When I first saw Johansson Projects’ inaugural press release for Excavations, I thought the title might prove most valuable not as a one off event, but as an annual exhibit. In constant return, tilling and re-tilling the soil each time our articulations become too content, too static or cocksure. Especially as Oakland presses forward in its Brooklyn-brother way, and not as the younger sibling to New York, but to the often marginalized provincialism and politic of the San Francisco art scene.

But even at the doors, over the clamoring talk and leaning to see through the shoulders of the crowd for work, some even growing from the walls, I realized this was an independent and exciting night, not to be repeated.

Johansson Projects had exploded the Murmur.

And with what? A landscape show, as Johansson originally—and that is to say long ago, several artists prior to opening night—envisioned it—the dynamic contemporary handling of that old fashioned form. But three artists became six, and six, eight. The very rupture of Excavations itself. And as product, a kinship of previously unrelated local artists such as Jana Flynn and veteran earthworks artist John Roloff, who’s renowned kiln works were being produced at the same time as Flynn herself. A vivid coupling no doubt. But like any assemblage, one in turn elevated and plagued by its company.

From the lush introduction of Inaoka’s aviary through Scott Oliver’s and Britton’s dreamt narratives, to the final fragmenting of Desotto’s audio nonsense, Excavations is visually explosive. The Show hangs in shrapneled beauty. But nothing new seemed to reveal itself on this my second visit, and actually the holdings together seemed a bit strained without the crowded support.

I recall the answer a lector once gave in a stiflingly overheated Chicago auditorium when asked from the echoing and distant audience microphone – How do you judge Good and Bad in contemporary art? Well, each person does, came the response, but me – I think when I see decent contemporary art I think: ‘Wow…hm.’ But when I see a really lasting piece, I think: ‘Hmmm…Wow!’

I believe in this.

John Rolof, Landscape Projection (for an Unknown Window), No. 2, 1998, 12 ft. x 8 ft.

John Rolof’s morose photo work, Landscape Projection (for an Unknown Window), demands this response in its inside- out dialogue between generic window space and an abstract interior ‘earth-work’. And Val Britton’s walls. Her large-scale maps of her deceased father’s truck routes are, in the end, anything but mournful. Breaking from the traditional dependence on topographical ring work to provide movement, she’s able to elicit a deeply believable and somehow constant chaotic throbbing by way of slashes and physical overlay. They may have arisen from the static Rand McNally, but these beautified renderings of that lonesome profession seem less like maps than stories from daughter to absent father. While successfully holding entire rooms captive, it is in the lure of their three-dimensional detail that they are able to seduce the audience into their both bold and intricate narratives, marked by monumental lines and frail continents.

Val Britton, Where could you have been, or where could I?,2005.

But enjoyable as they are, Yvette Molina’s incredible mark making and Misako Inaoka’s three latest birds are hindered by the addition of earlier and less mature decorative work. For Molina it seems to be a market issue: that the immense success of her previous work - as hungry as the public has proven to be for her saturated naturalist scapes – seems to have made it harder to cut the remaining butterflies from otherwise rigorous aluminum meditations. In the case of Inaoka, the division among her birds seems more an issue of discrepancy. When an artist turns a corner in their work – in this case her sculptural birds reaching a point where they shed their kitsch wardrobing, for a wondrous morphological evolution – it is the responsibility, both of the artist and curator, to recognize this shift and act upon it without mercy. And Andrew Benson’s landscapes, which are, in his own words, derived from “an artistic methodology that draws upon practices as diverse as landscape painting, computer science, electronic engineering, cartography, systems theory, signal processing, and architectural design” – which sounds like gorgeous sport to me - unfortunately read like 120 mph Rorschach tests, minus the rich psychological and historical context.

But it was no doubt, an event. Raucous, the curator herself having to shoulder the door shut an hour past closing time against the protests of her public. And a buying public – so much so that pieces were added post-event (a habit Ms. Johansson must train herself out of having come from the retailist buffet of the Union Square district). And why, because no matter what the gripes, Excavations proved a high-impact groundbreaking, and one that makes me look forward to the finer tuning of future projects.