Encouraging Art (What I do is a bit different…)

It’s been only recently that I heard SECA, liberated from its acronymic form, sounded out in all its mouth-filling glory; Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art.

Upon recovering from a private moment of taking the phrase literally (imagining physical pieces of artworks being given a pep talk), I realized SECA is actually a misnomer that means to say, “Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Production.”

But, in keeping with my initial, prima facie notion of SECA actually encouraging art objects, I thought I’d take it upon myself to do just that – after all, while I may not be a member of the secret, black-van escorted Society that does so, I do encourage contemporary art nevertheless.

As it seems the winners of SECA’s biennial prize don’t really need any additional encouragement, I thought I’d direct my efforts elsewhere, towards artwork included in a different group show found in the Bay Area – the Six Pack show at the LAB.

A Message to the Pen and Paper Drawings of Sarah Applebaum: Keep it up! It’s quite nice how you tickle my eye, producing slight optical effects that suggest movement and depth. It’s clever that you seem to be composed just as much by your delicate pen-marks as by the absences around and between those variable black swishes. Your polymorphous, quantum forms seem to crystallize right there before me, similar to the way a school of fish can suddenly resemble a shape. You’re whimsical and somehow remind me of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, that great Post-Impressionist painting from the late 19th century. Maybe that’s because your little marks, in what seems to be an exercise of black and white pointillism, never seem to touch but cohere anyhow into something wondrous.

A Message to the Paintings (sometimes sculptural) of Sarah Bereza: What a sense of humor you have! You seem to suggest there’s something rather perverse or even grotesque about femininity at this particular moment in cultural production. I suppose one need not look much further than the regular humiliation of teenage women proffered by MTV to find sufficient evidence of that! Tell me, is that Pepto-Bismol you are painted with, Pillow Fight 1, 2 & 3 (2004)? Your nauseatingly pink quality does, ironically, play well with the women pictured pillow fighting. While it’d be great to transition towards a more nuanced portrayal of womanhood, your painted Styrofoam frames, complete with antlers and horns (aspects of a series from 2006), are a witty, if gratuitous, take on the Hot Topic imagery consumed by countless mall-going, SuicideGirls.com-visiting teens today.

A Message to the Sculptural Drawings/Installations of Matthew Cox: Well hello to you, too! That was shrewd, the way one of you (Why is a vulture following me?, 2005) physically came alive upon my entrance to The LAB – you must have a motion detector somewhere! As a smartly drawn, pencil-rendered sky-scape eerily scrolls behind a little rubber vulture spinning in a perpetual circle, I see in you the beginnings of a much larger (and exciting) investigation – maybe into the mood surrounding the increasingly rapid rate of technological obsolescence? This being so, Static (2005), as a television-set whitewashed and repurposed into a platform for drawing, you compliment the other work rather well. There’s something recognizably uncertain, though surprisingly fun, about your relationship to technology – I like that you’re almost entirely black and white!

A Message to the Collages of David King: You seem to have been produced with the utmost precision and, as you are all collages, I whole-heartedly applaud your sharpness and acute edges. What is this terrain you depict? From what I can tell, you all have a deserted landscape as your foundation, yet the scene is made strange through the application of tiny, pixel-seeming squares of color or peculiar clusters of diamonds and pearls. This produces a delightful and slight visual effect that pleases just as much as it disorients my sense of time and content. It’s a great background for the figures you feature, retro-looking exercise models, posed to resemble reliquary figures or Bodhisattvas. You’re all nicely constructed and read like little metaphysical riddles.

A Message to the Photographs of Meredith Miller: It’s difficult, these days, to be a photograph – one often needs a solid thematic or concept to really engage viewers that feel they could, otherwise, make you themselves. That being said, the weighty bodies you respectfully showcase appear powerfully fleshy, like figures painted by Michelangelo or Rubens, rather than obscene or grotesque exaggerations, the way thicker bodies are generally imaged these days. You’re quite soft spoken and don’t pander attention by way of shock. Instead, you feel genuine and produced out of love and understanding rather than morbid curiosity. I truly appreciate this about you.

A Message to the Paintings of Joseph Rizzo: Have we met before? You look pretty familiar to me but I could be mistaking you for some other work I’ve seen around the Mission District. Sometimes I fear there are too many others just like you out there and that each of you will need to better individualize for me to tell any of you apart. That being said, you do show a lot of promise and I never fail to crack a smile upon encountering your kind of quirky imagery.

And, Finally, A Message to The LAB: I’d like to thank you for holding this group and have always appreciated your exhibitions and programs that certainly prove there are, indeed, a breadth of practices alive and well here in the Bay Area.