Oakland's Boontling Gallery has found a niche in the signature staging: a year old and already having annuals, as in the salon styled open entry art exhibition Overhung, of which has shown great popularity among local artists and audience.

This month, gallerists Weisberg and Simpson delivered part two of this annual exhibition, Overhung II: Hungover, which was no small feat due to space constraints and the quickly growing reputation of Boontling Gallery as a destination where emerging artists meet the intersection of the safe (as in the unpretentious stepping stone) and the transition onward.

Upon the immediate awe of this intriguingly cautious and cleverly hung show, Overhung works best as an art historical study: one look at the small Boontling Gallery's interior transformed into a salon styled maison d'art and one finds themselves immediately in the middle of a strange reflection regarding the familiarity and roots in the aesthetics of Bay Area art generation after generation of artists. The complexity of Overhung is found then almost exclusively in its familiarity and in the express salvation that any prior claims to a single Bay Area style or any notions of such resemblances were, in fact, a chance to market something that was not nearly as passing or isolated as was made to seem.

Overhung exceeds in space design, exposure opportunity for over 100 artists (absolutely amazing navigation of space), but not in any grand standing idea of resurrecting the salon style as a standard. Weisberg and Simpson managed to take a dull, seemingly art school topic and turn it into something far from the expected. For the intensive labor and time included in staging a show of this type, (managing nearly 300 works and dealing with close to that in sheer number of artists involved), one could possibly overlook the practice of charging emerging Bay Area artists five dollars to show in a gallery that is still emerging itself.

Though the annual Overhung exhibition provides much needed exposure for Bay Area artists, Boontling is not a showcase gallery but is exceptionally smart as a staging ground for emerging artists in the Bay Area. The ultra casual, make shift environment of Boontling Gallery lends itself to a certain naturalism in terms of the artists and art that are attracted to this venue, making an exhibition like Overhung invaluable both as a segment or as a whole.