This February, SFMOMA opened it biannual acknowledgment of local, emerging contemporary artists with the 2008 SECA Art Award exhibition. As exhibitions are only shadows of their development processes, it is necessary to recount the narrative of this project in order to understand its culmination. A somewhat bizarre approach, comprised of studio visits coordinated by the busload, and curators resembling cultural tour guides--replete with itineraries and megaphones--the award selection process is nevertheless undeniably exacting and unique.

Since 1967, the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA)--an organization of SFMOMA patrons--has sponsored this Award, which culminates in an exhibition at the museum every two years. This year's exhibition curators, Apsara DiQuinzio and Alison Gass, directed the selection process, in which the SECA members participate and advise without voting or veto power. As in years past, after receiving nominations from members of the Bay Area community, SECA invited the nominated artists to submit portfolios, which were then reviewed by Gass and DiQuinzio with the full SECA membership as an actively opinionated audience. Narrowing the pool to a group of thirty semi-finalists, DiQuinzio and Gass led the aforementioned studio visits, whose subsequent review resulted in the final selections for the Award. At the culmination, Tauba Auerbach, Desirée Holman, Jordan Kantor, and Trevor Paglen received the honors for 2008.

Desirée Holman. Masks (Conduits of Fantasy) 1, 2007; colored pencil on paper; 16 x 16 in. (40.6 x 40.6 cm); Courtesy the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; © 2008 Desirée Homan; photo: Don Ross, courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For the current exhibition, Desirée Holman exhibited drawings and videos from her project The Magic Window. The project embodies two classic television families from the eighties--the Huxtables, from The Cosby Show, and the Connors from Roseanne--as literal second skins. Performers reenact the sitcom characters in masks that droop like the pelted flesh worn in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Silence of the Lambs. The hypnotic video projection shifts from horror to humor as the families dance together in semi-choreographed absurdity. This genre play expands in the supporting series of renderings. When seen via documentation, Holman's work can be misinterpreted as sloppy, but the level of craft in the drawings, as well as the controlled effects of the lo-fi video production, provide the project with a sturdy aesthetic backbone. The masks' rough edges enhance the figurative displacement, revealing just enough under the surface to allow the performers to become empathetic contact points for the audience. These fissures expose the effects of class and race that were collectively witnessed by television viewers in the eighties, portrayed in the now archetypical narratives of the Huxtables and the Connors.

Jordan Kantor. Untitled (The Bar), 2007; oil on canvas; 38 x 52 in. (162.6 x 213.4 cm); Collection of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein; © 2008 Jordan Kantor; photo: Donald Felton, Almac Camera, courtesy Ratio 3, San Francisco.

Jordan Kantor's paintings are highly literate, reworking contemporary tableaux via painting's historical referents. The canvases' subjects are diverse, ranging from performance stills of Johnny Cash, to a rendition of Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, to simple lens flares. Other paintings are reworked and displayed as positives and photo-negative inversions. In this way, Kantor can be understood as a post-Internet painter, drawing from reference images in an indexical manner. The images autopsy photographic media from the reductive viewpoint of accumulated paint. Kantor's brushstrokes seem to be processed scientifically, as if he is testing to find the minimum threshold at which a photographic space emerges from pigment, an inversion of typical media critique. All of the canvases are untitled, with the description of the content in parenthesis following. This semiotic ju-jitsu extends the alienation of the content from the painting, much like Magritte's assertion "This is not a pipe." Unfortunately, the repetition on every painting becomes formulaic and an unfortunate hedging on works that are strong enough to invoke this meaning without redundant naming conventions.

Trevor Paglen. KEYHOLE-IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite, USA 186), 2008; chromogenic print, 37 1/2 x 30 in. (95.3 x 76.2 cm); Courtesy Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco, and Bellwether Gallery; © 2008 Trevor Paglen; photo: courtesy the artist, Altman Siegel Gallery, and Bellwether.

Experimental geographer Trevor Paglen's studio practice seeks to display things that are unintended to be seen. Dwelling in the shadows of American military culture, Paglen's work exposes the visual signifiers of secret intelligence operations that officially do not exist. Drawing from his book I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World, the exhibition displays military uniform patches reminiscent of coats of arms. In his research, Paglan collected the patches from intelligence projects that-- while officially off the books--were nominally visible, identified only by the visual markers on the uniforms of their secret participants. The cognitive dissonance of this display is tempered only by our capitalist culture where everything, even military secrets, is branded.

It is rare that such politically trenchant work is embodied with as much aesthetic beauty as Paglin's satellite photographs. The Other Night Sky takes the form of time-lapse skyscapes with stars arching with the rotation of the earth. Only the dotted lines of spy satellites break the radial symmetries of the images. In this series, Paglan reverses the Panopticon of militarized surveillance, exposing the apparatus of state imaging as it collides with the celestial.

Tauba Auerbach. Static II, 2008; chromogenic print; 60 x 42 in. (152.4 x 106.7 cm); Collection of the artist; © 2008 Tauba Auerbach; photo: Vegard Kleven, courtesy STANDARD (OSLO), Norway.

The artwork of Tauba Auerbach arises out of pattern and repetition. Her photographs Static II and Static IV enlarge colorful television static fields into abstract arrays of colored dots. The series included in this exhibition move away from her earlier bodies of work, which were grounded in the use of text and word play, as well as the graphic flatness of a web design. These prints are more aggressive in their scale and presentation, violently breaking the frame. The playfulness her earlier work has been sacrificed for large-scale visual saturation. The vignetting and photographic distortions in the prints add a layer of perceptual process to the work, but this additional mediation is alienating to the viewer. We're no longer percipient interpreters of the pattern, playing games with Auerbach's design. Instead, we are witnesses to the frisson of a systemic collapse. Unfortunately, this shift in perspective depletes the humor and joy present in her earlier work, and lets the audience off easy, as we no longer need to invest the cognition required to decode her optic riddles.

One of the most notable aspects of this year's selection is that all of these artists have made significant career traction outside of the Bay Area prior to their receipt of the award. While the recognition may be a milestone for the artists individually--and each of them is quite deserving for the accomplishments in their practices-- the selections seem to be safe, conservative choices. SFMOMA has put its seal of approval on emerging Bay Area artists who already had developing national recognition, as opposed to using its prestige and clout to promote equally talented local artists at earlier stages in their careers. The SECA Art Award has the power and the visibility to expand the pool of local artists with an international following. If the award focused on artists at earlier stages in their careers, this unique recognition would also probably do significantly more to raise the prestige of the Bay Area contemporary art scene outside of its own echo chamber.

The 2008 SECA Art Award is on view at SFMOMA until May 10, 2009.