Memorial Fort video courtesy of Adam Cimino.
In the end, Hot & Cold is about creating a community of makers. With the art world rapidly globalizing, far-flung artists are able to form bonds and influence one another through various webs of interaction. I thank the creators of Hot & Cold for seven years of keeping these points of connection authentic and varied.
"Hot & Cold: The End is Here" will be on view at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.
Art Practical Issue 1 will include a full-length version of this review.]]>
Dennis Gallagher: Forms & Shapestag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4682009-10-04T21:00:00Z2009-10-05T00:44:29ZLeigh Markopoulos
Forms & Shapes, installation view, 2009. All works untitled, various dates; left wall: charcoal on paper; right wall and floor: ceramic. Courtesy of Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.
Bay Area sculptor Dennis Gallagher's posthumous survey exhibition, "Forms & Shapes," presents a comprehensive range of work--from massive stacked ceramic sculptures, to smaller maquettes and assemblages, plates, and drawings. Given that the 57-year-old artist tragically passed away earlier this year, the instance of five large, vertical sculptures all produced in 2009 is a testament to his protean creativity. The exhibition is punctuated by the inclusion of earlier work, which hints at his development from abstract and monochromatic (mostly white) sculptures through the more complex, representational, and often functional work of recent years. The drawings--especially the bold, black-line series from 1991--are to be understood equally as working sketches and powerful explorations of abstraction.
Gallagher, like many artists, early on adapted a select range of forms into his sculptural vocabulary, putting them through their paces often in defiance of gravity and, indeed, interpretation. And yet almost in spite of themselves, the works evoke a wealth of references, from classical motifs such as the Three Graces and the shafts of Ionic columns, to Constructivist assemblages of Merzbau-like ambition, and Brutalist architecture. Even at their most menacing, however, a measure of humanity runs throughout the obviously handmade irregularity of their forms and surfaces, pitted, scarred and roughly glazed as they are. The gallery's somewhat theatrical lighting lends gravitas to the staging of what, when viewed as a totality, could ultimately be understood as totems to the memory of failed modernist Utopias.
Dennis Gallagher: "Forms & Shapes" is on view at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco through October 10, 2009. ]]>
Nathan Redwood: On A Necktag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4302009-10-04T20:50:00Z2009-10-05T01:52:55Z Untitled #1, 2009; acrylic on paper. Courtesy of Electric Works, San Francisco. Although the paintings in "On A Neck" are stylistically those of Nathan Redwood, he has made some questionable departures from his earlier work. The artist's new indulgence in portraiture seems a logical step in terms of his subject matter. However, his abstracted figures do not translate when left without a background context. When I last saw Redwood's work at Electric Works, I was quite taken with his large, narrative, yet surreal, paintings. They had not only a great presence in the space, but were also extremely fun. In this show, there is very little imagination in the work, and Redwood's particular style can at times be overwhelming to its detriment. These newer, much smaller works have the same sense of quickness and palette without the intricacies for which he is known. His figures are sometimes slightly abstracted,...Rachel AdamsUntitled #1, 2009; acrylic on paper. Courtesy of Electric Works, San Francisco.
Although the paintings in "On A Neck" are stylistically those of Nathan Redwood, he has made some questionable departures from his earlier work. The artist's new indulgence in portraiture seems a logical step in terms of his subject matter. However, his abstracted figures do not translate when left without a background context.
When I last saw Redwood's work at Electric Works, I was quite taken with his large, narrative, yet surreal, paintings. They had not only a great presence in the space, but were also extremely fun. In this show, there is very little imagination in the work, and Redwood's particular style can at times be overwhelming to its detriment. These newer, much smaller works have the same sense of quickness and palette without the intricacies for which he is known. His figures are sometimes slightly abstracted, at other times completely. Yet without backgrounds in which to ground them, most float haphazardly within swirling colors.
The gallery separated paintings on canvas from those on paper, which was a well-considered move--the framed works on paper are much stronger. This may have to do with their execution. Even though the subjects are shared with those of the rest of the show, the five pieces together form a more coherent narrative. Four of the group are untitled, which might seem important since the titles for Redwood's work are nearly always simple. But with these more abstract portraits, his non-titles render the work uneventful.
Nathan Redwood: On A Neck is on view at Electric Works Gallery in San Francisco through November 7, 2009.]]>
Brian Ulrich: Dark Storestag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4512009-10-04T20:40:00Z2009-10-05T01:53:45Z Richland Mall, 2009; archival pigment print. Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco. Brian Ulrich began photographing abandoned shopping malls, stores, and big box retailers in the wake of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, an uncertain time when the government called on Americans to resume their normal patterns of consumption. Outside of the obvious timeliness of Ulrich's show and current platitudes about American consumerism, "Dark Stores" is a collection of beautifully uncanny images that ruminate upon the structure and occasional failure of retail architecture. In his photographs, interiors of abandoned stores sit void of merchandise, with exteriors equally as desolate. Even with a store's signage removed, the franchises' identities are still apparent in the ghostly and patinated outlines of absent logos and familiar lettering. Moreover, the homogenous and iconic architecture which brands big box retailers also serves as a conspicuous reminder of their financial failures. In his most...Genevieve QuickRichland Mall, 2009; archival pigment print. Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.
Brian Ulrich began photographing abandoned shopping malls, stores, and big box retailers in the wake of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, an uncertain time when the government called on Americans to resume their normal patterns of consumption. Outside of the obvious timeliness of Ulrich's show and current platitudes about American consumerism, "Dark Stores" is a collection of beautifully uncanny images that ruminate upon the structure and occasional failure of retail architecture.
In his photographs, interiors of abandoned stores sit void of merchandise, with exteriors equally as desolate. Even with a store's signage removed, the franchises' identities are still apparent in the ghostly and patinated outlines of absent logos and familiar lettering. Moreover, the homogenous and iconic architecture which brands big box retailers also serves as a conspicuous reminder of their financial failures. In his most successful images, the context is ambiguous--the store could be closed for the day, rather than permanently. While Target (2009), Ulrich's image of the store's exterior with a cast-off shopping cart, is perhaps too convenient, he shows sophisticated restraint in Richland Mall, where the building and parking lot stand starkly and quietly amid a snowy landscape. The wholesale abandonment of modern architecture itself is particularly unsettling in these photos, as it disrupts our notions about the very permanence of the form. Operating at their deepest level, Ulrich's photographs of abandoned retailers are uncanny reminders that within a few short miles, there is probably an identical store teeming with shoppers.
"Brain Ulrich: Dark Stores" is on view at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco through October 31, 2009]]>
Ian McDonald: Today and Otherstag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4442009-10-04T20:30:00Z2009-10-05T01:54:32Z "Today and Others," installation view, 2009. Courtesy of Queen's Nails Projects, San Francisco. Ian McDonald's exhibition at Queen's Nails Projects comprises fourteen handmade objects in five enigmatic groupings that flout distinctions between design, museum, and gallery displays. Evincing a simpler approach than his previous work, McDonald's tussle with the production mechanisms of capitalism seems to have morphed from emulation to rejection. Glossy mould works have given way to thrown, sculpted and crafted pieces, simple drip glazes in neutral tones, and more recognizably functional objects: lamps, storage urns, and benches. The work's detail resides in such unexpected places as the glass marbles atop lids of ceramic jars or buried in the back wall, a flash of lilac burnishing the leg of a redwood bench, or the curious circular object glazed and covered in gold leaf. As with McDonald's previous installations, most of the (untitled) pieces are arranged on pedestals, and...Leigh Markopoulos
"Today and Others," installation view, 2009. Courtesy of Queen's Nails Projects, San Francisco.
Ian McDonald's exhibition at Queen's Nails Projects comprises fourteen handmade objects in five enigmatic groupings that flout distinctions between design, museum, and gallery displays. Evincing a simpler approach than his previous work, McDonald's tussle with the production mechanisms of capitalism seems to have morphed from emulation to rejection. Glossy mould works have given way to thrown, sculpted and crafted pieces, simple drip glazes in neutral tones, and more recognizably functional objects: lamps, storage urns, and benches. The work's detail resides in such unexpected places as the glass marbles atop lids of ceramic jars or buried in the back wall, a flash of lilac burnishing the leg of a redwood bench, or the curious circular object glazed and covered in gold leaf. As with McDonald's previous installations, most of the (untitled) pieces are arranged on pedestals, and in this incarnation further framed by plaques or benches.
Although the highlighted objects are indisputably the focus, they are distanced from their functionality through the artist's co-opting of conventional hierarchies reserved for the presentation of items of value. McDonald's insistence that no integral worth resides in the conceptual, formal, or functional properties of objects is perhaps best summed up by the penny pressed into the surface of a ceramic ball--the copper piece's inclusion in a system (whether monetary or artistic) assigns it symbolic value, rather than the coin's true worth as 97.5 percent zinc. The analogy with art is as inescapable as McDonald's pointed refutation of the economics of excess, his work ultimately suggesting that today need not be like all the others.
Ian McDonald: "Today and Others" is on view at Queen's Nails Projects in San Francisco through October 3, 2009.]]>
Mitzi Pederson: I'll Start Againtag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4292009-10-04T20:20:00Z2009-10-05T01:57:15Z Untitled, 2009; wood, sand, and string. Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco. All of Mitzi Pederson's work in "I'll Start Again" is untitled, and walking throughout the main space of her show at Ratio 3, it is hard to distinguish if each piece should be viewed individually or if the artist is more interested in creating something of a gesamtkunstwerk. Utilizing such common materials as wood, paper, and string, the very floor of the gallery plays to Pederson's advantage. The tension she captures with the string and wood sculptures, each hanging somewhat precariously upon the walls, is striking. Unlike previous wood and string pieces that were generally larger and louder, these smaller works pack a much stronger punch. A few resourcefully negotiate the architecture of the gallery itself, either by wrapping around the corner of a wall or disappearing and reemerging behind exposed pipe. Largely dealing with the idea...Rachel Adams
Untitled, 2009; wood, sand, and string. Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco.
All of Mitzi Pederson's work in "I'll Start Again" is untitled, and walking throughout the main space of her show at Ratio 3, it is hard to distinguish if each piece should be viewed individually or if the artist is more interested in creating something of a gesamtkunstwerk. Utilizing such common materials as wood, paper, and string, the very floor of the gallery plays to Pederson's advantage. The tension she captures with the string and wood sculptures, each hanging somewhat precariously upon the walls, is striking. Unlike previous wood and string pieces that were generally larger and louder, these smaller works pack a much stronger punch. A few resourcefully negotiate the architecture of the gallery itself, either by wrapping around the corner of a wall or disappearing and reemerging behind exposed pipe.
Largely dealing with the idea of tension, and how materials succumb to new ways of utilization, Pederson devises small and rather simple investigations that still manage to captivate the viewer. In one such work, Pederson sprayed sand onto a very thin piece of wood, which she then bent, and hung over string, creating an arching form. The gesture of the arch, the tension in the string, and the sparkle of the sand combine to create an ethereal affect. Unfortunately, in contrast to this strong showing in the main gallery, the back room of Ratio 3 leaves much to be desired, with only a large, scattered wall sculpture, another floor sculpture, and a few mixed media works on paper. Altogether, these pieces felt plain compared to the humbly impressive acrobatics of the gallery's main space.
Mitzi Pederson: "I'll Start Again" is on view at Ratio 3 in San Francisco through October 24, 2009]]>
2nd Look - Mitzi Pederson: I'll Start Again tag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4562009-10-04T20:10:00Z2009-10-05T02:00:16Z. "I'll Start Again," installation view, 2009. Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco. Quotidian materials similar to those that have appeared throughout Mitzi Pederson's oeuvre dominate the work in this show. The works exhibit a unified sensibility, but are at times disjointed--succeeding only in fits and starts. The strongest pieces are the wall sculptures in the main space. In two of them, long sections of lathe are pulled into graceful arcs against nails by threads anchored to rectangular pieces of plywood. Another elegant work consists of a multi-stranded rectangle of thread stretched between four nails, over which a ribbon-like section of sand-coated wood-veneer has been draped like a towel. Constructed simply from wood, nails, and thread, these objects are playful like the work of Richard Tuttle and profound like the work of Fred Sandback. The rest of the work in the show is less satisfying. The plywood and metal floor...Zachary Royer Scholzhttp://zacharyscholz.com
"I'll Start Again," installation view, 2009. Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco.
Quotidian materials similar to those that have appeared throughout Mitzi Pederson's oeuvre dominate the work in this show. The works exhibit a unified sensibility, but are at times disjointed--succeeding only in fits and starts. The strongest pieces are the wall sculptures in the main space. In two of them, long sections of lathe are pulled into graceful arcs against nails by threads anchored to rectangular pieces of plywood. Another elegant work consists of a multi-stranded rectangle of thread stretched between four nails, over which a ribbon-like section of sand-coated wood-veneer has been draped like a towel. Constructed simply from wood, nails, and thread, these objects are playful like the work of Richard Tuttle and profound like the work of Fred Sandback.
The rest of the work in the show is less satisfying. The plywood and metal floor sculptures that sit leadenly on Ratio 3's deteriorated wooden floor echo the space's plank and plywood rawness, but lack oomph. The torqued door-skin sculptures that are displayed behind them exude more dynamism, but feel like maquettes rather than finished pieces. The smaller adjoining back room offers a strong series of small painted works on paper and a couple of interesting wall sculptures, but feels like a different exhibit by the same artist. Having thoroughly enjoyed Pederson's strong outing at UCLA's Hammer Museum earlier this year, I had high hopes for this solo show and so was a bit underwhelmed. Still, the poetry of its best moments makes this show well worth a visit.
Mitzi Pederson: "I'll Start Again" is on view at Ratio 3, San Francisco through October 24, 2009]]>
Narangkar Glover: It's Gonna Be Awesometag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4472009-10-04T20:00:00Z2009-10-05T02:48:23Z The Other Side of This Life, 2008; oil on canvas; 50 x 72 in. With assured brushwork and equally deft needlework, Narangkar Glover has made a group of canvases that feature a homemade concrete skateboarding bowl located in her own Oakland backyard. This extraordinary structure, fondly referred to by those who know it as 'the pond,' is painted in real life a color that can only be described as swimming pool blue (an homage, perhaps, to the oft-practiced appropriation of empty pools as places to skate). Glover depicts tranquil scenes bathed in bright California sunshine. Three of the six large works in the main gallery include a single male figure seen against the blue of the bowl, its bright yellow rim, empty, pale skies, and swaths of rapidly brushed shrubbery. The remaining three are pure landscapes: plein air in the 'hood, lemon trees and jasmine accented by occasional spirals...Maria PorgesThe Other Side of This Life, 2008; oil on canvas; 50 x 72 in.
With assured brushwork and equally deft needlework, Narangkar Glover has made a group of canvases that feature a homemade concrete skateboarding bowl located in her own Oakland backyard. This extraordinary structure, fondly referred to by those who know it as 'the pond,' is painted in real life a color that can only be described as swimming pool blue (an homage, perhaps, to the oft-practiced appropriation of empty pools as places to skate).
Glover depicts tranquil scenes bathed in bright California sunshine. Three of the six large works in the main gallery include a single male figure seen against the blue of the bowl, its bright yellow rim, empty, pale skies, and swaths of rapidly brushed shrubbery. The remaining three are pure landscapes: plein air in the 'hood, lemon trees and jasmine accented by occasional spirals of razor wire visible above a board and chain-link fence.
In one of these nature/culture studies, Glover has primarily embroidered the image in wool instead of painting it. Below a single, stylized tree and flowering oxalis, a bold, slightly drippy stroke of yellow paint has been laid over a needlework version of the skating structure's rim. The conjunction of a craft traditionally associated with women with big, typically male, painterly gestures frames this body of Glover's work as a whole, suggesting a feminist reading of those quiet figures posed against the blue and green of garden and water.
Narangkar Glover: "It's Gonna Be Awesome," is on view at Blankspace Gallery in Oakland through October 11, 2009.]]>
Aaron Parazette: Air Drop and Anders Ruhwald: Almost Nothingtag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4582009-10-04T19:50:00Z2009-10-05T03:19:23Z Aaron Parazette. Color Key 6, 2009; acrylic on linen. This two-person show featuring brightly hued, hard-edged geometric paintings and rough-hewn monochromatic sculptures, is tied together by the artists' use of a post-minimalist vocabulary and a focus on craft. Aaron Parazette's abstract geometric paintings on shaped canvases recall those of Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Mangold, albeit with a highly keyed-up palette and on a more intimate scale. Like these artists, Parazette's works are self-contained worlds. Planes of colors, arranged in grids or concentric circles, are cropped by the edges of the unusually shaped supports. They are often continued on contiguous canvases, as if these diptychs or triptychs were removed from some larger whole. In Color Key 6 (2009), arcs of pink, orange, and white cover two oval-shaped canvases, which meet directly at the center of a hot pink circle, spilling across both canvases. Two thin green lines--one dark and one...Matt Stromberg
Aaron Parazette. Color Key 6, 2009; acrylic on linen.
This two-person show featuring brightly hued, hard-edged geometric paintings and rough-hewn monochromatic sculptures, is tied together by the artists' use of a post-minimalist vocabulary and a focus on craft. Aaron Parazette's abstract geometric paintings on shaped canvases recall those of Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Mangold, albeit with a highly keyed-up palette and on a more intimate scale. Like these artists, Parazette's works are self-contained worlds. Planes of colors, arranged in grids or concentric circles, are cropped by the edges of the unusually shaped supports. They are often continued on contiguous canvases, as if these diptychs or triptychs were removed from some larger whole. In Color Key 6 (2009), arcs of pink, orange, and white cover two oval-shaped canvases, which meet directly at the center of a hot pink circle, spilling across both canvases. Two thin green lines--one dark and one light--limn each color band, accentuating the optical effect. These paintings work best when they reflect a thoughtful balance between color, shape and support, while incorporating a subtle nod to historical precedents.
Contrary to the energetic paintings in Parazette's "Air Drop" show, the exhibition of Anders Ruhwald's monochromatic ceramic sculptures is appropriately called "Almost Nothing." Ruhwald has pared down his works to the basics of texture and form, stressing the primacy of the material. Like Robert Ryman's paintings, his use of white serves to focus our attention on his heavily worked surfaces. Also like Ryman, his marks are devoid of gesture. Unlike his minimalist predecessors however, his abstract forms are almost familiar to us (a tree stump, a vase), but are altered in ways that makes them unsettling, and somewhat comedic. They hover somewhere between minimalist ciphers and common objects. "What would this material do, if left to its own devices?" they seem to be asking. While some fashion themselves into crude variations of common forms, others simply struggle to be of some use: Marked, a three-legged object that mimics and marks a corner, Allting, which juts out of the wall near the ceiling and resembles a pipe, or Mono (3 in itself) (all works 2009), a rectangular slab placed on the wall like a blank canvas. While these works can be seen as almost nothing, what makes them most interesting is when they aspire to be almost something.
Aaron Parazette: "Air Drop" and Anders Ruhwald: "Almost Nothing" are on view Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco through October 24, 2009.]]>
Kim Anno: Liquescenttag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4522009-10-04T19:40:00Z2009-10-06T16:49:06Z Rose Snow, 2009; oil on aluminum. The works in this tranquil exhibition reward prolonged interaction. Their quiet presence, reminiscent of Morris Louis' veil paintings, offers viewers a hushed space within which to reflect. Like much of Kim Anno's previous work, they are painted in oil on sheets of aluminum. The dull glimmer of the metallic surface emerges through thin washes of color, producing a soft opalescence. Anno's trademark "combing" is restrained and flutters in little eddies rather than the bold sweeps that she has employed in the past. The gestures allude to landscapes but never entirely resolve into recognizable features. There is something eerie about these pieces that unsettles even as it attracts. They are decidedly arctic. The forms echo ice floes and bergs, while the colors evoke turquoise water and permanent twilight. Clouds of fine scratches mar the delicate metallic surfaces and cause the ambient light in the...Zachary Royer Scholzhttp://zacharyscholz.comRose Snow, 2009; oil on aluminum.
The works in this tranquil exhibition reward prolonged interaction. Their quiet presence, reminiscent of Morris Louis' veil paintings, offers viewers a hushed space within which to reflect. Like much of Kim Anno's previous work, they are painted in oil on sheets of aluminum. The dull glimmer of the metallic surface emerges through thin washes of color, producing a soft opalescence. Anno's trademark "combing" is restrained and flutters in little eddies rather than the bold sweeps that she has employed in the past. The gestures allude to landscapes but never entirely resolve into recognizable features. There is something eerie about these pieces that unsettles even as it attracts. They are decidedly arctic. The forms echo ice floes and bergs, while the colors evoke turquoise water and permanent twilight. Clouds of fine scratches mar the delicate metallic surfaces and cause the ambient light in the gallery to flicker across them like the dancing aurora borealis. The vacant expanses evoke numbing emptiness but also deflect casual entry. This impenetrability adds to their mystery, but renders the paintings more difficult than they need to be. They are beautiful but remain largely alien, much like the bleak landscape they reference.
Kim Anno: "Liquescent" is on view at Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.]]>
In case you missed it - Alison McLennantag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4482009-10-04T19:30:00Z2009-10-05T00:19:12Z Purgatory, 2005; wood, glass, Fiberglas, paint, gold and silver leaf; 19 ½ x 47 x 24 in. Alison McLennan makes sculpture in the form of furniture. Like Scott Burton's chairs, McLennan's tables, cabinets, and lamps can serve a utilitarian purpose. In this exhibition of pieces completed over the past several years, many works suggest a humorous, Pop-infused reading. Purgatory (2005) is a glass-topped table, the base of which consists of a weighty-looking pyramid on its side, seemingly sticking its pointy-head so firmly into an organic comma-shape that the skin of the latter has been pierced, creasing as it is pushed inwards. This effect is achieved through carving and the skillful application of Fiberglas on wood. Like many of the furniture-based objects created by LA artist Robert Therrien, our ability to get McLennan's visual joke--both psychically and somatically--depends on how well it is done, but only as a point of...Maria PorgesPurgatory, 2005; wood, glass, Fiberglas, paint, gold and silver leaf; 19 ½ x 47 x 24 in.
Alison McLennan makes sculpture in the form of furniture. Like Scott Burton's chairs, McLennan's tables, cabinets, and lamps can serve a utilitarian purpose. In this exhibition of pieces completed over the past several years, many works suggest a humorous, Pop-infused reading. Purgatory (2005) is a glass-topped table, the base of which consists of a weighty-looking pyramid on its side, seemingly sticking its pointy-head so firmly into an organic comma-shape that the skin of the latter has been pierced, creasing as it is pushed inwards. This effect is achieved through carving and the skillful application of Fiberglas on wood. Like many of the furniture-based objects created by LA artist Robert Therrien, our ability to get McLennan's visual joke--both psychically and somatically--depends on how well it is done, but only as a point of departure. Rather than being about skill, the piece is driven by its initiating concept.
Sometimes, the functional aspect of her work is all but hidden. Wall-hung jewelry cabinets initially present themselves as (merely) aesthetic objects, each consisting of a framed, high relief representation of a vastly enlarged beetle carapace or a stylized cocoon. (She studied entomology in college and still retains a fascination with the complexity and beauty of insects.) But these insect-inspired forms can be opened with a tiny key, revealing an exquisitely fitted interior, replete with delicate drawers and sets of hooks.
Tower-like table lamps incorporate translucent versions of McLennan's photographs of Jingletown, her Oakland neighborhood. The focus in these images is on pattern and unexpected conjunctions of shapes and textures, suggesting that the connecting thread between all the works in this show is McLennan's gift for attentive and detailed observation.
Alison McLennan's work was on view at Artworks Downtown in San Rafael through September 28, 2009. ]]>
Nicholas Knight: Taking Pictures and Jo Babcock: Past Life Picturesquetag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4572009-10-04T19:20:00Z2009-10-05T02:12:38Z Nicholas Knight. Taking Pictures (Wheat Field with Cypresses), 2008; archival pigment print mounted on aluminum. Both artists currently on view at Steven Wolf Fine Arts address the way the medium of photography mediates our experience of that which is photographed. For "Taking Pictures" Nicholas Knight has photographed artworks in galleries and museums all over the world, as seen through the viewfinders of the digital cameras and cell phones of visitors, often with the out-of-focus original in the background. Knight's real subject is not the works of art, but the way technology has come to dominate our perception of art, and indeed the world around us. Interaction with the screen has replaced direct interaction with works of art. Instead of the varied and grand array of museum-goers pictured in Thomas Struth's Museum Photos series, Knight's images reflect a contemporary standardization and leveling of sublime experience. A video depicting Knight mechanically...Matt Stromberg
Nicholas Knight. Taking Pictures (Wheat Field with Cypresses), 2008; archival pigment print mounted on aluminum.
Both artists currently on view at Steven Wolf Fine Arts address the way the medium of photography mediates our experience of that which is photographed. For "Taking Pictures" Nicholas Knight has photographed artworks in galleries and museums all over the world, as seen through the viewfinders of the digital cameras and cell phones of visitors, often with the out-of-focus original in the background. Knight's real subject is not the works of art, but the way technology has come to dominate our perception of art, and indeed the world around us. Interaction with the screen has replaced direct interaction with works of art. Instead of the varied and grand array of museum-goers pictured in Thomas Struth's Museum Photos series, Knight's images reflect a contemporary standardization and leveling of sublime experience. A video depicting Knight mechanically projecting a slide show of the series heightens this sensation. Thoughtfully, Knight has captured the hands and backs of the heads of many of the photographers, creating an intimate double portrait, and reflecting the access that technology grants, even if that access comes at the expense of unmediated experience.
For over 20 years, Jo Babcock has been making pinhole cameras from found materials: offering new life to coffee cans, snuff boxes, toys, and more. Babcock makes reference to their original functions, however, through the subjects they photograph, giving them a sense of agency. For example, a band-aid box camera produced a self-portrait of the injured artist. He thereby provides a conceptual link between the camera as object and the photograph it captures. In "Past Life Picturesque," a great selection of pinhole cameras is on display in a large vitrine as well as stacked atop the walls, as if trying to escape. Unfortunately none of the photographs taken with the individual cameras are included, telling only half their story. As a parallel to these quirky and whimsical objects, Babcock has mounted three peepholes on the wall, which thwart the viewers' voyeurism with an angry red light, a ticking clock and other symbols of our apocalyptic anxiety.
"Nicholas Knight: Taking Pictures" and "Jo Babcock: Past Life Picturesque" are on view at Steven Wolf Fine Arts in San Francisco through October 10, 2009.]]>
Alika Cooper: A Cold Wavetag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4532009-10-04T19:10:00Z2009-10-05T02:14:44Z Twiggy, 2009; gouache on paper. Most of the pieces in this packed show are unframed works on paper that depict morosely staring film starlets from the 1950's through the 1970's. The works stretch across several walls including two large floating panels covered by expansive clusters of smaller works. The show's scope and celebrity focus brings to mind Elizabeth Peyton's recent outing at New York's New Museum. However, Alika Cooper, through her near monochromatic palette and confident, brushy handling of gouache, produces a richness of texture and emotion that Peyton's more colorful renderings in oil rarely posses. While Cooper works from film stills and press photographs, she manages to steep her images in a depth of melancholy only hinted at by their celluloid twins. The works embody the visibility of posing and the invisibility of neglect. They are beautiful and at times poignant, yet I can't help but wonder: are...Zachary Royer Scholzhttp://zacharyscholz.comTwiggy, 2009; gouache on paper.
Most of the pieces in this packed show are unframed works on paper that depict morosely staring film starlets from the 1950's through the 1970's. The works stretch across several walls including two large floating panels covered by expansive clusters of smaller works. The show's scope and celebrity focus brings to mind Elizabeth Peyton's recent outing at New York's New Museum. However, Alika Cooper, through her near monochromatic palette and confident, brushy handling of gouache, produces a richness of texture and emotion that Peyton's more colorful renderings in oil rarely posses. While Cooper works from film stills and press photographs, she manages to steep her images in a depth of melancholy only hinted at by their celluloid twins. The works embody the visibility of posing and the invisibility of neglect. They are beautiful and at times poignant, yet I can't help but wonder: are these moody portraits of Hollywood's past criticizing the strident sexism that chained these beautiful women to rigid expectations, or do they yearn for the glamour of these bygone days?
The non-starlet works in the show don't clarify Cooper's position, though they do broaden the melancholy--a pathetically scraggly Christmas tree, an abandoned stuffed panda, and a forlorn phonograph. These images evoke a sense of loss that feels much more intimate and far more banal. I am intrigued by these images, but not satisfied with where these seemingly personal points of sadness intersect with Cooper's brooding depictions of the famous.
"Alika Cooper: A Cold Wave" is on view at Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.]]>
Mary Anne Kluth and Laurel Roth: Theory of the Unforeseentag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4672009-10-04T19:00:00Z2009-10-09T00:46:37Z Foreground: Laurel Roth. Food #5, Pig, 2009; walnut, gold leaf, Swarovski crystal. Background: Mary Anne Kluth. The Lorentz Fitzgerald Calculations, 2009, watercolor and acrylic with watercolor collage on paper. Image: Randall Miller. Mary Anne Kluth and Laurel Roth explore the possibilities and limitations of their materials in "Theory of the Unforeseen," a two-person show at Frey Norris Gallery. The two bodies of work co-exist harmoniously, although conceptual dialogue seemed limited to a shared but vague interest in scientific knowledge production. Equating painterly material investigation with scientific exploration of macro and micro bodies, Kluth's paintings on paper feature warm splashes of red and yellow over cool dark backgrounds with tiny scientist figures nestled into the corners. The possibility of evoking heavenly bodies places air quotes around the expressionistic paint application while the placement of the figures reliably avoids violating the internal logic of the splashy paint. Calculated to highlight the...Randall Miller
Foreground: Laurel Roth. Food #5, Pig, 2009; walnut, gold leaf, Swarovski crystal.
Background: Mary Anne Kluth. The Lorentz Fitzgerald Calculations, 2009, watercolor and acrylic with watercolor collage on paper. Image: Randall Miller.
Mary Anne Kluth and Laurel Roth explore the possibilities and limitations of their materials in "Theory of the Unforeseen," a two-person show at Frey Norris Gallery. The two bodies of work co-exist harmoniously, although conceptual dialogue seemed limited to a shared but vague interest in scientific knowledge production.
Equating painterly material investigation with scientific exploration of macro and micro bodies, Kluth's paintings on paper feature warm splashes of red and yellow over cool dark backgrounds with tiny scientist figures nestled into the corners. The possibility of evoking heavenly bodies places air quotes around the expressionistic paint application while the placement of the figures reliably avoids violating the internal logic of the splashy paint. Calculated to highlight the disjuncture between methodical analysis and the phenomena of experience, the figures become extraneous, as that disjuncture already begins to occur in the contrast between the splashes of saturated hues and the linear bands of dark color. With a little more faith in her medium, the painter could expand this dialogue.
Roth's meatless animal skulls are exquisitely carved out of walnut, flashing "high bling grillz" made from gold leaf and Swarovski crystal. Presenting jaw fragments as dueling pistols in plush velvet cases pushes the sculptures further into free associative territory. These strategic pairings are evocative of early Surrealist non-sequiturs, minus some undifferentiated element that truly jars the senses. Despite their titles and the gallery literature, I did not get the sense that these pieces had as much to do with food production as the pleasure of experiencing the mimetic construction of the objects. Craft is at once their grace and their leash.
"Mary Anne Kluth and Laurel Roth: Theory of the Unforeseen" is on view at Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco through October 4, 2009.]]>
In case you missed it - James Sansing: Systemic Obsolescencetag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4612009-10-04T18:50:00Z2009-10-05T04:00:07Z Seed , 2009; mixed-media. James Sansing spent four months in residence at SF Recycling & Disposal, creating three different series of wall pieces using only what he could find on site. Intricate and evocative, the first set--each about two feet square--are small-scale assemblages that suggest traumatized urban landscapes: foreclosed properties in varying states of neglect, or the stripped and decaying structures found in the wake of a hurricane. Sansing said the driving force behind his selections for this series were objects in a range of subdued green, gray, and red hues, which he combined with the frames from dismantled adding machines or typewriters, and affixed to the wall. Sansing also discovered broken tempered glass, a bag of graphite powder, and cast-off bags of cement. From these, he constructed two of his gorgeous signature abstract wall pieces by pouring the cement onto the broken glass, removing the latter, and then...Stephanie Baker Seed , 2009; mixed-media.
James Sansing spent four months in residence at SF Recycling & Disposal, creating three different series of wall pieces using only what he could find on site.
Intricate and evocative, the first set--each about two feet square--are small-scale assemblages that suggest traumatized urban landscapes: foreclosed properties in varying states of neglect, or the stripped and decaying structures found in the wake of a hurricane. Sansing said the driving force behind his selections for this series were objects in a range of subdued green, gray, and red hues, which he combined with the frames from dismantled adding machines or typewriters, and affixed to the wall.
Sansing also discovered broken tempered glass, a bag of graphite powder, and cast-off bags of cement. From these, he constructed two of his gorgeous signature abstract wall pieces by pouring the cement onto the broken glass, removing the latter, and then coloring the mold with the graphite powder. These hang between the aforementioned landscapes and forty photographs set in the metallic grids of discarded electrical boxes. He removed the human figure from each photo to create silhouettes in a variety of positions or poses, including some rather humorous ones. Placed behind the now-empty figures are reflective surfaces from the backs of LCD fixtures, which shine and blink like a collection of eyes from forty different faces. All are entitled Missing Persons, each with a subtitle describing the individual's action or posture.
The piece I enjoyed the most from this last series was Missing Persons: Man With Car, which was taken in front of a group of houses I recognize from the Outer Sunset, giving new context to a familiar setting. Strange how the missing--but shining-- man proudly leans against his car, an ancient model T or old Ford. Someday, I wonder, where will the photograph of a proud owner of a 2009 Hybrid or SUV end up?
James Sansing: "Systemic Obsolescence" was on view at the San Francisco Recycling & Disposal gallery September 26-27, 2009. For more information about his work and the Artist in Residence Program, please see http://www.sfrecycling.com/AIR/index.php?t=d]]>
Elise Irving: Lightboxestag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4552009-10-04T18:40:00Z2009-10-05T02:18:42Z As Below, 2007; pigment prints on transparencies, Plexiglas, florescent lights. Elise Irving's exhibition opens with a cloud-like cluster of unframed Polaroids whose images bear the marks of abuse that such casually taken photos often endure. The occasional rips and stains reinforce the vaguely forlorn feeling the images collectively possess: a broken mirror rests on a neglected wicker chair, a TV antenna faces down a palm tree, and snow quietly encroaches a tangle of leafless twigs. While their distressed materiality and format are a bit cliché, the Polaroids' honesty lends their brooding an unexpected and satisfying weight. Just past the Polaroids, the lightboxes that give the show its name hang in a slightly darkened rear space. Constructed by sandwiching transparent emulsions between multiple layers of clear acrylic, the softly glowing boxes depict a wide range of subjects. The layered creation of depth recalls scenery flats and produces a glowing diorama-like...Zachary Royer Scholzhttp://zacharyscholz.comAs Below, 2007; pigment prints on transparencies, Plexiglas, florescent lights.
Elise Irving's exhibition opens with a cloud-like cluster of unframed Polaroids whose images bear the marks of abuse that such casually taken photos often endure. The occasional rips and stains reinforce the vaguely forlorn feeling the images collectively possess: a broken mirror rests on a neglected wicker chair, a TV antenna faces down a palm tree, and snow quietly encroaches a tangle of leafless twigs. While their distressed materiality and format are a bit cliché, the Polaroids' honesty lends their brooding an unexpected and satisfying weight.
Just past the Polaroids, the lightboxes that give the show its name hang in a slightly darkened rear space. Constructed by sandwiching transparent emulsions between multiple layers of clear acrylic, the softly glowing boxes depict a wide range of subjects. The layered creation of depth recalls scenery flats and produces a glowing diorama-like space that floats between dimensions. Some depict recognizable landscapes. Others are so blurry and abstracted that they almost cease to read as photographs. The strongest depict domestic interiors in which the lightboxes' rectilinear logic resonates with the depicted architectural structures. The ghostly edges of walls, doorframes, and mantles stitch together across multiple depths to produce a tangled yet integrated environment. In its best passages, Irving's work begins to illuminate the shifting complexity of our relationships to the domestic spaces we occupy, from those of our childhood to the ones we inhabit today.
Elise Irving: "Lightboxes" is on view at Marke Wolfe Contemporary Art in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.]]>
Barnaby Furnas: the lesser lighttag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4662009-10-04T18:30:00Z2009-10-05T00:00:04Z Mummers Day I, 2009; colored pencil, watercolor, and dye on Twin Rocker Calligraphy Cream Paper. In Barnaby Furnas' lively suite of paintings at Anthony Meier Fine Arts, spectacle, pageantry, costuming and performance serve as the springboard for the artist's investigation into abstract patterning. Collectively titled "the lesser light" - taken from a Biblical reference to the moon--his work once again draws from familiar harbingers of the modern spectacular: pyrotechnic rock concerts, big budget action movies, carnivalesque street celebrations, and the theatrics of professional wrestling. The result is a mélange of color and contrast that at once celebrates and questions the blinding wattage of the hyperbolic visual idolatry in which we can all indulge. The standout of the show is a fabulous series of watercolors featuring Mummers Day performers. The figures occupy prismatic mandala-like spaces where eyes, lucha libre masks, and vibrating facets of color radiate outward and around the...Randall MillerMummers Day I, 2009; colored pencil, watercolor, and dye on Twin Rocker Calligraphy Cream Paper.
In Barnaby Furnas' lively suite of paintings at Anthony Meier Fine Arts, spectacle, pageantry, costuming and performance serve as the springboard for the artist's investigation into abstract patterning. Collectively titled "the lesser light" - taken from a Biblical reference to the moon--his work once again draws from familiar harbingers of the modern spectacular: pyrotechnic rock concerts, big budget action movies, carnivalesque street celebrations, and the theatrics of professional wrestling. The result is a mélange of color and contrast that at once celebrates and questions the blinding wattage of the hyperbolic visual idolatry in which we can all indulge.
The standout of the show is a fabulous series of watercolors featuring Mummers Day performers. The figures occupy prismatic mandala-like spaces where eyes, lucha libre masks, and vibrating facets of color radiate outward and around the page like the feathers of a peacock. Similarly, a pair of rock concert paintings conveys the exuberance of live entertainment.
Furnas paints Mummers, drummers, and rock stars; identity types existing within a performative context where the experience of the show is greater than the actual people involved. This point is driven home in two paintings of KISS drummer Peter Criss that serves as the thematic counterpoint to the visual dazzle of the rest of the exhibition. The aloof figure once took off his trademark cat make-up only to become an anonymous middle-aged rocker. Criss looks bored in the paintings; resigned to a world where pageantry and costume supersede the man. The shine off the disco ball can only offer so much illumination: the lesser light of the show's title.
Barnaby Furnas: "the lesser light" is on view at Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco through October 9, 2009.]]>
2nd Look - Barnaby Furnas: the lesser lighttag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4592009-10-04T18:20:00Z2009-10-05T21:26:28Z Motörhead, 2009; colored pencil, golden acrylic with water-dispersed pigments on linen; 60 x 84 in. Through the paintings in "the lesser light," Barnaby Furnas examines the psychological effects of ecstatic public ritual from three perspectives: the performer, the spectacle, and the immersive group experience. In two intimate acrylic and colored pencil portraits, Furnas depicts KISS' drummer Peter Criss with half-closed eyes having a satisfied, post-show smoke, still in full make-up and costume, sticks in hand. It is painted with fastidious attention to chrome studs on leather and the backdrop of hot stage lights, but a more cursory treatment to hair and face under the mask of makeup. The resulting picture is more a portrait of a persona--of costume and posture-than a biographical instance. Furnas emphasizes ritual costume in five watercolor and dye drawings of Philadelphia's Mummers, traditional parade performers that celebrate the New Year. In buzzing complementary color schemes,...Mary Anne KluthMotörhead, 2009; colored pencil, golden acrylic with water-dispersed pigments on linen; 60 x 84 in.
Through the paintings in "the lesser light," Barnaby Furnas examines the psychological effects of ecstatic public ritual from three perspectives: the performer, the spectacle, and the immersive group experience.
In two intimate acrylic and colored pencil portraits, Furnas depicts KISS' drummer Peter Criss with half-closed eyes having a satisfied, post-show smoke, still in full make-up and costume, sticks in hand. It is painted with fastidious attention to chrome studs on leather and the backdrop of hot stage lights, but a more cursory treatment to hair and face under the mask of makeup. The resulting picture is more a portrait of a persona--of costume and posture-than a biographical instance.
Furnas emphasizes ritual costume in five watercolor and dye drawings of Philadelphia's Mummers, traditional parade performers that celebrate the New Year. In buzzing complementary color schemes, the performers optically merge with each other and the field they are embedded in. Furnas creates scintillating pattern first, figure and ground relationships second.
In two larger acrylic, dispersed pigment, and colored pencil paintings of arena rock performances, Furnas applies marks unvaryingly to depict the hands of the audience and the musicians, the lighter flames, the disco gradient, and the lighting grids, producing a strobe-like effect and referencing the repetitive nature of ritual. The hot pinks and oranges he utilizes heighten the color and the otherworldly effect of stadium lights. Framing the images are ejaculate-like spumes of water-dispersed pigment that characterize the scene as one of regenerative catharsis, not localized in any particular performer or audience member, but in the group as a whole.
Barnaby Furnas: "the lesser light" is on view at Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco through October 9, 2009.
Art Practical Issue 1 will include a full-length version of this review.]]>
Bruce Conner: Discovered tag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4622009-10-04T18:10:00Z2009-10-05T01:48:00Z Metronome Cocoon,1961-1995; mixed media assemblage; 14 x 5-1/2 x 7 in. There is something mechanical about Bruce Conner's inkblot drawings. I believe it to be their fearful symmetry which, bolt upright or around the page, feels unnatural. What should be the most organic and fluid of all marks - the free flowing curve of ink on paper - becomes replicated across a fold, creating a precise crystalline spine. They do not sway breezily across their paper like the unruly vines of a garden plot, but throb with the stillness of hothouse orchids behind glass. The creases forming the central column of each of these totems are barely visible but ever palpable, diverting the viewer from relating to the drawing as an image, but instead as the document of a process, the memory of an action, the irrefutable record that this now flat plane was once a dimensional object; in...Jarrett EarnestMetronome Cocoon,1961-1995; mixed media assemblage; 14 x 5-1/2 x 7 in.
There is something mechanical about Bruce Conner's inkblot drawings. I believe it to be their fearful symmetry which, bolt upright or around the page, feels unnatural. What should be the most organic and fluid of all marks - the free flowing curve of ink on paper - becomes replicated across a fold, creating a precise crystalline spine. They do not sway breezily across their paper like the unruly vines of a garden plot, but throb with the stillness of hothouse orchids behind glass. The creases forming the central column of each of these totems are barely visible but ever palpable, diverting the viewer from relating to the drawing as an image, but instead as the document of a process, the memory of an action, the irrefutable record that this now flat plane was once a dimensional object; in short, as remains of something transformed, in the manner a wrinkled face testifies to a life lived.
They are also, of course, sly plays on the Rorschach test, for which the movie psychoanalyst turns to face the audience and asks "tell me what you see," hoping to reveal in the cloudy response to these non-objective smudges projected fears, fantasies, and neurosis. This is actually what Conner's iconic nylon clad assemblages have always done, but perhaps they pose the question differently than the drawings. "Tell me what you don't see" allows us to inject personal form and meaning into the half-images assuredly residing between and beneath the objects' fabric skin: at once silk, spider web, panty hose and the hoary copper coloring of another time, which might actually be the color of memory. And like the ordered remembrances of those inkblot conservatories, the assemblages reminds us that our histories and experiences, like our lives and relationships, need to be tended and honored, that there is nothing more tender, fleeting, meaningful, or momentous.
Bruce Conner: "Discovered" is on view at Gallery Paula Anglim in San Francisco through October 10, 2009.]]>
An Autobiography of The San Francisco Bay Area (Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself)tag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4402009-10-04T18:00:00Z2009-10-05T21:20:24Z Catherine Opie. Jerome Caja, 1993; Chromogenic print; 19 x 14 3/4 in. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles. SF Camerawork's 35th anniversary show "San Francisco Plays Itself" is like stepping onto a Diane Arbus/Nan Goldin-esque set. Most of the works are framed photographs with accompanying statements, but the conversations contained within and between--the characters, the eccentrics, the occasions, the friends, the moments, and the sense of time--animate the gallery spaces. This is the story of San Francisco from 1974 to the present. Ken Miller photographs Bill Vollmann in drag. Gail and Dale play gently on a beach of Katy Grannan's making. Dennis, SF Camerawork's favorite UPS guy, proudly displays his UPS tattoos in Jona Frank's uniform series. Larry Sultan's grandiose portrait of Denise Hale for W magazine looks slyly over at Catherine Opie's pose of Jerome Caja as a Spanish matriarch on the other wall. The Jangs play out...Anne Colvin
Catherine Opie. Jerome Caja, 1993; Chromogenic print; 19 x 14 3/4 in. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
SF Camerawork's 35th anniversary show "San Francisco Plays Itself" is like stepping onto a Diane Arbus/Nan Goldin-esque set.
Most of the works are framed photographs with accompanying statements, but the conversations contained within and between--the characters, the eccentrics, the occasions, the friends, the moments, and the sense of time--animate the gallery spaces. This is the story of San Francisco from 1974 to the present.
Ken Miller photographs Bill Vollmann in drag. Gail and Dale play gently on a beach of Katy Grannan's making. Dennis, SF Camerawork's favorite UPS guy, proudly displays his UPS tattoos in Jona Frank's uniform series. Larry Sultan's grandiose portrait of Denise Hale for W magazine looks slyly over at Catherine Opie's pose of Jerome Caja as a Spanish matriarch on the other wall. The Jangs play out their '70's lives in dens and sitting rooms in Michael Jang's neat scenarios. A young Richard Misrach hangs out on a five-block stretch of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley from 1972 to '74, the staring faces looking very much like present-day hipsters.
Ari Marcopoulos's two huge, distressed photocopies on paper stand out as remnants, depicting a scar on an arm and bruises on torsos that look like bullet holes. They literally and metaphorically seem to be pointing the way, punctuation marks in an unfinished chapter.
Curated by Chuck Mobley, "An Autobiography of The San Francisco Bay Area. Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself" is on view at SF Camerawork until October 21, 2009. "Part 2: The Future Lasts Forever" opens in January 2010. ]]>
Moby Dicktag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4432009-10-04T17:50:00Z2009-10-05T02:33:14Z Peter Hutton. At Sea, 2007 (still); DVD (transferred from 16-millimeter film), color, silent; 60 min. Testosterone abounds in Jens Hoffmann's handsome "Moby Dick," as it does in Melville's saga of vengeance and the sea. From Kenneth Anger's randy Fireworks (1947) to Adrian Villar Rojas's (with Alan Legal) My Dead Grandfather (2009)--a giant, impaled white whale of unfired clay--and Orson Welles' booming voice intoning Ahab's words throughout the galleries, male energy and hubris are in evidence everywhere. It is a Moby Dick of Shakespearean proportions, as Hoffmann leavens the tragic with the antic, and gives us some really great curatorial surprises. Buster Keaton's 1921 film The Boat greets viewers and creates a welcome foil to Ahab's darkness. Rockwell Kent's original wood engravings for the 1930 Lakeside Press edition of Moby Dick are marvels of visual conciseness. In casting a wide net, Hoffman offers Kirsten Pieroth's Die Farbe der Meere (The...Lea Feinstein
Peter Hutton. At Sea, 2007 (still); DVD (transferred from 16-millimeter film), color, silent; 60 min.
Testosterone abounds in Jens Hoffmann's handsome "Moby Dick," as it does in Melville's saga of vengeance and the sea. From Kenneth Anger's randy Fireworks (1947) to Adrian Villar Rojas's (with Alan Legal) My Dead Grandfather (2009)--a giant, impaled white whale of unfired clay--and Orson Welles' booming voice intoning Ahab's words throughout the galleries, male energy and hubris are in evidence everywhere.
It is a Moby Dick of Shakespearean proportions, as Hoffmann leavens the tragic with the antic, and gives us some really great curatorial surprises. Buster Keaton's 1921 film The Boat greets viewers and creates a welcome foil to Ahab's darkness. Rockwell Kent's original wood engravings for the 1930 Lakeside Press edition of Moby Dick are marvels of visual conciseness.
In casting a wide net, Hoffman offers Kirsten Pieroth's Die Farbe der Meere (The Colors of the Seas) (2002), plastic bottles filled from the world's oceans. Mateo Lopez's modest Love Song (2009)--ten sheets of imaginary notation for songs of the Humpback Whale--features penciled staves that morph into waves. Whale song echoes through the gallery, and scattered bars of "the ship, the black freighter...." from the Three Penny Opera sound a cautionary tale.
Peter Hutton's extraordinary 60-minute silent film At Sea (2007) is worth a visit all its own. A merchant marine veteran, Hutton practices a scrupulous, almost Zen-like brand of filmmaking: he holds still and waits. The film progresses from ant-size workers constructing a container ship of vast proportions to a wreckage-strewn beach in Bangladesh, the backdrop for a "ship-breaking," where barefoot men hack at an immense rusted hull. At Sea is stately, balletic, and profoundly humane.
Sampling sea-inspired works from a range of disciplines, periods, and aesthetic perspectives, the exhibition expands the metaphorical implications of Moby Dick, paying tribute to Melville's multi-layered work and offering a richly nuanced experience for the viewer.
"Moby Dick" is on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco through December 12, 2009.]]>
2nd Look - Colter Jacobsen's Sp(out)er (In)nomine diaboli in Moby Dick tag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4632009-10-04T17:40:00Z2009-10-09T00:36:24Z Colter Jacobsen. Sp(out)er (In)nomine diaboli, 2009; oil on canvas. A boggy, soggy, squinchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant. - Moby Dick, Chapter 3 At the beginning of Chapter 3 of Moby Dick, Ishmael describes a unstretched painting hanging in the Spouter-Inn --an almost abstract torrent of grey, blue and black-- to be "so thoroughly besmoked", that one might take it to be "some ambitious young artist's...endeavor to delineate chaos bewitched." He learns from others that it may have originally depicted a whale being impaled on the three masts of a ship during a hurricane. All the remaining visual clues are a limp black cloud near the center of the image and...Jarrett Earnest
Colter Jacobsen. Sp(out)er (In)nomine diaboli, 2009; oil on canvas.
A boggy, soggy, squinchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant. - Moby Dick, Chapter 3
At the beginning of Chapter 3 of Moby Dick, Ishmael describes a unstretched painting hanging in the Spouter-Inn --an almost abstract torrent of grey, blue and black-- to be "so thoroughly besmoked", that one might take it to be "some ambitious young artist's...endeavor to delineate chaos bewitched." He learns from others that it may have originally depicted a whale being impaled on the three masts of a ship during a hurricane. All the remaining visual clues are a limp black cloud near the center of the image and three poles.
What is amazing is not the precision with which Colter Jacobsen has recreated a painting from Melville's lengthy description, but the way in which he consolidates the complexity of the novel. Foremost, the abstraction of the image speaks to the unruliness of the novel. Further, it attests on its very surface to the passage of time: not only the span within the novel - the period it hung in the Spouter-Inn before Ishmael encountered it, but also the ensuing years since Melville published Moby Dick, which saw the novel itself become clouded by the soot of pop culture and academia.
The painting described by Ishmael was aged and obscured by the generations of tobacco smoke rising up alongside the stories, laughter, brawls, and histories of the sailors in port. It is this intergenerational vaporized machismo which shrouds Sp(out)er (In)nomine diaboli. It is a relic of hyper-masculinity, visualizing a bond shared between men. The almost pornographic scene of the impaled whale becomes a sensitive encounter between the viewer and the artwork in Jacobsen's painting. He locates a diffused and intimate, if troubled, space within--and literally on top of--the novel's epic structure, evoking queer desire and depicting the homoeroticism that courses just beneath the book's surface.
Unlike much of the other work in this exhibition, Jacobsen's painting isn't clever or cute, but consolidates many of Moby Dick's nuanced concerns. It stands out as an example of what an artist dialoging with a great work of art can do in the present moment; one that doesn't supply cheeky answers in sailor's suits, but offers a challenge, and invites us on its quest for knowing.
"Moby Dick" is on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco through December 12, 2009. ]]>
Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm's Reachtag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4412009-10-04T17:30:00Z2009-10-05T21:17:15Z Cairo, Sonoma, 2006; Xerox print; 53 x 36 in. Courtesy of the artist, Ratio 3, San Francisco, and The Project, New York. Ari Marcopoulos marks his world through lens-based images. The beauty of his work lies in the remnants of experience delicately outlined in a snowy landscape or a bodily wound. His narratives--for the most part populated by male physicality--are full of music, art, skateboarding, snowboarding, New York City, Sonoma, and his family. Rachel Williams (1993) directs her skater-torn arms at the camera, a bandage carelessly hangs from an elbow. Bike Crash 11 (2002) displays a close-up of two grazed, dressing-stained knees, and the eponymous Man with Scars, Jamaica (1987) smokes a spliff. Tracks slash the crisp snow to ribbons in Daytona (2000). Two teens sleep in MiniDisc, Riksgrausen (1998), one wearing a neck brace, while a third listens to music, very matter of fact. A question mark resounds...Anne ColvinCairo, Sonoma, 2006; Xerox print; 53 x 36 in. Courtesy of the artist, Ratio 3, San Francisco, and The Project, New York.
Ari Marcopoulos marks his world through lens-based images. The beauty of his work lies in the remnants of experience delicately outlined in a snowy landscape or a bodily wound. His narratives--for the most part populated by male physicality--are full of music, art, skateboarding, snowboarding, New York City, Sonoma, and his family.
Rachel Williams (1993) directs her skater-torn arms at the camera, a bandage carelessly hangs from an elbow. Bike Crash 11 (2002) displays a close-up of two grazed, dressing-stained knees, and the eponymous Man with Scars, Jamaica (1987) smokes a spliff. Tracks slash the crisp snow to ribbons in Daytona (2000). Two teens sleep in MiniDisc, Riksgrausen (1998), one wearing a neck brace, while a third listens to music, very matter of fact.
A question mark resounds in the form of a haunting video loop: a boy wearing a wool hat stares into the camera unflinching, his right eye and cheek swollen. Off-camera laughter adds to the disquieting tone.
The impressive array of prints includes large-format Xeroxes, which are extensions of the artist's self-published zines. In Cairo (2007)--monumental in size, evocatively raw and grainy--there's a hint of something near the mouth. Big dirty close-ups of bruised hands and scratched fingers form playful patterns in Four Hands (2007). The density of these images hangs heavy.
Cairo is the name of one of Ari's sons. He stands in Cairo, Sonoma (2006), lanky and awkward, somewhere between a place and a person, just within arm's reach.
Dedicated to Franz Schnaas, 1966-2009.
Curated by Stephanie Cannizzo, Ari Marcopoulos: "Within Arm's Reach" is on view at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum until February 7, 2010.]]>
Freddy Chandra: Listening Sequencetag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4602009-10-04T17:20:00Z2009-10-04T23:39:34Z Composition (Violet-Blue) 01, 2009; graphite, urethane, resin, cast acrylic, and varnish; 13 1/4 x 72 x 1 1/2 in. "Listening Sequence," Freddy Chandra's solo debut at Brian Gross Fine Art, is a synethesthetic meditation built on Minimalist forms, and evoking multivalent layers of sound. Manipulating the clarity and tonality of deceptively simple blocks on the wall, Chandra composes delicate rhythms of shadow, color, and empty air. He punctuates his arrangements with vibrant hues of blue, purple, and green, as well as subtle and carefully arranged voids. His graphite, urethane, resin, acrylic, and varnish surfaces seem at once alive and machine-manufactured, responsive to the ambient lighting conditions in the room, yet with no perceptible fingerprints or tool marks. Composition (Violet-Blue) 01 (2009) is comprised of five blocks hung on the wall in two horizontal rows. A pattern of rectangles emerges from the arrangement of lighter and darker materials, as well...Mary Anne KluthComposition (Violet-Blue) 01, 2009; graphite, urethane, resin, cast acrylic, and varnish; 13 1/4 x 72 x 1 1/2 in.
"Listening Sequence," Freddy Chandra's solo debut at Brian Gross Fine Art, is a synethesthetic meditation built on Minimalist forms, and evoking multivalent layers of sound. Manipulating the clarity and tonality of deceptively simple blocks on the wall, Chandra composes delicate rhythms of shadow, color, and empty air. He punctuates his arrangements with vibrant hues of blue, purple, and green, as well as subtle and carefully arranged voids. His graphite, urethane, resin, acrylic, and varnish surfaces seem at once alive and machine-manufactured, responsive to the ambient lighting conditions in the room, yet with no perceptible fingerprints or tool marks.
Composition (Violet-Blue) 01 (2009) is comprised of five blocks hung on the wall in two horizontal rows. A pattern of rectangles emerges from the arrangement of lighter and darker materials, as well as the shadows cast by the blocks onto the wall or each other. Punctuating the arrangement is a small chunk of impenetrable, light blue-green material that seems to repel or absorb the surrounding shadows in comparison to its compatriots.
Laid out on the wall in elongated, horizontal grids, the bars of color reference the graphical representation of sound in a digital music editing software interface such as Pro Tools, in which, each stripe on the register representing represents a sample of human voice, or a track of piano. As such, one could as easily trace a path to the work of composer Phillip Glass as to the material sensibilities of sculptors Larry Bell or Robert Irwin.
Freddy Chandra: "Listening Sequence" is on view at Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco until October 31, 2009. ]]>
Deborah Oropallo: Wild Wild West.Showtag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4462009-10-04T17:10:00Z2009-10-05T02:41:51Z Rein, 2009; permanent pigment on aluminum. Deborah Oropallo's current exhibition at Steven Wirtz Gallery merges contemporary ideas about female subjectivity with rodeo fantasy. It includes a series of digitally manipulated images almost entirely comprised of provocatively dressed cowgirls superimposed upon rodeo arena backgrounds. The bedazzled female performers with lassos and fringe galore strike kitten-esque poses and flaunt their gadgetry. Titles such as Star, Dusty, and Cody evoke names bestowed upon beloved broncos. Notably absent from the figures, however, are their faces. In contrast to "Feign"-- her 2008 show at the gallery that consisted of female faces juxtaposed upon classic portraits of elaborately costumed 17th and 18th century men--"Wild Wild West.Show" seemingly suggests the opposite position for gazing upon its subjects. The women's sexuality lies not in their glances but in their attire and body language. The gap voided of the face serves as an aperture through which to see...Katie McCrackenRein, 2009; permanent pigment on aluminum.
Deborah Oropallo's current exhibition at Steven Wirtz Gallery merges contemporary ideas about female subjectivity with rodeo fantasy. It includes a series of digitally manipulated images almost entirely comprised of provocatively dressed cowgirls superimposed upon rodeo arena backgrounds. The bedazzled female performers with lassos and fringe galore strike kitten-esque poses and flaunt their gadgetry. Titles such as Star, Dusty, and Cody evoke names bestowed upon beloved broncos.
Notably absent from the figures, however, are their faces. In contrast to "Feign"-- her 2008 show at the gallery that consisted of female faces juxtaposed upon classic portraits of elaborately costumed 17th and 18th century men--"Wild Wild West.Show" seemingly suggests the opposite position for gazing upon its subjects. The women's sexuality lies not in their glances but in their attire and body language. The gap voided of the face serves as an aperture through which to see the arena and to feel the lifelessness of these subjects. They look as if they are either disappearing before one's eyes or conversely, slowly being built up to mask the out-of-focus backgrounds. The lassos and fringe disintegrate into pixilated squares upon closer inspection. The disappearing forms suggest vanishing notions of a traditional American West and an increasingly blurred line between fantasy and reality.
"Deborah Oropallo: Wild Wild West. Show" is on view at Steven Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco through October 31, 2009.]]>
In case you missed it - Ed Francotag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4642009-10-04T17:00:00Z2009-10-04T23:32:11Z Untitled, after Adagio for Strings (Barber); acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 in. Despite current notions about professional specialization in the arts--as in every field of endeavor--people are more complex than capitalistic worker bees. Aural and visual sensitivity often cohabit within the same temperaments, complementing each other instead of combating. Giorgione, Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee, and Ingres are only a few members of a very long roster of artist-musicians of various levels of proficiency (Although Ingres, who drew divinely, played the violin execrably). Some artists have explored the relationship deliberately. Synesthetics like Kandinsky, who claimed to "see" musical tones as colors, irresistibly created visual analogs of melodies or chords. For their part, artistically inclined musicians from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries designed color-displaying organs that would "illustrate" their scores. Their electronic-wizard successors today have completely smudged the lines between disciplines, creating multimedia pieces that would have been technologically unimaginable only...DeWitt ChengUntitled, after Adagio for Strings (Barber); acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 in.
Despite current notions about professional specialization in the arts--as in every field of endeavor--people are more complex than capitalistic worker bees. Aural and visual sensitivity often cohabit within the same temperaments, complementing each other instead of combating. Giorgione, Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee, and Ingres are only a few members of a very long roster of artist-musicians of various levels of proficiency (Although Ingres, who drew divinely, played the violin execrably). Some artists have explored the relationship deliberately. Synesthetics like Kandinsky, who claimed to "see" musical tones as colors, irresistibly created visual analogs of melodies or chords. For their part, artistically inclined musicians from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries designed color-displaying organs that would "illustrate" their scores. Their electronic-wizard successors today have completely smudged the lines between disciplines, creating multimedia pieces that would have been technologically unimaginable only a few generations ago.
Ed Franco's abstract acrylic paintings may not pulse, flash, and morph like light shows or car-stereo graphic equalizers, but their musical sources are clearly expressed in their titles, Untitled after Firebird (Stravinsky) being a typical example. He pays homage to Mozart, Dvorak, Grofe, Smetana, Barber, Cage, Reich, Carter, and even TThe Gypsy Kings.
Music lovers will have fun here. Those less familiar (as I am) may feel slightly guilt-ridden, and culturally unprepared to understand these works. As a consolation, however, we can enjoy the paintings as latter-day Abstract Expressionism in the Still, Motherwell, and Rothko mold: improvised painted or collaged forms set against flat but modulated fields to poetic effect. Franco's paintings are determinedly anti-contemporary. if we consider current esthetic fashion of conceptualist and scientific methodology married to emotional ambiguity. In this age of surrogates and simulacra, Franco's paintings aim at and achieve handmade artistic authenticity instead. For those of us who try to consider culture as a long-term enterprise, who believe that painting and music can endure and must prevail, it's a welcome interruption in the regularly scheduled programming -- and a reminder to listen as well as look.
Work by Ed Franco was on view at the University of California Berkeley Extension Downstairs Gallery in San Francisco from June 22 through July 10, 2009.
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Tomma Abts: Chance and Constructiontag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4652009-10-04T16:50:00Z2009-10-08T04:16:22Z Tomma Abts. Untitled (brushstroke), 2009; color water bite aquatint with aquatint, hard ground etching and drypoint; image size: 17⅝ x 12⅞ in. "Tomma Abts: Chance and Construction," drawn from three decades at Crown Point Press, showcases the work of artists who welcome accident into their artistic process. The physical facts of the printmaking technique--raised etched lines, grainy aquatint, and the slurry of spit-bite--are visible and deeply pleasing, while many of the prints surprisingly evoke pictorial spaciousness. The exhibition features five prints by Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts. She begins her compositions with a stray pencil mark or torn paper laid on the plate, then carefully constructs her compositions using tongue-in-cheek illusionary devices such as cast shadows, transparency, and overlapping forms. In Untitled (brushstroke) (2009) a zig-zag shoelace of a line seems to hover over the picture plane. Ruled lines and legal-pad stripes emphasize the flatness and margins of her...Lea Feinstein
Tomma Abts. Untitled (brushstroke), 2009; color water bite aquatint with aquatint, hard ground etching and drypoint; image size: 17⅝ x 12⅞ in.
"Tomma Abts: Chance and Construction," drawn from three decades at Crown Point Press, showcases the work of artists who welcome accident into their artistic process. The physical facts of the printmaking technique--raised etched lines, grainy aquatint, and the slurry of spit-bite--are visible and deeply pleasing, while many of the prints surprisingly evoke pictorial spaciousness.
The exhibition features five prints by Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts. She begins her compositions with a stray pencil mark or torn paper laid on the plate, then carefully constructs her compositions using tongue-in-cheek illusionary devices such as cast shadows, transparency, and overlapping forms. In Untitled (brushstroke) (2009) a zig-zag shoelace of a line seems to hover over the picture plane. Ruled lines and legal-pad stripes emphasize the flatness and margins of her page. The green aquatint fade and shadowing heighten the spatial effect.
Laura Owens' Untitled (LO273) (2004) offers a whimsical scene of whales and ships in a corrugated sea inspired by scrimshaw carving. A gentle foil to the macho "Moby Dick" down the road at CCA's Wattis Institute, the rich mix of patterns and the indigo coloring link it to Japanese textiles.
Richard Tuttle's eight aquatints, Up, to 7 (2000)--seem generated by a formula that dictates shape, color, and placement. Pinned at the top of an empty frame supported by a tiny ziggurat, the colored shapes resemble "les funambules": circus actors both funny and serious. Maverick composer John Cage, a Crown Point favorite and the grandfather of chance operations, is represented by a selection from his 1985 Ryoku series. In these, he utilized I-Ching throws--sticks with ideograms on them--to position and trace stones onto etching plates, depending on which faces turned up. Ink color and the distribution of embossed geometric shapes were also decided by chance. The resulting prints are quiet equivalents of Zen gardens.
Kathan Brown, the founder of Crown Point Press, routinely invites non-printmakers to work at the studio. Her commitment to experimentation by sculptors, poets, painters, and musicians brings new processes to the table, challenges the artists, and enriches the print lexicon.
"Tomma Abts: Chance and Construction" is on view at Crown Point Press in San Francisco through November 28, 2009.]]>
Todd Bura: Painting Spiritual Paintingtag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4452009-10-04T16:40:00Z2009-10-05T02:43:38Z Your Painting, 2009; oil on canvas. Experience is a form of paralysis. - Erik Satie At first glance, Todd Bura's paintings on view at Triple Base Gallery seemed utterly unsophisticated and primitive. I was reluctant to look closely. As I was about to exit the space, however, a stack of show posters in the corner caught my eye. "Painting Spiritual Painting" is a body of work whose merit is not entirely understood by the viewer unless accompanied by R.M. Wilke's statement printed on the show posters. It exhorts in part that "If the angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced him, not with tears, but with your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner!" Coupled with the fact that each piece is entitled Your Painting, I was encouraged to look again, endeavoring to see the work with fresh eyes. The works contain...Katie McCrackenYour Painting, 2009; oil on canvas.
Experience is a form of paralysis. - Erik Satie
At first glance, Todd Bura's paintings on view at Triple Base Gallery seemed utterly unsophisticated and primitive. I was reluctant to look closely. As I was about to exit the space, however, a stack of show posters in the corner caught my eye. "Painting Spiritual Painting" is a body of work whose merit is not entirely understood by the viewer unless accompanied by R.M. Wilke's statement printed on the show posters. It exhorts in part that "If the angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced him, not with tears, but with your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner!" Coupled with the fact that each piece is entitled Your Painting, I was encouraged to look again, endeavoring to see the work with fresh eyes.
The works contain basic shapes and primary colors using simple painting techniques. In focusing on the experience of painting a circle, line, or dot as a singular act that can never be repeated or re-experienced, Bura has instructed himself "to be a beginner." For example, in one work he employs a method with which most people are familiar: swirling colors onto a page and covering it with black, then using a sharp object to scrape away the top layer and reveal lines of cosmic wonder.
These paintings are mere remnants of the artist's attempt to "humb[ly] resolve to be always beginning." Anyone can paint a circle, but can they also treat the act of painting a circle as the innocent beginning of something new?
Todd Bura: "Painting Spiritual Painting" is on view at Triple Base Gallery in San Francisco through October 25, 2009.]]>
In case you missed it - Cherie Raciti: Small Abstract Reliefstag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4272009-10-04T16:30:00Z2009-10-06T16:07:44Z Gamma Buster #1, 2008; mixed media; 7.25 x 9 in. Cherie Raciti's "Small Abstract Reliefs" was on view recently at the Garage Gallery in Berkeley, a naturally lit, high ceilinged, shoebox-sized space in a residential neighborhood. Kjersten Walker runs the gallery as a satellite of the Berkeley Outlet, a used furniture store. Walker is committed to showing artists whose work is accessible to a broader collector base, with all priced at or under $300. Cherie's work bridges two- and three- dimensional space. It draws one in with simple ancient designs and intimate physical scale. Starting with Tantric and Jain diagrams, Raciti creates textured, brightly pigmented sculptures with paper. She builds up layers of acrylic modeling material and paints the porous surface with gouache, creating a fresco-like surface. She sands and repaints her pieces repeatedly, embedding color in the hardened acrylic. The accumulated strata catch and reflect light as it...Elizabeth JohnsonGamma Buster #1, 2008; mixed media; 7.25 x 9 in.
Cherie Raciti's "Small Abstract Reliefs" was on view recently at the Garage Gallery in Berkeley, a naturally lit, high ceilinged, shoebox-sized space in a residential neighborhood. Kjersten Walker runs the gallery as a satellite of the Berkeley Outlet, a used furniture store. Walker is committed to showing artists whose work is accessible to a broader collector base, with all priced at or under $300.
Cherie's work bridges two- and three- dimensional space. It draws one in with simple ancient designs and intimate physical scale. Starting with Tantric and Jain diagrams, Raciti creates textured, brightly pigmented sculptures with paper. She builds up layers of acrylic modeling material and paints the porous surface with gouache, creating a fresco-like surface. She sands and repaints her pieces repeatedly, embedding color in the hardened acrylic. The accumulated strata catch and reflect light as it bounces across the rough surface. Looking at these pieces is like looking at rich food.
In another group, symbols including the infinity sign, ankh, and an hourglass combine to invoke relationships between physics, religion, and geometry. The installation--large magnets affix the work to a metal surface--recalls the science experiment that uses a magnet and metal filings to reveal the lines of force. The esoteric symbols on the front of Cherie's reliefs similarly convey the magnetic forces that are hidden from view.
"Small Abstract Reliefs" was on view through September 13, 2009 at the Garage Gallery in Berkeley.]]>
Chekov II, 2009; acrylic on canvas; 16 x 19 in. Courtesy of Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.
Luke Butler's exhibition at Silverman Gallery is as exclamatory as its title. A composite of his Enterprise (2008-09) and Leaders of Men (2009) series, Butler's "Captain!" explores the tropes of TV and media representations of masculinity. Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" drew on the poetic device of the heroic couplet to memorialize President Lincoln and perhaps accustom the American imagination to a more erotic power relationship. Similarly, Butler's paintings and collages are profoundly accessible even while they awaken a provocative empathy. Still frames from Star Trek and Starsky & Hutch from the Enterprise series are culled for moments of anguish, terror, or vulnerability. Butler painted a particularly poignant scene of Spock cradling the head of Captain Kirk, isolating the couple on a muted gray background that calls to mind the galactic Wild West of the USS Enterprise or the middle gray of the television screen.
The sexual thrust of these paintings are accentuated in the Leaders of Men collages, where the contemplative heads of American Cold War presidents are cropped to bodies found in retro gay pornography--think of a scantily clad Richard Nixon, prepping for a shave. Butler succeeds in revealing the sensitive underpinnings of some of our most testosterone-fueled narratives. He may have titled the exhibition as homage to the yelps of the crew, the bisexuality of Walt Whitman, or a pointed political accusation, but Captain! embraces all of these interpretations with straightforward dexterity.
Luke Butler: "Captain!" is on view at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.]]>
Hammer Films, 2009; acrylic on canvas; 16 x 12 in.
When classic campy entertainment is rendered in paint, the remediation restores some of the earnestness to the original enterprise. Thus, Captain Kirk is once again an empathetic hero--casting off the pop cultural taint of William Shatner's long career--in the canvasses on display in Luke Butler's exhibition "Captain!" at Silverman Gallery. The compositions, lifted from still frames from Star Trek episodes, seek to invest the sci-fi drama with the iconic power of a pictorial tableau.
Lurking across the gallery are collages of vintage gay erotica spliced with the heads of mid-century American political leaders such as Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford. The leaders freshly toned and highly endowed bodies are charming, frolicking in natural landscapes and swimming with seals. The collages are illusionist, flirting with photographic compositions in the manner of John Heartfield's pamphlet covers. Where Heartfield focused his critique on the politics of Weimar Germany, Butler dives into the cultural dissonances stirring in the United States period of high modernism, before the counterculture overflowed into mainstream American life. These fetishized depictions of Captain Kirk and Lyndon Johnson critique the construction of masculinity and power. Unfortunately, the insights into gender politics gleaned from the work seem almost as historical as their source materials.
The highlights of the exhibition are paintings of title sequences from B-movies. The formalities of the title graphics, complete with production credits, expose the industrial methods of production that produced such lowbrow delights. For a moment, films that have been relegated to the camp of the past become new contemporary ideas.
Luke Butler: "Captain!" is on view at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.]]>
Lightening Field 131, 2009; silver gelatin print. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
As a conceptual photographer often heavily invested in his process, Hiroshi Sugimoto has always been interested in photography's ability to capture light as well as the medium's capacity to frame and objectify its subject. In his current show, "Lightning Fields," Sugimoto references the history of photography by pursuing two distinct projects related to William Henry Fox Talbot--inventor of the photographic negative. The first part is Sugimoto's literal and meticulous reprinting of two of Talbot's botanical photograms while the second is inspired by the pioneer's explorations with electricity.
In Lightning Fields, Sugimoto plays with the tenuousness of positive and negative by purposefully incorporating electrical charges as part of the photographic process. Without a camera, Sugimoto applies a Van de Graaff 400,000-volt generator to his large negatives to create photogram-like records of transitory sparks and static electricity. The Van de Graaff, originally designed for particle acceleration, is most recognizable as the ubiquitous science museum display that when touched causes one's hair to stand on end. Unlike the museum exhibit, the high voltage supplied by Sugimoto's Van de Graaff is extremely dangerous. This heightened sense of corporeal harm is reinforced by static electricity's capacity to "scar" and--to a traditional photographer--ruin large format negatives upon removal from the camera. By essentially establishing a micro-environment in the dark room akin to the conditions of an electrical storm, Sugimoto creates lush large-scale black and white prints that resemble botanical and biological images, landscapes, high-power microscopic magnifications, and lightning itself. This richly layered process creates works that, in the tradition of Talbot before him, elegantly blur the boundary between science and photography.
"Hiroshi Sugimoto: Lightning Fields" is on view at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco through October 31, 2009.]]>
PATH, 2008; installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of i8 gallery, Reykjavík and Maribel Lopez Gallery, Berlin. Photo: diephotodesigner.de.
Elín Hansdóttir's architectural interventions intend to alter our engagement with space and recalibrate optical experience. Her 2008 installation PATH cut off all functional areas of a Berlin gallery, filling it with a frenetic corridor. The gallery door opened directly onto a dimly lit hallway that zigzagged at severe angles while shafts of light--seeming to emanate subconsciously--punctuated the space's shadows. Hansdóttir addressed this and other topics when she recently spoke at Marin's Headlands Center for the Arts, describing how a visitor entered and exited this single pathway through the same door, without ever realizing they turned around.
The artist painted a similar corridor blindingly white for a 2005 installation in a rural Icelandic house, thwarting visitors with uneven steps and awkward corners. She recalled that the openness of the venue and the challenge of the structure itself provoked vandalism and aggression from children playing within the space. Wary that her installations can look overly designed, the artist admitted that there was potential for this vandalism to distract from their visual affect. Yet, by testing the space, the children learned its bizarre construction and marked their whereabouts, showing how such surreal visions can motivate the internalization of new systems. In this vein, Hansdóttir's work largely attempts to dissolves a Cartesian notion of perspective and forces the viewer to experience vision outside the apex of the image.
Elín Hansdóttir is in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito during Fall 2009. ]]>
Jay Nelson. The Good Bye Ranch, 2007-09; graphite on paper; 60 x 88 in.
The relationship between an exhibition and its catalog is always a tenuous one. Much of the art is distorted in the translation to a new medium. Similar to the metamorphosis of literature into film, new insights are gained at the expense of the raw experience of the original artwork. "Hot & Cold: The End is Here," a group show at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions inverts this flow, curating a live exhibition based on the local art zine Hot & Cold. Developed by Chris Duncan and Griffin McPartland, Hot & Cold has always been a terminal project, counting down 10 issues to its final Issue #1, the nexus for this exhibition.
Flipping through the pages of an issue of Hot & Cold is uniquely compelling. It has no standard structure. Each copy is a hand-bound assemblage of media from silkscreen to appliqué to photocopies, often in conjunction with time-based media such as vinyl or performance. Duncan and McPartland's editorial approach is essentially as a Fluxus piece; its meaning to be evoked by experiencing the cocktail of media in one fluid exchange. The installation at Baer Ridgway is derived from this playfulness. Drawing from an A-list of artists with Bay Area roots, including Amy Franceschini, Mads Lynnerup, and Brion Nuda Rosch, the exhibition is deftly curated. Most notable are Jay Nelson's supple drawing The Good Bye Ranch (2007-09), and Tammy Ray Carland's erotically underplayed photograph Hers and Hers. Yet despite all this quality artwork, something is inevitably lost in translation. The personal experience of navigating the zine, which is at the root of Hot & Cold's success, slips away into din of another group show.
"Hot & Cold: The End is Here" will be on view at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.]]>
Chris Duncan & Griffin McPartland. Hot and Cold Issue #1, 2009; mixed media.
Hot & Cold co-creators Chris Duncan and Griffin McPartland explain the zine's concept as such: "usually zines go downhill the longer they are produced, so we plan(ned) to do the opposite by starting with issue ten and get better and better as we count down to one." Seven years on, that day has arrived. Issue #1 is their most ambitious project to date, its launch coinciding with a show at Baer Ridgeway.
In the exhibition's poster, protest signs declaring "The End is Here" echo the more political artworks in the show. Pieces by Michael Arcega, Ryan Wallace, Reed Anderson, and Mads Lynnerup speak to the great heights of excess and recession we have recently witnessed. As a counterpoint, Michelle Blade's watercolor homage to poet Ranier Maria Rilke offers inspiration to look inward and keep creating, even through hard times.
As one of Rilke's letters reminds us, "Art too is just a way of living..." The final Hot & Cold project takes this idea to heart. A map by Ribbons producer David Wilson inserted in the zine led viewers out of the gallery space and to a well-hidden grove in the Richmond hills. There, Wilson and conspirators constructed a massive fort out of twigs and brush. Swings, ditches, and mild interventions were inserted into the landscape where the public was invited to play, potluck, and enjoy live music on a recent Sunday.
Memorial Fort video courtesy of Adam Cimino.
In the end, Hot & Cold is about creating a community of makers. With the art world rapidly globalizing, far-flung artists are able to form bonds and influence one another through various webs of interaction. I thank the creators of Hot & Cold for seven years of keeping these points of connection authentic and varied.
"Hot & Cold: The End is Here" will be on view at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.
Art Practical Issue 1 will include a full-length version of this review.]]>
Forms & Shapes, installation view, 2009. All works untitled, various dates; left wall: charcoal on paper; right wall and floor: ceramic. Courtesy of Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.
Bay Area sculptor Dennis Gallagher's posthumous survey exhibition, "Forms & Shapes," presents a comprehensive range of work--from massive stacked ceramic sculptures, to smaller maquettes and assemblages, plates, and drawings. Given that the 57-year-old artist tragically passed away earlier this year, the instance of five large, vertical sculptures all produced in 2009 is a testament to his protean creativity. The exhibition is punctuated by the inclusion of earlier work, which hints at his development from abstract and monochromatic (mostly white) sculptures through the more complex, representational, and often functional work of recent years. The drawings--especially the bold, black-line series from 1991--are to be understood equally as working sketches and powerful explorations of abstraction.
Gallagher, like many artists, early on adapted a select range of forms into his sculptural vocabulary, putting them through their paces often in defiance of gravity and, indeed, interpretation. And yet almost in spite of themselves, the works evoke a wealth of references, from classical motifs such as the Three Graces and the shafts of Ionic columns, to Constructivist assemblages of Merzbau-like ambition, and Brutalist architecture. Even at their most menacing, however, a measure of humanity runs throughout the obviously handmade irregularity of their forms and surfaces, pitted, scarred and roughly glazed as they are. The gallery's somewhat theatrical lighting lends gravitas to the staging of what, when viewed as a totality, could ultimately be understood as totems to the memory of failed modernist Utopias.
Dennis Gallagher: "Forms & Shapes" is on view at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco through October 10, 2009. ]]>
Untitled #1, 2009; acrylic on paper. Courtesy of Electric Works, San Francisco.
Although the paintings in "On A Neck" are stylistically those of Nathan Redwood, he has made some questionable departures from his earlier work. The artist's new indulgence in portraiture seems a logical step in terms of his subject matter. However, his abstracted figures do not translate when left without a background context.
When I last saw Redwood's work at Electric Works, I was quite taken with his large, narrative, yet surreal, paintings. They had not only a great presence in the space, but were also extremely fun. In this show, there is very little imagination in the work, and Redwood's particular style can at times be overwhelming to its detriment. These newer, much smaller works have the same sense of quickness and palette without the intricacies for which he is known. His figures are sometimes slightly abstracted, at other times completely. Yet without backgrounds in which to ground them, most float haphazardly within swirling colors.
The gallery separated paintings on canvas from those on paper, which was a well-considered move--the framed works on paper are much stronger. This may have to do with their execution. Even though the subjects are shared with those of the rest of the show, the five pieces together form a more coherent narrative. Four of the group are untitled, which might seem important since the titles for Redwood's work are nearly always simple. But with these more abstract portraits, his non-titles render the work uneventful.
Nathan Redwood: On A Neck is on view at Electric Works Gallery in San Francisco through November 7, 2009.]]>
Richland Mall, 2009; archival pigment print. Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.
Brian Ulrich began photographing abandoned shopping malls, stores, and big box retailers in the wake of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, an uncertain time when the government called on Americans to resume their normal patterns of consumption. Outside of the obvious timeliness of Ulrich's show and current platitudes about American consumerism, "Dark Stores" is a collection of beautifully uncanny images that ruminate upon the structure and occasional failure of retail architecture.
In his photographs, interiors of abandoned stores sit void of merchandise, with exteriors equally as desolate. Even with a store's signage removed, the franchises' identities are still apparent in the ghostly and patinated outlines of absent logos and familiar lettering. Moreover, the homogenous and iconic architecture which brands big box retailers also serves as a conspicuous reminder of their financial failures. In his most successful images, the context is ambiguous--the store could be closed for the day, rather than permanently. While Target (2009), Ulrich's image of the store's exterior with a cast-off shopping cart, is perhaps too convenient, he shows sophisticated restraint in Richland Mall, where the building and parking lot stand starkly and quietly amid a snowy landscape. The wholesale abandonment of modern architecture itself is particularly unsettling in these photos, as it disrupts our notions about the very permanence of the form. Operating at their deepest level, Ulrich's photographs of abandoned retailers are uncanny reminders that within a few short miles, there is probably an identical store teeming with shoppers.
"Brain Ulrich: Dark Stores" is on view at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco through October 31, 2009]]>
"Today and Others," installation view, 2009. Courtesy of Queen's Nails Projects, San Francisco.
Ian McDonald's exhibition at Queen's Nails Projects comprises fourteen handmade objects in five enigmatic groupings that flout distinctions between design, museum, and gallery displays. Evincing a simpler approach than his previous work, McDonald's tussle with the production mechanisms of capitalism seems to have morphed from emulation to rejection. Glossy mould works have given way to thrown, sculpted and crafted pieces, simple drip glazes in neutral tones, and more recognizably functional objects: lamps, storage urns, and benches. The work's detail resides in such unexpected places as the glass marbles atop lids of ceramic jars or buried in the back wall, a flash of lilac burnishing the leg of a redwood bench, or the curious circular object glazed and covered in gold leaf. As with McDonald's previous installations, most of the (untitled) pieces are arranged on pedestals, and in this incarnation further framed by plaques or benches.
Although the highlighted objects are indisputably the focus, they are distanced from their functionality through the artist's co-opting of conventional hierarchies reserved for the presentation of items of value. McDonald's insistence that no integral worth resides in the conceptual, formal, or functional properties of objects is perhaps best summed up by the penny pressed into the surface of a ceramic ball--the copper piece's inclusion in a system (whether monetary or artistic) assigns it symbolic value, rather than the coin's true worth as 97.5 percent zinc. The analogy with art is as inescapable as McDonald's pointed refutation of the economics of excess, his work ultimately suggesting that today need not be like all the others.
Ian McDonald: "Today and Others" is on view at Queen's Nails Projects in San Francisco through October 3, 2009.]]>
Untitled, 2009; wood, sand, and string. Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco.
All of Mitzi Pederson's work in "I'll Start Again" is untitled, and walking throughout the main space of her show at Ratio 3, it is hard to distinguish if each piece should be viewed individually or if the artist is more interested in creating something of a gesamtkunstwerk. Utilizing such common materials as wood, paper, and string, the very floor of the gallery plays to Pederson's advantage. The tension she captures with the string and wood sculptures, each hanging somewhat precariously upon the walls, is striking. Unlike previous wood and string pieces that were generally larger and louder, these smaller works pack a much stronger punch. A few resourcefully negotiate the architecture of the gallery itself, either by wrapping around the corner of a wall or disappearing and reemerging behind exposed pipe.
Largely dealing with the idea of tension, and how materials succumb to new ways of utilization, Pederson devises small and rather simple investigations that still manage to captivate the viewer. In one such work, Pederson sprayed sand onto a very thin piece of wood, which she then bent, and hung over string, creating an arching form. The gesture of the arch, the tension in the string, and the sparkle of the sand combine to create an ethereal affect. Unfortunately, in contrast to this strong showing in the main gallery, the back room of Ratio 3 leaves much to be desired, with only a large, scattered wall sculpture, another floor sculpture, and a few mixed media works on paper. Altogether, these pieces felt plain compared to the humbly impressive acrobatics of the gallery's main space.
Mitzi Pederson: "I'll Start Again" is on view at Ratio 3 in San Francisco through October 24, 2009]]>
"I'll Start Again," installation view, 2009. Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco.
Quotidian materials similar to those that have appeared throughout Mitzi Pederson's oeuvre dominate the work in this show. The works exhibit a unified sensibility, but are at times disjointed--succeeding only in fits and starts. The strongest pieces are the wall sculptures in the main space. In two of them, long sections of lathe are pulled into graceful arcs against nails by threads anchored to rectangular pieces of plywood. Another elegant work consists of a multi-stranded rectangle of thread stretched between four nails, over which a ribbon-like section of sand-coated wood-veneer has been draped like a towel. Constructed simply from wood, nails, and thread, these objects are playful like the work of Richard Tuttle and profound like the work of Fred Sandback.
The rest of the work in the show is less satisfying. The plywood and metal floor sculptures that sit leadenly on Ratio 3's deteriorated wooden floor echo the space's plank and plywood rawness, but lack oomph. The torqued door-skin sculptures that are displayed behind them exude more dynamism, but feel like maquettes rather than finished pieces. The smaller adjoining back room offers a strong series of small painted works on paper and a couple of interesting wall sculptures, but feels like a different exhibit by the same artist. Having thoroughly enjoyed Pederson's strong outing at UCLA's Hammer Museum earlier this year, I had high hopes for this solo show and so was a bit underwhelmed. Still, the poetry of its best moments makes this show well worth a visit.
Mitzi Pederson: "I'll Start Again" is on view at Ratio 3, San Francisco through October 24, 2009]]>
The Other Side of This Life, 2008; oil on canvas; 50 x 72 in.
With assured brushwork and equally deft needlework, Narangkar Glover has made a group of canvases that feature a homemade concrete skateboarding bowl located in her own Oakland backyard. This extraordinary structure, fondly referred to by those who know it as 'the pond,' is painted in real life a color that can only be described as swimming pool blue (an homage, perhaps, to the oft-practiced appropriation of empty pools as places to skate).
Glover depicts tranquil scenes bathed in bright California sunshine. Three of the six large works in the main gallery include a single male figure seen against the blue of the bowl, its bright yellow rim, empty, pale skies, and swaths of rapidly brushed shrubbery. The remaining three are pure landscapes: plein air in the 'hood, lemon trees and jasmine accented by occasional spirals of razor wire visible above a board and chain-link fence.
In one of these nature/culture studies, Glover has primarily embroidered the image in wool instead of painting it. Below a single, stylized tree and flowering oxalis, a bold, slightly drippy stroke of yellow paint has been laid over a needlework version of the skating structure's rim. The conjunction of a craft traditionally associated with women with big, typically male, painterly gestures frames this body of Glover's work as a whole, suggesting a feminist reading of those quiet figures posed against the blue and green of garden and water.
Narangkar Glover: "It's Gonna Be Awesome," is on view at Blankspace Gallery in Oakland through October 11, 2009.]]>
Aaron Parazette. Color Key 6, 2009; acrylic on linen.
This two-person show featuring brightly hued, hard-edged geometric paintings and rough-hewn monochromatic sculptures, is tied together by the artists' use of a post-minimalist vocabulary and a focus on craft. Aaron Parazette's abstract geometric paintings on shaped canvases recall those of Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Mangold, albeit with a highly keyed-up palette and on a more intimate scale. Like these artists, Parazette's works are self-contained worlds. Planes of colors, arranged in grids or concentric circles, are cropped by the edges of the unusually shaped supports. They are often continued on contiguous canvases, as if these diptychs or triptychs were removed from some larger whole. In Color Key 6 (2009), arcs of pink, orange, and white cover two oval-shaped canvases, which meet directly at the center of a hot pink circle, spilling across both canvases. Two thin green lines--one dark and one light--limn each color band, accentuating the optical effect. These paintings work best when they reflect a thoughtful balance between color, shape and support, while incorporating a subtle nod to historical precedents.
Contrary to the energetic paintings in Parazette's "Air Drop" show, the exhibition of Anders Ruhwald's monochromatic ceramic sculptures is appropriately called "Almost Nothing." Ruhwald has pared down his works to the basics of texture and form, stressing the primacy of the material. Like Robert Ryman's paintings, his use of white serves to focus our attention on his heavily worked surfaces. Also like Ryman, his marks are devoid of gesture. Unlike his minimalist predecessors however, his abstract forms are almost familiar to us (a tree stump, a vase), but are altered in ways that makes them unsettling, and somewhat comedic. They hover somewhere between minimalist ciphers and common objects. "What would this material do, if left to its own devices?" they seem to be asking. While some fashion themselves into crude variations of common forms, others simply struggle to be of some use: Marked, a three-legged object that mimics and marks a corner, Allting, which juts out of the wall near the ceiling and resembles a pipe, or Mono (3 in itself) (all works 2009), a rectangular slab placed on the wall like a blank canvas. While these works can be seen as almost nothing, what makes them most interesting is when they aspire to be almost something.
Aaron Parazette: "Air Drop" and Anders Ruhwald: "Almost Nothing" are on view Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco through October 24, 2009.]]>
Rose Snow, 2009; oil on aluminum.
The works in this tranquil exhibition reward prolonged interaction. Their quiet presence, reminiscent of Morris Louis' veil paintings, offers viewers a hushed space within which to reflect. Like much of Kim Anno's previous work, they are painted in oil on sheets of aluminum. The dull glimmer of the metallic surface emerges through thin washes of color, producing a soft opalescence. Anno's trademark "combing" is restrained and flutters in little eddies rather than the bold sweeps that she has employed in the past. The gestures allude to landscapes but never entirely resolve into recognizable features. There is something eerie about these pieces that unsettles even as it attracts. They are decidedly arctic. The forms echo ice floes and bergs, while the colors evoke turquoise water and permanent twilight. Clouds of fine scratches mar the delicate metallic surfaces and cause the ambient light in the gallery to flicker across them like the dancing aurora borealis. The vacant expanses evoke numbing emptiness but also deflect casual entry. This impenetrability adds to their mystery, but renders the paintings more difficult than they need to be. They are beautiful but remain largely alien, much like the bleak landscape they reference.
Kim Anno: "Liquescent" is on view at Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.]]>
Purgatory, 2005; wood, glass, Fiberglas, paint, gold and silver leaf; 19 ½ x 47 x 24 in.
Alison McLennan makes sculpture in the form of furniture. Like Scott Burton's chairs, McLennan's tables, cabinets, and lamps can serve a utilitarian purpose. In this exhibition of pieces completed over the past several years, many works suggest a humorous, Pop-infused reading. Purgatory (2005) is a glass-topped table, the base of which consists of a weighty-looking pyramid on its side, seemingly sticking its pointy-head so firmly into an organic comma-shape that the skin of the latter has been pierced, creasing as it is pushed inwards. This effect is achieved through carving and the skillful application of Fiberglas on wood. Like many of the furniture-based objects created by LA artist Robert Therrien, our ability to get McLennan's visual joke--both psychically and somatically--depends on how well it is done, but only as a point of departure. Rather than being about skill, the piece is driven by its initiating concept.
Sometimes, the functional aspect of her work is all but hidden. Wall-hung jewelry cabinets initially present themselves as (merely) aesthetic objects, each consisting of a framed, high relief representation of a vastly enlarged beetle carapace or a stylized cocoon. (She studied entomology in college and still retains a fascination with the complexity and beauty of insects.) But these insect-inspired forms can be opened with a tiny key, revealing an exquisitely fitted interior, replete with delicate drawers and sets of hooks.
Tower-like table lamps incorporate translucent versions of McLennan's photographs of Jingletown, her Oakland neighborhood. The focus in these images is on pattern and unexpected conjunctions of shapes and textures, suggesting that the connecting thread between all the works in this show is McLennan's gift for attentive and detailed observation.
Alison McLennan's work was on view at Artworks Downtown in San Rafael through September 28, 2009. ]]>
Nicholas Knight. Taking Pictures (Wheat Field with Cypresses), 2008; archival pigment print mounted on aluminum.
Both artists currently on view at Steven Wolf Fine Arts address the way the medium of photography mediates our experience of that which is photographed. For "Taking Pictures" Nicholas Knight has photographed artworks in galleries and museums all over the world, as seen through the viewfinders of the digital cameras and cell phones of visitors, often with the out-of-focus original in the background. Knight's real subject is not the works of art, but the way technology has come to dominate our perception of art, and indeed the world around us. Interaction with the screen has replaced direct interaction with works of art. Instead of the varied and grand array of museum-goers pictured in Thomas Struth's Museum Photos series, Knight's images reflect a contemporary standardization and leveling of sublime experience. A video depicting Knight mechanically projecting a slide show of the series heightens this sensation. Thoughtfully, Knight has captured the hands and backs of the heads of many of the photographers, creating an intimate double portrait, and reflecting the access that technology grants, even if that access comes at the expense of unmediated experience.
For over 20 years, Jo Babcock has been making pinhole cameras from found materials: offering new life to coffee cans, snuff boxes, toys, and more. Babcock makes reference to their original functions, however, through the subjects they photograph, giving them a sense of agency. For example, a band-aid box camera produced a self-portrait of the injured artist. He thereby provides a conceptual link between the camera as object and the photograph it captures. In "Past Life Picturesque," a great selection of pinhole cameras is on display in a large vitrine as well as stacked atop the walls, as if trying to escape. Unfortunately none of the photographs taken with the individual cameras are included, telling only half their story. As a parallel to these quirky and whimsical objects, Babcock has mounted three peepholes on the wall, which thwart the viewers' voyeurism with an angry red light, a ticking clock and other symbols of our apocalyptic anxiety.
"Nicholas Knight: Taking Pictures" and "Jo Babcock: Past Life Picturesque" are on view at Steven Wolf Fine Arts in San Francisco through October 10, 2009.]]>
Twiggy, 2009; gouache on paper.
Most of the pieces in this packed show are unframed works on paper that depict morosely staring film starlets from the 1950's through the 1970's. The works stretch across several walls including two large floating panels covered by expansive clusters of smaller works. The show's scope and celebrity focus brings to mind Elizabeth Peyton's recent outing at New York's New Museum. However, Alika Cooper, through her near monochromatic palette and confident, brushy handling of gouache, produces a richness of texture and emotion that Peyton's more colorful renderings in oil rarely posses. While Cooper works from film stills and press photographs, she manages to steep her images in a depth of melancholy only hinted at by their celluloid twins. The works embody the visibility of posing and the invisibility of neglect. They are beautiful and at times poignant, yet I can't help but wonder: are these moody portraits of Hollywood's past criticizing the strident sexism that chained these beautiful women to rigid expectations, or do they yearn for the glamour of these bygone days?
The non-starlet works in the show don't clarify Cooper's position, though they do broaden the melancholy--a pathetically scraggly Christmas tree, an abandoned stuffed panda, and a forlorn phonograph. These images evoke a sense of loss that feels much more intimate and far more banal. I am intrigued by these images, but not satisfied with where these seemingly personal points of sadness intersect with Cooper's brooding depictions of the famous.
"Alika Cooper: A Cold Wave" is on view at Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.]]>
Foreground: Laurel Roth. Food #5, Pig, 2009; walnut, gold leaf, Swarovski crystal.
Background: Mary Anne Kluth. The Lorentz Fitzgerald Calculations, 2009, watercolor and acrylic with watercolor collage on paper. Image: Randall Miller.
Mary Anne Kluth and Laurel Roth explore the possibilities and limitations of their materials in "Theory of the Unforeseen," a two-person show at Frey Norris Gallery. The two bodies of work co-exist harmoniously, although conceptual dialogue seemed limited to a shared but vague interest in scientific knowledge production.
Equating painterly material investigation with scientific exploration of macro and micro bodies, Kluth's paintings on paper feature warm splashes of red and yellow over cool dark backgrounds with tiny scientist figures nestled into the corners. The possibility of evoking heavenly bodies places air quotes around the expressionistic paint application while the placement of the figures reliably avoids violating the internal logic of the splashy paint. Calculated to highlight the disjuncture between methodical analysis and the phenomena of experience, the figures become extraneous, as that disjuncture already begins to occur in the contrast between the splashes of saturated hues and the linear bands of dark color. With a little more faith in her medium, the painter could expand this dialogue.
Roth's meatless animal skulls are exquisitely carved out of walnut, flashing "high bling grillz" made from gold leaf and Swarovski crystal. Presenting jaw fragments as dueling pistols in plush velvet cases pushes the sculptures further into free associative territory. These strategic pairings are evocative of early Surrealist non-sequiturs, minus some undifferentiated element that truly jars the senses. Despite their titles and the gallery literature, I did not get the sense that these pieces had as much to do with food production as the pleasure of experiencing the mimetic construction of the objects. Craft is at once their grace and their leash.
"Mary Anne Kluth and Laurel Roth: Theory of the Unforeseen" is on view at Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco through October 4, 2009.]]>
Seed , 2009; mixed-media.
James Sansing spent four months in residence at SF Recycling & Disposal, creating three different series of wall pieces using only what he could find on site.
Intricate and evocative, the first set--each about two feet square--are small-scale assemblages that suggest traumatized urban landscapes: foreclosed properties in varying states of neglect, or the stripped and decaying structures found in the wake of a hurricane. Sansing said the driving force behind his selections for this series were objects in a range of subdued green, gray, and red hues, which he combined with the frames from dismantled adding machines or typewriters, and affixed to the wall.
Sansing also discovered broken tempered glass, a bag of graphite powder, and cast-off bags of cement. From these, he constructed two of his gorgeous signature abstract wall pieces by pouring the cement onto the broken glass, removing the latter, and then coloring the mold with the graphite powder. These hang between the aforementioned landscapes and forty photographs set in the metallic grids of discarded electrical boxes. He removed the human figure from each photo to create silhouettes in a variety of positions or poses, including some rather humorous ones. Placed behind the now-empty figures are reflective surfaces from the backs of LCD fixtures, which shine and blink like a collection of eyes from forty different faces. All are entitled Missing Persons, each with a subtitle describing the individual's action or posture.
The piece I enjoyed the most from this last series was Missing Persons: Man With Car, which was taken in front of a group of houses I recognize from the Outer Sunset, giving new context to a familiar setting. Strange how the missing--but shining-- man proudly leans against his car, an ancient model T or old Ford. Someday, I wonder, where will the photograph of a proud owner of a 2009 Hybrid or SUV end up?
James Sansing: "Systemic Obsolescence" was on view at the San Francisco Recycling & Disposal gallery September 26-27, 2009. For more information about his work and the Artist in Residence Program, please see http://www.sfrecycling.com/AIR/index.php?t=d]]>
As Below, 2007; pigment prints on transparencies, Plexiglas, florescent lights.
Elise Irving's exhibition opens with a cloud-like cluster of unframed Polaroids whose images bear the marks of abuse that such casually taken photos often endure. The occasional rips and stains reinforce the vaguely forlorn feeling the images collectively possess: a broken mirror rests on a neglected wicker chair, a TV antenna faces down a palm tree, and snow quietly encroaches a tangle of leafless twigs. While their distressed materiality and format are a bit cliché, the Polaroids' honesty lends their brooding an unexpected and satisfying weight.
Just past the Polaroids, the lightboxes that give the show its name hang in a slightly darkened rear space. Constructed by sandwiching transparent emulsions between multiple layers of clear acrylic, the softly glowing boxes depict a wide range of subjects. The layered creation of depth recalls scenery flats and produces a glowing diorama-like space that floats between dimensions. Some depict recognizable landscapes. Others are so blurry and abstracted that they almost cease to read as photographs. The strongest depict domestic interiors in which the lightboxes' rectilinear logic resonates with the depicted architectural structures. The ghostly edges of walls, doorframes, and mantles stitch together across multiple depths to produce a tangled yet integrated environment. In its best passages, Irving's work begins to illuminate the shifting complexity of our relationships to the domestic spaces we occupy, from those of our childhood to the ones we inhabit today.
Elise Irving: "Lightboxes" is on view at Marke Wolfe Contemporary Art in San Francisco through October 17, 2009.]]>
Mummers Day I, 2009; colored pencil, watercolor, and dye on Twin Rocker Calligraphy Cream Paper.
In Barnaby Furnas' lively suite of paintings at Anthony Meier Fine Arts, spectacle, pageantry, costuming and performance serve as the springboard for the artist's investigation into abstract patterning. Collectively titled "the lesser light" - taken from a Biblical reference to the moon--his work once again draws from familiar harbingers of the modern spectacular: pyrotechnic rock concerts, big budget action movies, carnivalesque street celebrations, and the theatrics of professional wrestling. The result is a mélange of color and contrast that at once celebrates and questions the blinding wattage of the hyperbolic visual idolatry in which we can all indulge.
The standout of the show is a fabulous series of watercolors featuring Mummers Day performers. The figures occupy prismatic mandala-like spaces where eyes, lucha libre masks, and vibrating facets of color radiate outward and around the page like the feathers of a peacock. Similarly, a pair of rock concert paintings conveys the exuberance of live entertainment.
Furnas paints Mummers, drummers, and rock stars; identity types existing within a performative context where the experience of the show is greater than the actual people involved. This point is driven home in two paintings of KISS drummer Peter Criss that serves as the thematic counterpoint to the visual dazzle of the rest of the exhibition. The aloof figure once took off his trademark cat make-up only to become an anonymous middle-aged rocker. Criss looks bored in the paintings; resigned to a world where pageantry and costume supersede the man. The shine off the disco ball can only offer so much illumination: the lesser light of the show's title.
Barnaby Furnas: "the lesser light" is on view at Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco through October 9, 2009.]]>
Motörhead, 2009; colored pencil, golden acrylic with water-dispersed pigments on linen; 60 x 84 in.
Through the paintings in "the lesser light," Barnaby Furnas examines the psychological effects of ecstatic public ritual from three perspectives: the performer, the spectacle, and the immersive group experience.
In two intimate acrylic and colored pencil portraits, Furnas depicts KISS' drummer Peter Criss with half-closed eyes having a satisfied, post-show smoke, still in full make-up and costume, sticks in hand. It is painted with fastidious attention to chrome studs on leather and the backdrop of hot stage lights, but a more cursory treatment to hair and face under the mask of makeup. The resulting picture is more a portrait of a persona--of costume and posture-than a biographical instance.
Furnas emphasizes ritual costume in five watercolor and dye drawings of Philadelphia's Mummers, traditional parade performers that celebrate the New Year. In buzzing complementary color schemes, the performers optically merge with each other and the field they are embedded in. Furnas creates scintillating pattern first, figure and ground relationships second.
In two larger acrylic, dispersed pigment, and colored pencil paintings of arena rock performances, Furnas applies marks unvaryingly to depict the hands of the audience and the musicians, the lighter flames, the disco gradient, and the lighting grids, producing a strobe-like effect and referencing the repetitive nature of ritual. The hot pinks and oranges he utilizes heighten the color and the otherworldly effect of stadium lights. Framing the images are ejaculate-like spumes of water-dispersed pigment that characterize the scene as one of regenerative catharsis, not localized in any particular performer or audience member, but in the group as a whole.
Barnaby Furnas: "the lesser light" is on view at Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco through October 9, 2009.
Art Practical Issue 1 will include a full-length version of this review.]]>
Metronome Cocoon,1961-1995;
mixed media assemblage; 14 x 5-1/2 x 7 in.
There is something mechanical about Bruce Conner's inkblot drawings. I believe it to be their fearful symmetry which, bolt upright or around the page, feels unnatural. What should be the most organic and fluid of all marks - the free flowing curve of ink on paper - becomes replicated across a fold, creating a precise crystalline spine. They do not sway breezily across their paper like the unruly vines of a garden plot, but throb with the stillness of hothouse orchids behind glass. The creases forming the central column of each of these totems are barely visible but ever palpable, diverting the viewer from relating to the drawing as an image, but instead as the document of a process, the memory of an action, the irrefutable record that this now flat plane was once a dimensional object; in short, as remains of something transformed, in the manner a wrinkled face testifies to a life lived.
They are also, of course, sly plays on the Rorschach test, for which the movie psychoanalyst turns to face the audience and asks "tell me what you see," hoping to reveal in the cloudy response to these non-objective smudges projected fears, fantasies, and neurosis. This is actually what Conner's iconic nylon clad assemblages have always done, but perhaps they pose the question differently than the drawings. "Tell me what you don't see" allows us to inject personal form and meaning into the half-images assuredly residing between and beneath the objects' fabric skin: at once silk, spider web, panty hose and the hoary copper coloring of another time, which might actually be the color of memory. And like the ordered remembrances of those inkblot conservatories, the assemblages reminds us that our histories and experiences, like our lives and relationships, need to be tended and honored, that there is nothing more tender, fleeting, meaningful, or momentous.
Bruce Conner: "Discovered" is on view at Gallery Paula Anglim in San Francisco through October 10, 2009.]]>
Catherine Opie. Jerome Caja, 1993; Chromogenic print; 19 x 14 3/4 in. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
SF Camerawork's 35th anniversary show "San Francisco Plays Itself" is like stepping onto a Diane Arbus/Nan Goldin-esque set.
Most of the works are framed photographs with accompanying statements, but the conversations contained within and between--the characters, the eccentrics, the occasions, the friends, the moments, and the sense of time--animate the gallery spaces. This is the story of San Francisco from 1974 to the present.
Ken Miller photographs Bill Vollmann in drag. Gail and Dale play gently on a beach of Katy Grannan's making. Dennis, SF Camerawork's favorite UPS guy, proudly displays his UPS tattoos in Jona Frank's uniform series. Larry Sultan's grandiose portrait of Denise Hale for W magazine looks slyly over at Catherine Opie's pose of Jerome Caja as a Spanish matriarch on the other wall. The Jangs play out their '70's lives in dens and sitting rooms in Michael Jang's neat scenarios. A young Richard Misrach hangs out on a five-block stretch of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley from 1972 to '74, the staring faces looking very much like present-day hipsters.
Ari Marcopoulos's two huge, distressed photocopies on paper stand out as remnants, depicting a scar on an arm and bruises on torsos that look like bullet holes. They literally and metaphorically seem to be pointing the way, punctuation marks in an unfinished chapter.
Curated by Chuck Mobley, "An Autobiography of The San Francisco Bay Area. Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself" is on view at SF Camerawork until October 21, 2009. "Part 2: The Future Lasts Forever" opens in January 2010. ]]>
Peter Hutton. At Sea, 2007 (still); DVD (transferred from 16-millimeter film), color, silent; 60 min.
Testosterone abounds in Jens Hoffmann's handsome "Moby Dick," as it does in Melville's saga of vengeance and the sea. From Kenneth Anger's randy Fireworks (1947) to Adrian Villar Rojas's (with Alan Legal) My Dead Grandfather (2009)--a giant, impaled white whale of unfired clay--and Orson Welles' booming voice intoning Ahab's words throughout the galleries, male energy and hubris are in evidence everywhere.
It is a Moby Dick of Shakespearean proportions, as Hoffmann leavens the tragic with the antic, and gives us some really great curatorial surprises. Buster Keaton's 1921 film The Boat greets viewers and creates a welcome foil to Ahab's darkness. Rockwell Kent's original wood engravings for the 1930 Lakeside Press edition of Moby Dick are marvels of visual conciseness.
In casting a wide net, Hoffman offers Kirsten Pieroth's Die Farbe der Meere (The Colors of the Seas) (2002), plastic bottles filled from the world's oceans. Mateo Lopez's modest Love Song (2009)--ten sheets of imaginary notation for songs of the Humpback Whale--features penciled staves that morph into waves. Whale song echoes through the gallery, and scattered bars of "the ship, the black freighter...." from the Three Penny Opera sound a cautionary tale.
Peter Hutton's extraordinary 60-minute silent film At Sea (2007) is worth a visit all its own. A merchant marine veteran, Hutton practices a scrupulous, almost Zen-like brand of filmmaking: he holds still and waits. The film progresses from ant-size workers constructing a container ship of vast proportions to a wreckage-strewn beach in Bangladesh, the backdrop for a "ship-breaking," where barefoot men hack at an immense rusted hull. At Sea is stately, balletic, and profoundly humane.
Sampling sea-inspired works from a range of disciplines, periods, and aesthetic perspectives, the exhibition expands the metaphorical implications of Moby Dick, paying tribute to Melville's multi-layered work and offering a richly nuanced experience for the viewer.
"Moby Dick" is on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco through December 12, 2009.]]>
Colter Jacobsen. Sp(out)er (In)nomine diaboli, 2009; oil on canvas.
A boggy, soggy, squinchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant. - Moby Dick, Chapter 3
At the beginning of Chapter 3 of Moby Dick, Ishmael describes a unstretched painting hanging in the Spouter-Inn --an almost abstract torrent of grey, blue and black-- to be "so thoroughly besmoked", that one might take it to be "some ambitious young artist's...endeavor to delineate chaos bewitched." He learns from others that it may have originally depicted a whale being impaled on the three masts of a ship during a hurricane. All the remaining visual clues are a limp black cloud near the center of the image and three poles.
What is amazing is not the precision with which Colter Jacobsen has recreated a painting from Melville's lengthy description, but the way in which he consolidates the complexity of the novel. Foremost, the abstraction of the image speaks to the unruliness of the novel. Further, it attests on its very surface to the passage of time: not only the span within the novel - the period it hung in the Spouter-Inn before Ishmael encountered it, but also the ensuing years since Melville published Moby Dick, which saw the novel itself become clouded by the soot of pop culture and academia.
The painting described by Ishmael was aged and obscured by the generations of tobacco smoke rising up alongside the stories, laughter, brawls, and histories of the sailors in port. It is this intergenerational vaporized machismo which shrouds Sp(out)er (In)nomine diaboli. It is a relic of hyper-masculinity, visualizing a bond shared between men. The almost pornographic scene of the impaled whale becomes a sensitive encounter between the viewer and the artwork in Jacobsen's painting. He locates a diffused and intimate, if troubled, space within--and literally on top of--the novel's epic structure, evoking queer desire and depicting the homoeroticism that courses just beneath the book's surface.
Unlike much of the other work in this exhibition, Jacobsen's painting isn't clever or cute, but consolidates many of Moby Dick's nuanced concerns. It stands out as an example of what an artist dialoging with a great work of art can do in the present moment; one that doesn't supply cheeky answers in sailor's suits, but offers a challenge, and invites us on its quest for knowing.
"Moby Dick" is on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco through December 12, 2009. ]]>
Cairo, Sonoma, 2006; Xerox print; 53 x 36 in. Courtesy of the artist, Ratio 3, San Francisco, and The Project, New York.
Ari Marcopoulos marks his world through lens-based images. The beauty of his work lies in the remnants of experience delicately outlined in a snowy landscape or a bodily wound. His narratives--for the most part populated by male physicality--are full of music, art, skateboarding, snowboarding, New York City, Sonoma, and his family.
Rachel Williams (1993) directs her skater-torn arms at the camera, a bandage carelessly hangs from an elbow. Bike Crash 11 (2002) displays a close-up of two grazed, dressing-stained knees, and the eponymous Man with Scars, Jamaica (1987) smokes a spliff. Tracks slash the crisp snow to ribbons in Daytona (2000). Two teens sleep in MiniDisc, Riksgrausen (1998), one wearing a neck brace, while a third listens to music, very matter of fact.
A question mark resounds in the form of a haunting video loop: a boy wearing a wool hat stares into the camera unflinching, his right eye and cheek swollen. Off-camera laughter adds to the disquieting tone.
The impressive array of prints includes large-format Xeroxes, which are extensions of the artist's self-published zines. In Cairo (2007)--monumental in size, evocatively raw and grainy--there's a hint of something near the mouth. Big dirty close-ups of bruised hands and scratched fingers form playful patterns in Four Hands (2007). The density of these images hangs heavy.
Cairo is the name of one of Ari's sons. He stands in Cairo, Sonoma (2006), lanky and awkward, somewhere between a place and a person, just within arm's reach.
Dedicated to Franz Schnaas, 1966-2009.
Curated by Stephanie Cannizzo, Ari Marcopoulos: "Within Arm's Reach" is on view at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum until February 7, 2010.]]>
Composition (Violet-Blue) 01, 2009; graphite, urethane, resin, cast acrylic, and varnish; 13 1/4 x 72 x 1 1/2 in.
"Listening Sequence," Freddy Chandra's solo debut at Brian Gross Fine Art, is a synethesthetic meditation built on Minimalist forms, and evoking multivalent layers of sound. Manipulating the clarity and tonality of deceptively simple blocks on the wall, Chandra composes delicate rhythms of shadow, color, and empty air. He punctuates his arrangements with vibrant hues of blue, purple, and green, as well as subtle and carefully arranged voids. His graphite, urethane, resin, acrylic, and varnish surfaces seem at once alive and machine-manufactured, responsive to the ambient lighting conditions in the room, yet with no perceptible fingerprints or tool marks.
Composition (Violet-Blue) 01 (2009) is comprised of five blocks hung on the wall in two horizontal rows. A pattern of rectangles emerges from the arrangement of lighter and darker materials, as well as the shadows cast by the blocks onto the wall or each other. Punctuating the arrangement is a small chunk of impenetrable, light blue-green material that seems to repel or absorb the surrounding shadows in comparison to its compatriots.
Laid out on the wall in elongated, horizontal grids, the bars of color reference the graphical representation of sound in a digital music editing software interface such as Pro Tools, in which, each stripe on the register representing represents a sample of human voice, or a track of piano. As such, one could as easily trace a path to the work of composer Phillip Glass as to the material sensibilities of sculptors Larry Bell or Robert Irwin.
Freddy Chandra: "Listening Sequence" is on view at Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco until October 31, 2009. ]]>
Rein, 2009; permanent pigment on aluminum.
Deborah Oropallo's current exhibition at Steven Wirtz Gallery merges contemporary ideas about female subjectivity with rodeo fantasy. It includes a series of digitally manipulated images almost entirely comprised of provocatively dressed cowgirls superimposed upon rodeo arena backgrounds. The bedazzled female performers with lassos and fringe galore strike kitten-esque poses and flaunt their gadgetry. Titles such as Star, Dusty, and Cody evoke names bestowed upon beloved broncos.
Notably absent from the figures, however, are their faces. In contrast to "Feign"-- her 2008 show at the gallery that consisted of female faces juxtaposed upon classic portraits of elaborately costumed 17th and 18th century men--"Wild Wild West.Show" seemingly suggests the opposite position for gazing upon its subjects. The women's sexuality lies not in their glances but in their attire and body language. The gap voided of the face serves as an aperture through which to see the arena and to feel the lifelessness of these subjects. They look as if they are either disappearing before one's eyes or conversely, slowly being built up to mask the out-of-focus backgrounds. The lassos and fringe disintegrate into pixilated squares upon closer inspection. The disappearing forms suggest vanishing notions of a traditional American West and an increasingly blurred line between fantasy and reality.
"Deborah Oropallo: Wild Wild West. Show" is on view at Steven Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco through October 31, 2009.]]>
Untitled, after Adagio for Strings (Barber); acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 in.
Despite current notions about professional specialization in the arts--as in every field of endeavor--people are more complex than capitalistic worker bees. Aural and visual sensitivity often cohabit within the same temperaments, complementing each other instead of combating. Giorgione, Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee, and Ingres are only a few members of a very long roster of artist-musicians of various levels of proficiency (Although Ingres, who drew divinely, played the violin execrably). Some artists have explored the relationship deliberately. Synesthetics like Kandinsky, who claimed to "see" musical tones as colors, irresistibly created visual analogs of melodies or chords. For their part, artistically inclined musicians from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries designed color-displaying organs that would "illustrate" their scores. Their electronic-wizard successors today have completely smudged the lines between disciplines, creating multimedia pieces that would have been technologically unimaginable only a few generations ago.
Ed Franco's abstract acrylic paintings may not pulse, flash, and morph like light shows or car-stereo graphic equalizers, but their musical sources are clearly expressed in their titles, Untitled after Firebird (Stravinsky) being a typical example. He pays homage to Mozart, Dvorak, Grofe, Smetana, Barber, Cage, Reich, Carter, and even TThe Gypsy Kings.
Music lovers will have fun here. Those less familiar (as I am) may feel slightly guilt-ridden, and culturally unprepared to understand these works. As a consolation, however, we can enjoy the paintings as latter-day Abstract Expressionism in the Still, Motherwell, and Rothko mold: improvised painted or collaged forms set against flat but modulated fields to poetic effect. Franco's paintings are determinedly anti-contemporary. if we consider current esthetic fashion of conceptualist and scientific methodology married to emotional ambiguity. In this age of surrogates and simulacra, Franco's paintings aim at and achieve handmade artistic authenticity instead. For those of us who try to consider culture as a long-term enterprise, who believe that painting and music can endure and must prevail, it's a welcome interruption in the regularly scheduled programming -- and a reminder to listen as well as look.
Work by Ed Franco was on view at the University of California Berkeley Extension Downstairs Gallery in San Francisco from June 22 through July 10, 2009.
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Tomma Abts. Untitled (brushstroke), 2009; color water bite aquatint with aquatint, hard ground etching and drypoint; image size: 17⅝ x 12⅞ in.
"Tomma Abts: Chance and Construction," drawn from three decades at Crown Point Press, showcases the work of artists who welcome accident into their artistic process. The physical facts of the printmaking technique--raised etched lines, grainy aquatint, and the slurry of spit-bite--are visible and deeply pleasing, while many of the prints surprisingly evoke pictorial spaciousness.
The exhibition features five prints by Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts. She begins her compositions with a stray pencil mark or torn paper laid on the plate, then carefully constructs her compositions using tongue-in-cheek illusionary devices such as cast shadows, transparency, and overlapping forms. In Untitled (brushstroke) (2009) a zig-zag shoelace of a line seems to hover over the picture plane. Ruled lines and legal-pad stripes emphasize the flatness and margins of her page. The green aquatint fade and shadowing heighten the spatial effect.
Laura Owens' Untitled (LO273) (2004) offers a whimsical scene of whales and ships in a corrugated sea inspired by scrimshaw carving. A gentle foil to the macho "Moby Dick" down the road at CCA's Wattis Institute, the rich mix of patterns and the indigo coloring link it to Japanese textiles.
Richard Tuttle's eight aquatints, Up, to 7 (2000)--seem generated by a formula that dictates shape, color, and placement. Pinned at the top of an empty frame supported by a tiny ziggurat, the colored shapes resemble "les funambules": circus actors both funny and serious. Maverick composer John Cage, a Crown Point favorite and the grandfather of chance operations, is represented by a selection from his 1985 Ryoku series. In these, he utilized I-Ching throws--sticks with ideograms on them--to position and trace stones onto etching plates, depending on which faces turned up. Ink color and the distribution of embossed geometric shapes were also decided by chance. The resulting prints are quiet equivalents of Zen gardens.
Kathan Brown, the founder of Crown Point Press, routinely invites non-printmakers to work at the studio. Her commitment to experimentation by sculptors, poets, painters, and musicians brings new processes to the table, challenges the artists, and enriches the print lexicon.
"Tomma Abts: Chance and Construction" is on view at Crown Point Press in San Francisco through November 28, 2009.]]>
Your Painting, 2009; oil on canvas.
Experience is a form of paralysis. - Erik Satie
At first glance, Todd Bura's paintings on view at Triple Base Gallery seemed utterly unsophisticated and primitive. I was reluctant to look closely. As I was about to exit the space, however, a stack of show posters in the corner caught my eye. "Painting Spiritual Painting" is a body of work whose merit is not entirely understood by the viewer unless accompanied by R.M. Wilke's statement printed on the show posters. It exhorts in part that "If the angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced him, not with tears, but with your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner!" Coupled with the fact that each piece is entitled Your Painting, I was encouraged to look again, endeavoring to see the work with fresh eyes.
The works contain basic shapes and primary colors using simple painting techniques. In focusing on the experience of painting a circle, line, or dot as a singular act that can never be repeated or re-experienced, Bura has instructed himself "to be a beginner." For example, in one work he employs a method with which most people are familiar: swirling colors onto a page and covering it with black, then using a sharp object to scrape away the top layer and reveal lines of cosmic wonder.
These paintings are mere remnants of the artist's attempt to "humb[ly] resolve to be always beginning." Anyone can paint a circle, but can they also treat the act of painting a circle as the innocent beginning of something new?
Todd Bura: "Painting Spiritual Painting" is on view at Triple Base Gallery in San Francisco through October 25, 2009.]]>
Gamma Buster #1, 2008; mixed media; 7.25 x 9 in.
Cherie Raciti's "Small Abstract Reliefs" was on view recently at the Garage Gallery in Berkeley, a naturally lit, high ceilinged, shoebox-sized space in a residential neighborhood. Kjersten Walker runs the gallery as a satellite of the Berkeley Outlet, a used furniture store. Walker is committed to showing artists whose work is accessible to a broader collector base, with all priced at or under $300.
Cherie's work bridges two- and three- dimensional space. It draws one in with simple ancient designs and intimate physical scale. Starting with Tantric and Jain diagrams, Raciti creates textured, brightly pigmented sculptures with paper. She builds up layers of acrylic modeling material and paints the porous surface with gouache, creating a fresco-like surface. She sands and repaints her pieces repeatedly, embedding color in the hardened acrylic. The accumulated strata catch and reflect light as it bounces across the rough surface. Looking at these pieces is like looking at rich food.
In another group, symbols including the infinity sign, ankh, and an hourglass combine to invoke relationships between physics, religion, and geometry. The installation--large magnets affix the work to a metal surface--recalls the science experiment that uses a magnet and metal filings to reveal the lines of force. The esoteric symbols on the front of Cherie's reliefs similarly convey the magnetic forces that are hidden from view.
"Small Abstract Reliefs" was on view through September 13, 2009 at the Garage Gallery in Berkeley.]]>