I like saying “lucky day.” The words have an infectious upbeat quality that rattle in my mouth. As a title for a visual art exhibition, Lucky Day is only somewhat less gratuitous sounding, but it sparkles none-the-less. As if to suggest that this Lucky Day could belong to anyone or, more acutely, that the exhibition, which basks under the bright umbrella of these words, is sure to surpass expectations.

Though the exhibition does have some surprises in store, SFAC gallery director Meg Shiffler had something entirely more personal in mind when organizing the show. It turns out that Lucky Day was, at least in part, inspired by the Tom Waits song of the same name. In it he sings of returning home “some lucky day.” Implicit however is the knowledge that the place he remembers from his childhood has continued to change in his absence—returning home has become an impossibility.

The group of artists in this exhibition possesses a similar knowledge in relation to place, though it is made more complicated by their active efforts to resist or record the passage of time. Individually, each has cultivated personal relationships to place and they have developed equally personal ways of documenting and reconstructing those places—attempting to capture the most fleeting of experiences. Thus the show’s title takes on new meaning for me, changing from an unlikely confluence of positive external forces into a self-determined outlook, as in “I’m just lucky to be here.”

It’s not quite as rosy as that, but the work in Lucky Day is life affirming. For me the process-oriented works in the exhibition best embody this sensibility. They also comprise the most interesting and quirky offerings. For example Chris McCaw used homemade large-format cameras to produce the ghostly gray landscapes that make-up his Sunburned series. Using photo paper rather than film, McCaw directs his lens toward the sun and opens the aperture all the way up. The magnified sun solarizes the image and eventually burns a hole through the paper, making a unique artifact of place and time. Though this is difficult to detect without a little foreknowledge the images are quite beautiful on their own.

Chris McCaw, Sunburned GSP #008, 2006.

Michael Anderson also makes his work in situ. For an ongoing project entitled Denver, Anderson surveys the natural world in search of exact matches for the individual hues that appear in the universal television color bars. When he thinks he’s found the desired color he sets up video equipment and sends a live-feed of the landscape to a monitor where the color match can be verified. If it’s a match he’ll mix a corresponding paint color and quickly coat a board before the light and weather conditions change. As if this project needed another layer of interpretation, the whole process is documented by a photographer. It’s a marvelously convoluted undertaking that points out much ambivalence towards the natural world, technology and our own senses.

Michael Anderson, TV Color Bars (L), Elevation Blue, 2006 (R).

As a meditative, lo-tech foil for Anderson, Spencer Finch’s series of “color-swatch drawings” entitled Maine Landscape with Passing Dragonfly (August 8, 2006) hangs near by. The five works on paper were made over a six-hour period in which the artist, sitting in a meadow, recorded the subtle shifts in color of the elements around him: a tree, a rock, the grass, the sky, and a dragonfly. Each subject is represented on its own sheet of paper by several unassuming blotches of watercolor, the corresponding times of day written in pencil below each blotch. It sounds a little precious but the overall effect is surprisingly disarming—reducing painting to its most basic elements: perception and representation.

Other works in the show are less engaging to me. Gretchen Bennett’s meticulous cut outs of vanishing urban façades, while impressive in their scale and detail, don’t succeed at creating a palpable sense of place and Claude Zervas’ digitally manipulated video series, Forest 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 & 3.6, depicting images of old growth forests slowly decomposing into abstraction and back again, evoke screen savers more than changing wilderness. To be fair this impression may have to do with the presentation (a flat-screen monitor atop a pedestal).

Particularly disappointing was Euan Macdonald’s The Shadow’s Path. Shot from a helicopter, the nine-minute video shows a bird’s-eye view of the earth’s shadow enveloping the landscape as the sun sets. Admittedly, I had some expectations here. Macdonald’s other video works exploit the tension between accident and intention to surprising and humorous effect. By comparison The Shadow’s Path comes off as an earnest, but failed attempt to capture the mind-blowing fact that the earth is an object in space. Perhaps herein lies the humor.

Lastly there is Daniel Tierney’s Predator and the Eternal Return. Installed in the Grove Street storefront, it is in many ways the inverse of the other works in Lucky Day. Tierney’s installation is about virtual space/places rather than real ones, and it is site-specific rather than self-contained. It’s also the most visually pleasurable work in the show. Approaching from a short distance a crisp digital world becomes visible, just out of reach from our own—the storefront window a gigantic screen. Up close one can see it’s a wire-frame landscape composed of red cord and spray paint, inhabited by large wads of crumpled paintings. The loose, ad hoc nature of Tierney’s construction contradicts the inhuman associations I have with digital media and virtual worlds and somehow makes a place, however temporary, for me.

Daniel Tierney, Predator and the Eternal Return, 2007.

Lucky Day will be on view at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and 155 Grove Street through March 24th. More info can be had at http://www.sfacgallery.org/