on the wall, resting on shelves, and slouching nonchalantly on the floor, this odd assortment exhibits a DIY aesthetic somewhere between natural history diorama and elementary school craft project. An incomplete model iceberg clings to an ice-water-blue wall partially revealing the skeletal wood structure beneath its frosty surface. Sugar cubes, piled high on a floating white shelf, approximate a glittering pixilated version of an iceberg's visible mass, while the shadow it casts on the bare wall below implies an elusive dark mass of ice beneath a surface of water that isn't there. Employing everything from digitally printed images of embroidery and delicate ethereal drawings on translucent vinyl, to wonkely transformed bits of polar fleece, wood, foam, flocking, and thread, Davies has produced icebergs, hillocks, waterfalls, and landscapes that are as sad as they are lamely fun.

The Facts Embroidered

Experienced together, the works force us into a strange set of shifting scalar relations. The slightly outsized snow-fort and flag casts us diminutively and a bit nostalgically as children. The underpowered stature of the bear denudes it of the full menace an adult would engender. This impotence is magnified by its helpless lack of eyes nose or mouth. Its strange vulnerability forces us to feel protective, even responsible, for this bizarre bear-like thing. The bergs and other various modeled landscapes situate us, through their diagrammatic language, in a position that is familiar but of ambiguous size. How big is that iceberg supposed to be? Is that a mini berg, a big berg, or a giant one?

Construction and Reconstruction

In combination, the works set us adrift in an unstable terrain more treacherous than their benign appearance belies. How do these patched together recreations, models and mock-ups relate to our relationships with the places and things that they index? The answers are not clear but there is a challenge in the work lurking darkly and massively beneath the surface.


Berg

There is not much fault to find with this show, but I do wish that it hit a bit harder or landed a few more body blows. Its levity makes the show refreshingly approachable, but allows an overly light reading. That said, I am sad to have missed the snow cones at the opening. Regardless, it is impressive that without resorting to overt politics or other didactic modes When Hell Freezes Over manages to implicate us concretely in the complex terrain of relationships and cultural desires that swirl around icebergs, polar bears, and the mysterious place they occupy within our constructed landscape of collective mythology.

When Hell Freezes Over will be on view at Gallery 16 through May 31, 2008. For more information at visit the Gallery16 web site.

Misfits: Todd Bura

It is rare for a show of small works not to feel diminutive. Misfits, Todd Bura's second solo outing at Triple Base Gallery, manages this with style. Triple Base's small space helps the modest sized work shine, but the lion's share of credit must go to Bura's pieces and their disparately cohesive installation in the space.

Installation view

Due to his delicate mark making, muted tones, and softened forms, the work could be described as "slight", but there is meat beneath its subtle surface. The language of Bura's gentle approach is indebted to minimalism, but blends in a povera aesthetic whose modesty keeps the work firmly rooted in the business of day-to-day revelation. The pieces employ a range of techniques and motifs, from nearly invisible pinholes and swirling masses, to angular wooden volumes and dense graphic forms. There are a number of works that could be described as "pictures" and some that might gain the tag "sculpture," but since all the works operate as both physical objects and visual conduits for the meaning flowing amongst them, such designations are nearly meaningless. While I have favorite works, the shows disparate cohesiveness is what I find most intriguing. The diverse objects in the show function concretely as a single work. This Gesamtkunstwerk encompasses not only the objects and the void space of the gallery, but the idiosyncratic details of the rooms architecture.


Untitled (LOS) and Untitled (USEE)

Bura's variously sized "pictures" hang about the gallery at generally standard spacing and height. However, each of the twelve works employs a slightly different center-height, creating a gently undulating wave of energy that softly pulses from piece to piece. No two works in this show are the same size, and this scalar variation is further modulated by Bura's orchestration of each works medium, ground, density, and presentation (framing etc.). A more overtly radical move is Bura's extension of his hung line of works past the normally accepted boundary of the gallery wall. One work hangs on a section of wall poking into the gallery's front bay windows, another, a diptych, is partially installed on the frame of the window itself.

Untitled (DWHE) and Untitled (TOG)

Bura's two "sculptures" are tucked unobtrusively into the back corners of the gallery; one hung unconventionally low, the other resting on the floor. Each is constructed of angular sections of wood that mirror the frames used in the show. Their forms reflect the joined logic of framing but have shaped themselves to echo the architecture of their environment. One is comprised of three rectangular arms, the longest filling the seam where two walls meet, and the other two, jutting perpendicular and flush along each extending wall. It floats a short distance above the floor, mirroring the intersecting seams of the white walls and wooden floor some foot or so below it. The other's two white arms meet at a similar right angle to the corner of the room in which it sits. Its shifted orientation to the intersecting walls triggers a cascade of 45 and 90-degree relationships. The forms of these sculptures are not only in sync with the architecture and the framing of other works, but are also echoed within the worked surfaces of the paintings that surround them. This total unity produces an expanded consideration that brings previously innocuous elements into play; electrical outlets, switches, doors, windows, baseboards, and bulwarks all become part of a shifting set of relationships. What is genuinely surprising is the level to which this succeeds. The architecture plays along so well that one may begin to question if the art has been orchestrated to the architecture or the architecture to the art.

Untitled (YTHI) and Untitled (NGYO)

As much as I appreciate the way that Bura's show at Triple Base manages to bring forward a present and curiously considered awareness of space, place, and our position within it, part of me wishes that, having gotten this far, it would go just a little further, or at least provide something more substantial to grab onto. I really like Todd's work but it often seems to slip away graying out into a barely audible texture glimpsed only in peripheral vision. I can't quite put my finger on what it is that keeps me slightly unsure of this work, but it is there. I usually shake my doubts off but I can never quite forget them. In part it may be the work's delicacy and precious scale which makes them prettier than I am generally comfortable with. While the works elusive quality is a little frustrating, I have to admit that there is something poetic and honest about it quietly slipping off stage to let us make meaning on our own.

Misfits will be on view at Triple Base Gallery through May 4, 2008.
more info at: www.basebasebase.com

Misfits, a solo show by Todd Bura

Todd Bura's second solo show at Triple Base Gallery entitled Misfits is a tidy collection of minimalistic pieces that are both quiet and rebellious. Bura's honesty for his medium and style show with the cavalier and intentional formal quality of his work. Bura's work reflects an artist who takes himself and his work not at all seriously and very seriously at the same time.

View of gallery

When entering the gallery, the amount of white space could be concerning at first, but Bura's paintings, consisting demurely as shapes, smears and lines come to the surface amid the installation like a sparse constellation of 3-D elements. In addition to the paintings are actual sculptural elements discovered as you navigate the space. These few sculptural moments also seem to break the surface of the white room; the use of a raw canvas, a tiny shelf, a wooden shape lying on the floor lodged in the corner of the gallery, a shimmer of hardware, a tiny cleat barely viewed from the side of a painting on museum board. Bura's pieces work together as an installation in that they reference each other or pick up where the others leave off. But because each piece is so unique, it's easy to have a favorite, and each individual piece can hold on its own.

View of gallery

Bura definitely exploits his medium by pushing and framing his materials in such a way that reveals their luscious nature. A couple pieces, both untitled, keep standing out in my mind. The first of which is the painting on raw canvas. It is a simple stroke going across the canvas. Upon closer inspection, you see the blurred edges where the outer brush bristles only partially saturated the canvas, leaving a soft graduated trail on either side of the expected thicker mark. Another piece, on the back wall of the gallery, is a white on white painting hovering over a completely useless and diminutive perfect little white shelf.

Untitled

I am going to assume that the installation of the pieces in Misfits was carried out as intuitively as the works themselves. Misfits could be referencing a Suprematist composition; visually by way of geometric shapes, and conceptually, with deliberate decision-making in the composition of the installation of individual works. Bura does not, however, rely on the reference to the likes of Suprematist artist, Kasimir Malevich, but happens to share a similar rebellious attitude. When asked about Malevich as a possible influence, Bura replied (via e-mail), "...That dude is dope." And so are you, Todd.

Misfits runs through May 4, 2008. For more images of the show and more information about Triple Base visit: http://www.basebasebase.com/

Bura's timely show at Triple Base is accompanied by similar pieces featured in a group show, Form +, curated by Lawrence Rinder, (Dean of California College of the Arts) at Meridian Gallery through May 3, 2008.

Make You Notice

Curator Patricia Maloney uses "Brass in Pocket" by Chrissie Hynde/The Pretenders to set the stage for Make You Notice at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. Hynde stands in the shadow of women rockers like Patti Smith, Joan Jet, and Pat Benatar--all women who didn't appease commercial interests to play in dotting girl groups. Female rockers possess/ed gritty hard-edged sex appeal and powerful personas that challenge/ed the male-centric rock world. In "Brass in Pocket" Hynde assertively lists some of her assets (arms, style, fingers, imagination, etc.) that she is going to employ to demand your attention. The four artists in Make You Notice (Lisa Anne Auerbach, Kate Gilmore, Laura Swanson, and Jenifer Wofford) use their bodies, personas, and narratives to halt the viewer's attention while subtly paying homage to the feminist performance artists of the 1970s. While Make You Notice addresses gender politics, it clearly has a larger and more nuanced agenda that engages the viewer after a period when the art world has become so fatigued on issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Laura Swanson

The focus of Laura Swanson's photographs is the difference between being looked at versus being seen. Swanson's photographs underscore our unease about physical differences, maladies, and disabilities in a society where we must negotiate both the rudeness of staring and of ignoring. Swanson is acutely aware of the viewers' dilemma and slyly plays with them by hiding or camouflaging herself from the viewer. Moreover, at first glance, the viewer is unaware if these are self-portraits; the very act of representing oneself or being represented is at issue and calls to mind the controversial work of Diane Arbus. Moreover, Swanson represents the range of her personality (from dark and gothic to playful and humorous) without being didactic in representing her "otherness".

Kate Gilmore, video still from Anything, 2006

Kate Gilmore shows videos that present her engaged in impossible and extreme tasks. "Anything. . ." shows Gilmore attempting to reach the video camera that is suspended high above her head. After grasping towards the camera--the unattainable--Gilmore moves a table over and climbs on it to reach the camera. Unfortunately the table does not provide her with the requisite height. Gilmore then piles chair upon chair in a heap and bundles the whole mess together with string. "Anything. . ." has the sculptural sensibility of Nancy Rubins and the comical grace of Mary Catherine Gallagher. The viewer is acutely aware of the impossibility of her task and the foreboding doom if she fails and plummets to the ground. In contrast to the gothic and abject quality of many female performance works of the 70s, Gilmore's work uses a refreshing and novel sense of physical comedy.

The artists in Make You Notice play with ideas of performing identity and the balance between desiring credit, attention, and possibly approval, whilst making the viewer aware of their talents, individuality, and range of being. Moreover, to Maloney's credit she doesn't mention the hook line in "Brass in Pocket". Anyone who knows the song, automatically completes the lyrics in his/her mind. The specialness of Make You Notice is the way that the artists command the viewer's attention and further the dialogue of performace/perfoming.

Make You Notice will be on view at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery through May 24th.

Neu Wave Feminism

The first Saturday of April, I dropped by the Castro's stylish little hotspot for art, Femina Potens Gallery, to check out the opening reception of their current show, Neu Wave Feminism, which runs through April 27th, 2008. As one might have expected, the small space was noisy, high energy, and packed with cute young hipsters and older folks alike. The founder and curator of Femina Potens Gallery, bondage model and up-and-coming Feminist porn mogul Madison Young, was there mingling with the crowd. For someone who runs numerous high profile web sites and was the recent recipient of a Feminist Porn Award for Hottest Kink Film, Young came off as refreshingly mellow and approachable. Her other accomplishments aside, as owner of Femina Potens she has a lot to smile about--she has curated one hell of a show this month.

In promos, Neu Wave Feminism describes itself as an art show in which "three feminist artists explore identity, gender, and sexuality." This description fails to hint at the intensity of this mixed media tour de force. The artists responsible for this, in the best sense of the phrase, are former commercial photographer Jenny Rocksusto, papercut artist Lex McQuilkin, and traditional oil painter of jarring contemporary images Alicia DeBrincat. Each of these artists could easily hold their own in a solo show. Presented together in Neu Wave Feminism, they serve up a powerhouse of an art show.

Jenny Rocksusto

In poster-sized photos, as seductively lush and glossy as any Vogue spread, Rocksusto makes the intimate territory of sex and body a jarringly public affair. In one photo, the viewer is confronted with a pregnant woman's torso, slathered in paint, her breasts bound with standard-issue police handcuffs. As the viewer stares at the pregnant woman's nipples straining against the handcuffs, the image suggests fun and titillating S&M play, but also introduces sour flavors of authoritarianism, police brutality, and patriarchal control. In another large-scale piece, condoms fresh out of their wrappers are arranged on a chessboard. What are the opposing pieces on the chessboard? Egg yolks. It is unclear who will win this externalized reproductive game of strategy, but the effect is fresh and witty.

Joining Rocksusto's work is that of Lex McQuilkin, who is in full control of her highly original medium of choice. McQuilkin, a self-described "papercut artist," carves paper into delicate silhouettes and arranges these ephemeral lines, words, and images into intimate and sometimes layered compositions. In one striking piece, a young, mustachioed figure wears a partially transparent dress shirt. The transparent paper of the shirt allows the voyeur, err viewer, to look through the shirt to see the figure's breasts and taped nipples beneath her clothes. This striking paper construction quietly urges the viewer to meditate on the complex nature of appearance, assumptions, and gender.

Alicia DeBrincat

Rounding out this stunning show is the work of oil painter Alicia DeBrincat. DeBrincat's style evinces an impressive degree of technical mastery that is increasingly hard to come by in galleries these days. She seems confident in her paint handling, and her figures' flesh has a degree of lifelikeness that is positively eerie. In one large-scale nude, the realism of the veins in the woman's feet was nothing short of unnerving. The freshness of DeBrincat's work, however, lies in the marriage of traditional oil painting technique with brave portrayals of female identity such as the Old Masters never dished out. In one painting, a larger-than-life nude woman strikes a cheesy pin-up pose against a backdrop of lemons. She wears a beauty-queen-style sash that reads "Round Ripe Juicy Tart." It remains unnervingly ambiguous whether this phrase is referring to the lemons or to the woman herself. While her alluring pose and the lushness of her painted flesh encourage the viewer to objectify her with their stare, the unwavering directness and intelligence of her gaze halts the viewer in mid-ogle. If this woman is an object of desire, she is one who is fully in control of her power over those who would desire her. The piece broaches some interesting themes of voyeurism, sexuality, objectification, and control, yet at the same time the painting is undeniably eye candy. The result is both creepy and thought-provoking.

With Neu Wave Feminism, Femina Potens treats the public to an undeniably strong show. Rocksusto, McQuilkin, and DeBrincat, though working in quite dissimilar media, combine to present a notion of Feminism that has a strong, thoughtful voice and evinces a deliberate approach to art making. What with the rich history and highly-analyzed nature of Feminism, it would have been easy to fall back on clichéd images and ideas. But, thankfully, Neu Wave Feminism breaks fresh ground.

Neu Wave Feminism will be on view at Femina Potens through April 27th.

Borderlandia: Enrique Chagoya

A dirty handprint on the pristine white wall of an exhibition space is usually something to cover up--not call attention to, but the five-fingered smudge beneath the frame of When Paradise Arrived, the anchoring image in Enrique Chagoya's Borderlandia exhibition at Berkeley Art Museum, was so fitting I had to wonder whether it was intentional. The hand and the tracks of its direct contact with charcoal and paint is a signature symbol in Chagoya's visual lexicon--a riotously idiomatic language in which one super-added sign deserves another. That the print was still there on a subsequent visit a few days later strengthened my suspicions.

When Paradise Arrived, 1988; charcoal and pastel on paper; 80 x 80 in.

The first major retrospective for the Mexico-born, San Francisco-based artist, Borderlandia is a comprehensive survey of the historical records Chagoya revises. Ranging from multi-colored, densely layered maps, codices and cartoons to starkly dichotomous large-scale paintings in red and black, the media Chagoya uses varies widely. His lack of allegiance to a single technique or form mirrors the irreverence of the wholesale cultural appropriation his work explores--a message that is consistently relayed through the use of a hodgepodge of recurring symbols that call historical authorship into question. Figureheads of established Western political, religious and cultural canons--Mickey Mouse, Ronald Regan and Pablo Picasso, stand trial for their roles in the approbation of cultural obliteration.

Chagoya's re-writing of history often hinges on depicting a cultural clash at the moment of collision. In When Paradise Arrived, for example, Mickey Mouse's sooty black outsized hand, fingers poised in mid-flick, dwarfs the figure of a girl whose only defense for the toppling devastation Mickey waits to deliver is the red Kahloesque heart she proffers in return. By freezing the action, Chagoya checks its inevitability and explores the potential for revision. This happens again in Liberty Club #1, in which a car hangs on the face of a cresting wave in a turbulent sea. Referencing the 2004 escape of a group of Cubans to Florida in a 1959 Buick, Chagoya's version of the historically-doomed vessel is still afloat and the viewer is left to ponder the what-ifs.

Liberty Club #1, 2006; Acrylic and water-based oil on canvas; 60 x 80 in.

Chagoya provides new cartographies to guide the lost through his alternative narratives. His maps, however, further scramble the cultural and geographic boundaries of the accepted legends. Road signs in "The Pastoral or Arcadian State, Illegal Alien's Guide to Greater America" direct a motley crew of international immigrants aboard a river barge to various waypoints. One direction offers a choice of destinations: State of Utopia, State of Denial or State of War; the way other leads directly to State of Shock. Chagoya's wry sense of humor is written on the side of a border patrol canoe that guards the shoreline of Arcadian State. Manned by military-clad natives with guns and headdresses, it reads "Part of the charm is the elusiveness of meaning."


Untitled (The Burden of Freedom), 2006; Charcoal and pastel on paper mounted on canvas; 60 x 60 in.

Indeed, it is this cartoonish play with historical narratives that characterizes Chagoya's work. Everywhere, signs, symbols, icons and legends are twisted, defaced and superimposed to reveal their hidden origins. Untitled (The Burden of Freedom) transforms the figures of Christ, Mohammed and Arnold Schwarzenegger into an abhorrent triumvirate ballerina dancing on a stage of blood-red handprints. Shadows and eerie afterimages often float or hang in suspension above their figures. Former California governor, Pete Wilson, minus his head, is a regular character. Bodies, seen skinless or dismembered in cooking pots, allude to rampant cultural cannibalism and the hand, whether used as subject or as tool, is both a humanizing and an active sign of resistance.

Chagoya's codices, non-linear narratives of repossessed and altered symbols printed on gorgeous accordion pleats of amate paper, serve as an important key to the legends and maps of the larger codex of Borderlandia itself. In such a place, a handprint on a wall makes a perfect guide to the half-written and nearly erased histories that Chagoya salvages from obscurity and rewrites for the record. Like his local compatriot, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Chagoya offers viewers passage through Borderlandia with the surety and confidence of a reliable coyote who knows both sides.

Borderlandia will be on view at the Berkeley Art Museum through May 18th, 2008.

The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things

The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, showing at the Berkeley Art Museum until July 20th, is Joan Jonas' second retrospective at the university's art museum; in 1982, the museum (then the University Art Museum) organized Jonas' first video and performance retrospective as well as published the first monograph of the artist's work. In this second retrospective of her work, Jonas considers the Hopi snake dance, which she first experienced in the 1960s during a trip to Arizona in relation to an essay by the German art historian Aby Warbur (1866-1929), who also observed Hopi tradition during a trip to Arizona. The resulting exhibition is stunning and multifaceted, but sometimes cryptic.

Jonas began her career in New York City as a sculptor but by 1968 she began mixing performance with props and mediated images, situated in various natural and/or industrial environments. Jonas first visited Arizona and the American Southwest in the 1960s and was greatly moved by the snake dance and other Hopi rituals she saw during her trip. Aby Warbur, a 19th century German art historian, visited the American Southwest in his lifetime and was equally influenced by what he saw when he was there; thirty years after he returned to Europe, Warbar gave a lecture on the Native American serpent ritual, which he in fact had never seen, but described the ritual with great knowledge and concern for the culture. Jonas felt a parallel between herself and Warbur, finding Warbur's essay particularly salient and incorporating the text as well as the ideology into her work; specifically, in The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, Jonas uses his lecture as the text for the work. Since being initially produced by the Renaissance Society in 2004, Jonas continued to develop this work, adding live performances, video footage of which is on view in the gallery, and music composed by jazz musician Jason Moran. In its present state, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things draws on various sources to extrapolate the power of universal narratives. Jonas' work is very compelling but is also complex as it considers Hopi traditions, the changing environments of the American Southwest, the human body, as well as a 19th century art historian's view; Jonas' work thus requires an in depth understanding.

The installation of The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things at first feels overwhelming; when entering the exhibition, multiple video projections of performance, image, and sound compete for the viewer's attention. Jonas' work is complicated and not initially accessible. Unfortunately, only a short introductory statement was included in the exhibition, which only briefly explains Jonas' work. In this manner, the visitor who does not have a background in Jonas' work, will likely, and unfortunately, be left confused by the exhibition. When visiting this show, I would advise to do a little research beforehand.

Jonas' work is complex and compelling. The Berkeley Art Museum has a history of collecting Jonas work but, until 2006, had much of her earlier work but little of her later films; in 2006, the museum acquired The Shape, the Sound, the Feel of Things, which, as Lucinda Barnes says in her accompanying essay, helps the museum represent "the fuller range and scope of Jonas' work."

For more information about Joan Jonas: The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things visit the Berkeley Art Museum web site.