Remnants of handmade posters, layers of billboard paper, grids and swirls of string, and silhouettes of permanent-wave end papers densely layer Mark Bradford’s canvases in his retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). These materials, the detritus of the street, are the discarded effects of forgotten and overlooked urban spaces. A Los Angeles–based painter and multi-media artist, Bradford maps the topography of social, sexual, and racial economies in his work, creating space for new subjectivities. Bradford’s process of collecting, collaging, and layering images, materials, and meanings create depth and texture, hinting at the glamour of materiality through the oversaturation of signifiers and the density of detail. In his two-dimensional work, Bradford sands and removes his material, employing  décollage to expose the hidden stratifications of color and text within the accumulation of ephemera, thus suggesting the depthless multiplicities of cultural meaning.

In Bradford’s video Niagara (2005), Melvin, a local prostitute, saunters down a sidewalk, swinging his arms and hips as he recedes into the distance. The work references Marilyn Monroe’s seductive walk in the 1953 film Niagara as it explores how a black male body inflects that iconic walk and occupies public space. Both Monroe and Melvin assert their sexuality through the embodied walk, implicating the desire of the viewer. The comparison of Monroe to Melvin invites an investigation of the performance of gender and sexual orientation within urban space.

Similarly, in the papier-mâché sculpture of a black basketball, Kobe I Got Your Back (2008), Bradford addresses the

Mark Bradford. Potable Water, 2005; billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, and additional mixed media; 130 x 196 in. Collection of Hunter Gray.

overdetermined cultural assignment of gender roles to the black body. As the title suggests, Bradford is covering, supporting, and backing the normative stereotype of the black athlete with an other: an unrecognized, unknown, and more nuanced masculinity. By offering Kobe Bryant an opportunity for failure, Bradford acknowledges the instability of an identity as a black male athlete and recognizes the exaggeration of the possibility of a lucrative career in sports while also suggesting an identity outside of athletics through the personal pronoun, I.

In both Niagara and Kobe, Bradford exposes occluded forms of masculinity and offers alternative strategies for self-identification. Though Bradford’s paintings often take the form of abstract maps and grids, mapping urban cartography or the topography of identity, his sculptural and video work is less abstract and more engaged in the performance of identity.

Mark Bradford is on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through June 17, 2012.

Becca Roy is currently pursuing a dual master's degree in Visual and Critical Studies and Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts.

Baby boomers feared that the MTV generation of the early 1980s was composed of vapid, hyperactive, and cynical adolescents whose need for rapid-fire visual stimuli and distraction allowed them to take in and process a plethora of small pieces of information while denying them the ability to stay on any one topic long enough to ever know it more than superficially.

Although the current subjects of this discussion are a new generation of youths and the Internet and social media now occupy the spotlight of blame, much conversation still revolves around the amount of information available versus the amount of time one has to do anything meaningful with it.

One member of the MTV generation, the artist Kate Nartker, has a video piece, Ten (2012), in the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art’s 4x4 exhibition that appropriates many of the assumptions about her generation in order to produce a work that is rich not just on an aesthetic level but also on a conceptual one.

Nartker’s current practice involves pulling film stills from VHS home movies of her family and her childhood. She then translates these images into textiles by weaving them on a jacquard loom. Each woven frame is then photographed and assembled into a stop-motion video piece.

The end product of much of Nartker’s work resembles a choppy version of the original source material, with pieces of thread standing in for pixels, but Ten focuses on the creation and destruction of a portrait of the artist at age ten. The viewer sees the portrait literally woven and unwoven, as abstract pieces of thread are transformed into a representational, photo-like image and then unraveled back to threads.

Kate Nartker. Ten, 2011; animated woven cloth; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA.

At only twenty seconds long, Ten is composed of quick, MTV-style edits between each frame. Each image is barely on the screen long enough for viewers to realize what they are looking at before the loop continues to works by the other three artists. All of the works in the exhibition are serially projected onto a single screen. The other three pieces average just over six and a half minutes in running time, making Ten seem like the brief MTV ads interspersed between the channel’s programs and commercials in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Nartker’s process not only exposes a literal part of the method used in her current practice but also asks viewers to consider how little information we need to create and assign meaning. Ten shows us that sometimes a fleeting glimpse or brief recollection of a memory holds more meaning than the glut of information available to us with a simple swipe of the finger.

4x4 is on view at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art through June 14, 2012.

Michael Rothfeld is an interdisciplinary artist and writer living in San Francisco by way of New York.  He is currently pursuing his MFA in Fine Art and MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts.

The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s retrospective exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is an uncomfortable place. In every room, viewers confront photographs and videos of people of such intimate detail that one can scrutinize their every hair, freckle, and blemish. Exposed to the viewers’ probing gaze, their bodies tower with enormous vulnerability in the large color prints that fill the rooms. As if anticipating the peril of being eternalized on film, they stand so awkwardly and self-consciously that one begins to feel uncomfortable for them.

In Coney Island, N.Y., USA, June 20, 1993 (1993), an adolescent girl holds one hand clenched and the other relaxed. One wonders if the timid look in her eyes reveals the uncertainty about the appearance of her own changing body. In the Olivier series (2000–03), Dijkstra photographed a soldier over the course of three years in the military. A viewer wonders if the stiffening of his posture and brow signify the psychological and physical strain that toughened him through time. One may get close enough to these portraits to study every bit of skin, wardrobe, stance, and expression. To study them in this way is to try to understand Dijkstra’s subjects beyond the bare-fact titles and backgrounds.

One tries to read into the idiosyncrasies of the ears and toes, the striped bathing suits and twisted shoulder straps, the eyes braving the camera and eyes averted. These details are the only clues a viewer has to piece together the missing stories of lives and identities. But one cannot know exactly what stories these traits, mannerisms, and peculiarities reveal. Grouping her subjects together in one extensive exhibition, Dijkstra shows how occupying a human body can be uneasy. She exposes both the explosion of empathic imaginings and the tenacious complexity of understanding others through visual cues.

I See A Woman Crying (Weeping Woman) (2009), a video installed near the end of the exhibition, reflects the overall viewing experience. A group of schoolchildren tell what they

Rineke Dijkstra. Olivier, The French Foreign Legion, Camp Général de Gaulle, Libreville, Gabon, June 2, 2002, 2002; chromogenic print; 49 5/8 x 42 1/8 in. Courtesy the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. © Rineke Dijkstra.

see in Picasso’s painting, Weeping Woman (1937). “I see a woman crying,” one child says. “She is lonely,” says another. “Maybe she is happy, but she is crying.” “She just got a million pound bill and she can’t pay it all.” “No one likes her.” Through the children’s voices, the viewer becomes aware of the similarly imagined conjectures one has been making all along about the subjects of Dijkstra’s portraits. The rich visual details do not help viewers understand the truth about these people but instead keep them rapt before each image, searching for what is unseen.

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective is on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through May 28, 2012.

Jordan Reznick is a San Francisco–based photographer and writer with a strong interest in aesthetic philosophy and political thought. She is currently working on graduate degrees in both Photography (MFA) and Visual and Critical Studies (MA) at California College of the Arts. 

Suspended from the ceiling, a three-dimensional matrix of spherical light bulbs hangs within the Haas Atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The San Francisco–based artist Jim Campbell has programmed the LEDs that make up Exploded Views (2011) to flicker like a pixilated, cinematic screen and create recognizable but fleeting images of ghostly dancing figures, passing cars, and flying birds. Commissioned by SFMOMA, Exploded Views engages both the architecture of SFMOMA and the visitor’s experience. When seen from the ground floor, the large-scale grid of lights appears to twinkle randomly like stars in the night sky. It is only after the viewer ascends SFMOMA’s central staircase that the shadow-like images begin to come into focus.

This play between abstraction and representational imagery, uncovered by the viewer’s change in perspective, is a reoccurring theme in Campbell’s work and directly questions ideas of perception and place. Any situation, be it physical or mental, affects what and how one sees. But even when images materialize in Campbell’s work, they are often transient. In its current installation, Exploded Views is structured to be considered from only two points of view: the ground floor and the staircase balconies. As the viewer moves from one to the other, the images subsequently appear and disappear.

While exhibited in the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York, a 2010 version of Exploded Views hovered at eye level, giving viewers greater control of their spatial relationship to the piece.

Jim Campbell. Exploded Views (Improv), 2011; 2880 LEDs, custom electronics. Choreography: Alonzo King LINES Ballet. Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Courtesy of the Artist and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco and New York. Photo: Sarah Christianson.

The viewer was confronted with not only the scale of the grid but also the transition of abstract flickers of light morphing into recognizable moving images in a more immediate way. The ephemeral images sharpened and then dissolved as the viewer approached the piece, and they faded in and out of abstraction as one walked around the grid. It’s unfortunate that SFMOMA’s installation of Exploded Views is dwarfed by the vast open space of the Haas Atrium and doesn’t allow for the level of engagement seen in the previous version.

As the title suggests, Campbell’s installation attempts to visualize the notion of multiple points of view. But by providing his audience with only two, the artist limits the viewers’ perspectives.

Jim Campbell: Exploded Views is on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through September 25, 2012.

Elizabeth Moran is an artist and writer based in San Francisco. She holds a BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and is currently pursuing an MFA in Photography and MA in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

Pinocchio Is On Fire (2010) is a three-part multimedia installation on the fourth floor of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) by artist Mark Bradford. I have chosen to focus on the dim room at the intersection of three other spaces, where I’m sitting on one of four black beanbag chairs and where the short, black high-traffic carpet beneath is soft as it gives to the load of crossed legs under my worn boot. The walls are papered in sheets of newsprint—each is pressed in a way that produces a state of imperfect blackness; each individual space is ripe with potential and bound by its margins. Over one hundred of these three-foot-wide rectangles within rectangles cover the entire room. They are unified by the frailty of the material, the way the prints are wrinkled from the application of the paste, and the audible bounce of Nancy Wilson’s rich vibrato delivering an emotive ballad through two small black speakers above one of the three doorways. The visual relationships between the black prints in their intra-acting chains begin to expose a skeleton of so many extruded appendages of communication.

The vast quantity of pasted newspapers, all rendered black, reflects a negotiation with the contradictions of print media. The language normally printed in newspapers is unable to communicate the numerous and incompatible perspectives that compose each story. There are many vastly different conditions that make up the lives and relationships between a newspaper’s readers and non-readers alike. This problem is brought to bear in the immersive multi-sensory experience

Mark Bradford. Pinocchio Is On Fire, 2010; multimedia installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. © Mark Bradford.

in which Bradford has removed the closed symbols of language and replaced them with an open symbol of everything or nothing: blackness. Unlike language, here, blackness has no concrete structure and is not relied upon for congruency. Black is relative. As such, the installation functions as an anti-map, where the viewer is the key. With these newspapers, the print does not attempt to make meaning but show how meaning is made.

If Bradford’s collages are an intervention with heavily coded print media that he re-figures into an expression of urban life, then the Pinocchio Is On Fire installation is an open application of that same process. Bradford is not just showing us black-life, he is using black to show us life.

Mark Bradford is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through June 17, 2012.

Henry Witecki is an emerging visual artist, writer, and aspiring curator. Educated at the San Francisco Art Institute and Alfred University, he will receive a dual master’s degree from California College of the Arts in Visual Critical Studies and Fine Art in 2013.

In the Currents, an exhibition of Iranian-American artists curated by Taraneh Hemami and Lucy Kalyani Lin, complicates and makes personal the ways in which Iran and Iranian culture are portrayed in much of Western media.

In Azin Seraj’s video installation, kaseye sabr labriz mishavad (bowl of patience, 2012), four Iranians speak about how their lives have been affected by the United Nations sanctions against Iran. Seraj layers the footage of the speakers with that of droplets of water filling a bowl, creating contorted and muddled images of the speakers, though their voices are clearly heard. Curiously, the visual rippling effect forces a viewer to concentrate on the intonation of words—even though only Farsi-speaking viewers are likely to understand them.

Farhad Bahram’s piece, Reciprocal Subject (2012), also complicates the view of its subjects. Like Seraj, Bahram empowers the subjects and makes them anonymous, but  they share in the creation of the work. Bahram and each subject simultaneously took pictures of each other in open public spaces, and Bahram arranged the resulting color photos on a board in an apparent order or system that mimics a scrapbook, with names appearing beside each photo. Each of the faces is partially obscured by a camera, frustrating any viewer’s desire to identify the subjects. The public spaces that serve as backdrops add an additional level of neutrality and anonymity. Still, there is a complicity that only exists between Bahram and each subject, leaving viewers curious about their relationship.

Farhad Bahram. Reciprocality (2012); color photograph; 4 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Another notable piece, Flag (2012), from Sanaz Mazinani’s series “Conference of the Birds,” uses photographic images to create a patterned flag reflective not of a particular region but of a specific idea. Her flag is rooted in solidarity as opposed to being grounded in a specific physical location. The repeated images coalesce to form a tightly knit pattern that creates a visual mesh of people, places, and cultures. Mazinani’s work, along with that of Seraj and Barham, blurs the expected lines of perception and demands that viewers participate in the act of seeing not only their works but also their culture.

In the Currents is on view at the Asian Resource Center Gallery, in Oakland, through June 15, 2012.

Dorothy Santos is a freelance art writer based in San Francisco. She holds a BA in both Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco.

The Museum on the Seam huddles on a congested road in Jerusalem, its scarred facade a passing aberration amid unblemished neighbors. A physical marker of the now-invisible green line that once divided Israel and Jordan, the museum’s charred, exposed girders, bombed-out balcony, and bullet-riddled walls bear witness to violence now mostly overwritten by the bustle of the contemporary city.

Although perhaps unsurprisingly for a museum whose physical condition is so deeply constitutive of its institutional identity, many of the works in its current exhibition, contrary to the title Beyond Memory, bear witness by presenting what remains. Wim Wenders’s New York, November 8, 2001, IV (2001), a large-scale photograph of Ground Zero taken shortly after 9/11, frames the sunlit pile of detritus within a shadowy circle of skyscrapers. The photograph begs viewers to draw close, to search for a focal point in a vast, brightly illuminated chaos. Even the tractors and the cleanup crew are barely distinguishable from the devastation they are attempting to shape into order.

Shilpa Gupta’s Memory-II (2008), an architectural installation on the museum’s roof, also represents, quite literally, the physical conditions of a particular trauma. The word memory is cut into the eight-and-a-half-foot, spike-topped cement wall, creating literal and linguistic peepholes onto an aestheticized miniature of the former no-man’s land between Israel and Jordan. The visual thoroughfares nudge viewers to consider how their m- or e-shaped view of the city and its turbulent past are necessarily mediated by personal and cultural memories of the original wall, and, in turn, by the extent to which both memory and Memory-II offer only a partial or partially obstructed look into what was and what is.

Shilpa Gupta, Memory-II, 2008; cement architectural installation; 331 x 6 x 102.5 in. Courtesy of the Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem.

These more iconic representations of historical trauma find their counterpoint in works like Gilad Ophir’s [Untitled] (2006), a photograph of an unforgiving, stone-stippled slice of the Negev Desert. This image resonates far more with the curator’s desire to reach “the viewer’s sub-conscience [sic] through metaphoric images beyond memory” than do most other works in the exhibition, for the desert floor betrays no trace of the various civilizations that have called the region home over the past 4,000 years.¹ Instead, the image becomes a blank canvas onto which the viewer can project the fabled and historic events that have taken place there: Abraham’s expulsion from Egypt, the Roman conquest of the region, centuries of nomadic crossings, and the establishment of contemporary Israeli defense bases. But regardless of their historical import or emotional power, these events all find their terminus in the bleakly delimited horizon, in the casual fact of geological indifference.

Beyond Memory is on view at The Museum on the Seam, in Jerusalem, Israel, through 2012.

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NOTES:

1. Raphie Etgar, “Curator’s Introduction,” Beyond Memory exhibition, (Museum on the Seam).

As part of our ongoing partnership with Daily Serving, Art Practical is pleased to bring you Danielle Sommer's review, “Stephanie Washburn's Twice Told,” which you can also read here at Daily Serving.

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What makes a tale “twice told”? For Nathaniel Hawthorne, who published a collection called Twice Told Tales, these were stories that had already lived one life by having been previously printed. And for William Shakespeare, who coined the phrase, a “twice-told tale” was the most tedious tale of the lot, borrowed and uninspired. Shakespeare, however, had not met Stephanie Washburn.

In the case of Washburn’s “Twice Told,” on view at the Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, the tales that repeat belong to the endless stream of images and narratives available through the television set. Washburn, a painter, breaks the fourth wall by reacting to this stream, turning the television on and smearing her screen with not just paint, but everyday household items like butter, tape, bread, and potatoes. She then sets up a Hasselblad digital camera, and snaps a picture.

The resulting images, which Washburn calls “television drawings,” don’t look much like drawings; nor is the television screen easy to spot. From a distance, many look like Abstract Expressionist paintings. The spaghetti strewn across the screen in Reception 2 (2011), and Reception 9 (2011), initially calls to mind the gestures of Jackson Pollock, although thoughts of the fleshy materiality and subversive humor of many 1970s feminist artists follow quickly.

For many of the images, including Reception 4, 5, and 13 (all 2011), it’s almost impossible to make out any specific background image beyond a field of color. The television’s tell, of course, is its glow, and that glow permeates

Stephanie Washburn. Reception 7, 2011; digital c-print; edition of 3 + 2 AP; 8 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles.

Washburn’s images: warm in some and cool in others, at times penetrating swathes of paint and at other times merely strengthening the shadows of dimensional objects.

This interplay of the television image and Washburn’s interventions occurs not just formally (in terms of light and shadow, or scale), but figuratively. In Reception 1 (2011), a rubber-gloved hand creeps onto the scene from the bottom left of the image; blending almost perfectly with a group of three hands in the background, except for the fact that the intervening (gloved) hand has a deep shadow to emphasize its physicality.

The beauty and power of Washburn’s work comes from how effortlessly the images marry both formal and conceptual references to a variety of traditionally “opposed” relationships: digital and physical, visceral and cerebral, touch and sight. It’s no wonder that the series is called “Reception”; Washburn’s photographs don’t just rework old narratives and images into new forms, but challenge us to consider our role as media consumers in the 21st century.

Twice Told is on view at Mark Moore Gallery, in Culver City, Los Angeles, through May 19, 2012.

I once walked into a small gallery under the roof of the Musée Maillol in Paris and found myself surrounded by a dozen of the French artist’s nude women in bronze. The iconic broad-shouldered figures startled me, arrested my movement. It is common in American museums to see one or two Maillols in a room—to be intrigued by their beauty, the power and grace of their form, the intensity of their gaze—but it is rare to be cornered by a posse of them.

Stephen De Staebler’s work is as far from Aristide Maillol’s as Berkeley—De Staebler’s home until his death in 2011—is from the French artist’s Roussillon. Yet the experience of walking into the de Young Museum’s retrospective of De Staebler ceramic figures brought back that startling moment in Paris. They crowd around the viewer, evoking an amalgam of the stillness of a graveyard, the gravity of a procession, the grace of a dance, and, most magically, the sentience of a living thing. Curator Timothy Anglin Burgard writes that De Staebler’s sculptures “focus instead on the transitional or metamorphic states that lie between nature and culture, life and death, integration and disintegration, and matter and spirit."¹ This is a fair statement, but I was aware as much of their persistence and repose as I was of their transitional nature. They are, like the Maillol nudes, self-possessed, self-reliant, and whole.

“Everyone...in one way or another, feels incomplete,” De Staebler proposed. “You could almost say civilization is the attempt to camouflage the fact that we’re incomplete human beings.”² Perhaps this is why De Staebler’s incomplete sculptures function as complete. They represent the experience of being embodied in their fragmentation, unfamiliarity, and unknowableness. When De Staebler said, “There is something about the fallibility of the human body that you have to come to terms with,” he meant that his sculptures come not to a resolution but to an understanding, a truce, with embodiment.³ When he gathered body parts in Thorax Figure (2008), for example, the brick of clay that surmounts the intimations of foot, ankle, calf, knee, and thigh does not merely stand in for a pelvis, it is, with only the merest articulation, pelvic. When, in works like the bronze Winged Woman Walking I (1987), De Staebler cantilevered an appendage from a shoulder, the result suspends all disbelief about both the body and its capacity to fly.

De Staebler’s figures seem utterly original, not in the sense of being unprecedented—I wasn’t surprised to find in Burgard’s

Stephen De Staebler. Thorax Figure, 2008; pigmented stoneware, porcelain, and earthenware, with surface oxides, fire brick, and stone; 68 x 17 x 16 in. Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, promised gift of the estate of Stephen De Staebler. © Estate of Stephen De Staebler. Courtesy of Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco. Photo credit: Scott McCue.

essay affirmation that De Staebler drew inspiration from Moore, Giacometti, Rodin, and Egyptian stone pharaohs—but in the impossible sense of their having been the models for these earlier developments. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin said, of translated poetry, that it “must enrich its adoptive tongue as it had changed the linguistic world of its original.”⁴ Applying the textures of rock, bone, and skin and the colors of earth, sky, and what seem the remains of ancient polychrome, De Staebler translated not the work of his predecessors but the human figure itself. He returned the body to its original language: the event of living.

Matter and Spirit: The Sculpture of Stephen De Staebler is on view at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, through May 13, 2012.

Rob Marks has an MA in visual and critical studies from the California College of Arts and writes for DailyServing. He is also the publications and training manager for the UCSF Alliance Health Project.

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NOTES:

1. Timothy Anglin Burgard, “Stephen De Staebler: Humanist Sculptor in an Existentialist Age,” Matter and Spirit: The Sculpture of Stephen De Staebler (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2012), 58.

2. Ibid, 54.

3. Ibid, 52.

4. Carolyn Forché, ed., Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 33.

When you see Scent of Mystery (2012), you see a Facebook page for Elizabeth Taylor. It is a rough sketch that shows a computer screen, not an iPhone view of Facebook. All of the words and images are written and drawn by hand. On this page, there are pictures and details of her education and work, which indicate that this is an info page on Facebook. Even though it looks very realistic, it is not a real Facebook page because Elizabeth Taylor is dead.

There are many other random things on this page that let you know it isn’t real. There is an ad for Critter Outfitters, which says, “Like this, please” under it, and there are also a lot of newer TV shows in her Facebook “likes.” Under the “Inspirational People” category, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and MLK are listed. The drawing also says that Elizabeth Taylor works at Verizon.

For her profile picture, the drawing shows a white woman in a dress with pink hair and yellow wings. I believe this work is called Scent of Mystery because it appears to be a normal Facebook page, but if you look closer, you can see that it has many random details that either would not be on Facebook or that the real Elizabeth Taylor would not have liked.

Ligorano/Reese. Scent of Mystery, 2012; ink and colored pencil; 15.5 x 16.75 in. unframed; 18.5 x 18 in. framed. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Portraiture Post Facebook is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 7, 2012. This review was produced as part of the Art Smarts workshop held in conjunction with 826 Valencia.

My name is Aaron Bendich. I am eleven-and-a-half-years old. I go to the East Bay School for Boys. I live with my sister and parents in Berkeley, California. I like to play yo-yo, draw, hang out with friends, snowboard, BMX, skateboard, ski, and stunt scooter.

Aaron Bendich. Self-Portrait Sketch, 2012; ink on paper. Courtesy of the Artist.

There are three major layers in Chris Doyle’s work Masque (2012), a beautiful watercolor with vibrant colors that have a sort of transparent feel. In the background there is a quiet, peaceful forest scene painted in cool greens, blues, and purples. This peaceful feeling is also conveyed through the simple, pleasing composition and the use of aerial perspective. There are a few trees on either side that frame the piece and the ground is blanketed in a layer of ferns, sticks, and large, leafy shrubs. The forest is a bit dark, almost like an early morning, which gives it a mysterious feel. It sort of fades out as you move backward, almost as if it is fading into the fog until the trees are faint, indistinct, barely visible shapes in the distance.

The second layer is a set of bold, black, opaque stripes—almost like a zebra—that contrasts with the transparent feel of the rest of the work. The stripes start bold, short, and thick and become longer and thinner as they near the center. They are symmetrical both horizontally and vertically, although they vary in size, shape, and width. The stripes give the piece a sense of movement, almost like waves moving in and out and up and down, as though they lie on a curved surface above the rest of the image and are moving in toward the central focal point.

The final layer is an odd, abstract shape at the center of the image. It is like a brilliant, cheerful “masque.” It is divided into small sections painted in bold, bright colors, making it seem almost as though it is coming toward you and framed by the black stripes and the quiet forest. It is symmetric about its center. It looks almost like a series of snapshots were taken of the forest floor and then cut out and pasted together to make this figure. In parts, you can see golden-brown soil with

Chris Doyle. Masque, 2012; watercolor; 44.5 x 67.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

bright green grass, shrubs, and wide leaves; there are even lines in parts that mimic the bold black stripes. The more you look at it, the more your eye transforms it into different images—a face, a rooster, a small red sandal. Its vibrant colors and varied shapes and textures, as well as the background layers, draw your eye toward it.

Overall, this image is filled with variety. There is a quiet, peaceful forest, a series of bold curves, and a brightly colored abstract figure. For me, these elements of contrast are part of what make this image so fascinating. It is filled with detail—the more you look at it, the more you see. Images pop out at you, and then something else catches your eye, and the image transforms into a different one entirely. The piece evokes feelings of peaceful, almost mysterious quiet and vibrant excitement that work together in perfect harmony. Its strong contrasts, bold shapes, colors, and rich details leave you still thinking about it and the powerful images and emotions it conveys.

Portraiture Post Facebook is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 7, 2012. This review was produced as part of the Art Smarts workshop held in conjunction with 826 Valencia.

My name is Laura Pierson. I am twelve years old and I go to Hillcrest School. I am an only child and I live with parents in Oakland, California. I enjoy drawing (I do graphite landscapes and oil pastel studies of Impressionist paintings), writing (last November, I wrote a forty-thousand-word novella for National Novel Writing Month), and doing math problems.

The first thing you see in Julie Heffernan’s Study for Self-Portrait in Parts (2012) is the tree hung with body parts on the right side of the painting. There are decapitated heads all around the tree. They give off a sinister mood of captivity and death. The tree reminds me of a tree so abundantly full of fruit that some of it is falling off—except here, the fruits are carcasses.

On the left, the landscape is less scary and serious than on the right-hand side of the painting; it shows an odd but interesting tree with palm-like leaves branching out of a sphere near the top. Behind the tree are gentle, orange clouds that are painted with very clear, harsh brushstrokes; they transition from blue on top to white on the bottom. The background shows a rather normal picture: a lake of gray-blue water and shadowed trees lining the banks of the lake behind the tree hung with bodies.

To the right of the palm-like tree, small, tan-furred animals that look like baby lions pace around, waiting for a new victim to hang on the body-part tree. In reality, humans hunt animals with their advanced weaponry. In this painting, however, it seems as though the artist has turned the tables, suggesting to a viewer what it would be like to be at the lower end of the food chain.

In and around the tree are multiple heads and other body parts that are painted in small, careful brushstrokes, such as the heads of a blonde woman wearing lipstick, an almost bald man with big ears and big lips, and an angry man with a large nose and red hat. There are rubbery legs draped on a branch; a woman’s body without arms, legs, or a head; and even a pig’s snout stuck onto the tree. Blue, shadowed faces behind

Julie Heffernan. Study for Self-Portrait in Parts, 2012; oil on canvas; 11 x 14 x 1.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

the clear body parts give the tree an icy vibe. The tree sits on a pile of mossy, green rocks. After looking at it for a while, you start to see heads appear among the rocks; they’re mixed in so that you don’t notice them at first. However, one body in the pile of rocks is very noticeable. It is a rubbery body that has been flattened to look like it has no bones or organs.

It seems that the artist was trying to tell a joke with her title, but the work turned into a serious study of life and death. Overall the painting is a good example of a balance between dark and jesting moods, as well as two different styles of painting. It gives viewers many ideas to build on and even creates its own story in the process. Though there is a lot of death in the painting, there is also a feeling of life given off by the trees thriving all around and the little animals eating the dead. This painting shows you the unyielding story of life.

Portraiture Post Facebook is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 7, 2012. This review was produced as part of the Art Smarts workshop held in conjunction with 826 Valencia.

My name is Britta Gruner. I am twelve years old and am in seventh grade. I like to travel and have been to Italy, Spain, Germany, and Thailand. My favorite books are fantasy and adventure novels. I enjoy listening to stories and can’t sit still for very long, unless I am doing something interesting. Some day I would like to climb Mt. Whitney.

In Skull of Santo Guerro (III) (2011) by Al Farrow, the first thing that hits you is the dark church divided into two parts—the square nave and the tall, straight, almost breathtaking triangle of a steeple, the sides of which come together under a tall crucifix and figure of Jesus Christ. The steeple is important because of its awe-inspiring height and straightness.

After a while, you look through the looking glass into the nave, where you may expect to see bloodshed, but instead you see a slightly bashful skull resting on a rich but faded, thick carpet. The looking glass manipulates the image of the skull to create the illusion that it is bashful with its large eyes and almost pointed bottom half. The relatively large skull seems to be taking a deep breath and filling up the room. Ironically, it seems like the most innocent thing in the spooky church.

The church itself is made of guns, gun parts, bullets, and metal. The pistols lean against the bottom of the steeple, helping it transition from a square to a triangle. The turrets are literally made from turret extensions and the rest of the material looks like melted gun metal, which helps give the sculpture a mood of darkness, night, and evil. The guns blend so perfectly together and with the church structure that it takes you a second to realize that they are, in fact, gun parts. They tell of a somber battle massacre of which the skull is the last relic.

The sculpture is most remarkable in the fact that it needs and is also a story; without the story, it wouldn’t exist or make sense. Why a church? Perhaps he uses a church because churches are always sanctuary. Perhaps the gun parts show that evil and death pervade everywhere, even in a seemingly restful church. Or maybe the church caused the battle, and the poor skull belongs to someone forced into the war. Either way, the tall awesome, imposing, dark building belongs in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s creepiest stories.

Al Farrow is clearly a brilliant artist who is incredibly original and knows how to manipulate humanity’s fear of death, war, bloodshed, and treason. He makes sculptures into tales of darkness by using material like an author uses words.

Al Farrow. Skull of Santo Guerro (III), 2011; guns, gun parts, bullets, cartridge shells, steel, brass, lead shot, glass, bone, antique textitle (mid-sixteenth century Italian silk with gold and silver embroidery); 52 x 18 x 22 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Portraiture Post Facebook is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 7, 2012. This review was produced as part of the Art Smarts workshop held in conjunction with 826 Valencia.

My name is Irene Gerenrot. I am twelve years old and in seventh grade. I enjoy reading and writing fictional stories and poetry. After school and on the weekends, I participate in art lessons, aerobatics, and math club. I live with my mom, brother, and cat.

Masque is a watercolor that was painted in 2012, by Chris Doyle. In this painting, Doyle puts a foggy forest background behind a bright figure in the middle. The figure has vibrant colors and looks like a shaman, who is a person who knows how to heal and use magic. The figure has a helmet on its head and looks like it has a robe flowing from its back. Under what could be a red heart or sandal in the middle of the figure, you can see hands that look like crab pincers, but which are green and coming out of the robe.

The shaman figure looks like it is sending shockwaves throughout the forest, but the dark stripes coming from the “shaman” look like the stripes on a zebra. However, the white on the zebras has been erased so that you just seen its black stripes. Instead of one, there are two zebras.

When you look at Masque in another way, it looks as if there are feet on the top of the shaman figure. And if you look hard enough, you can see that there are two indents on either side of the shaman figure and more above it. An indent straight above the shaman figure makes it look like a mask. When you look at Masque from far away, it looks scary and as if it was going to jump out at you. This is why it is called Masque, and it could be a portrait of a dream or a vision.

Chris Doyle. Masque, 2012; watercolor; 44.5 x 67.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Portraiture Post Facebook is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 7, 2012. This review was produced as part of the Art Smarts workshop held in conjunction with 826 Valencia.

Jade Fa is twelve years old. She lives in San Francisco but is originally from Taiwan. She goes to Chinese American International School and is in sixth grade. She loves to draw and to read a lot of books. Her favorite books include The Hunger Games series, the Harry Potter series, and the Warriors series.

Jade Fa. Self-portrait sketch, 2012. Ink on paper. Courtesy of the Artist.

Janus (2010) is a work of art made by Scott Greene. It is a black-and-white drawing of a head with two faces looking in opposite directions. The head rests on a tree that is marked with paint and cuts. The base of the tree is littered with different war helmets and garbage sacks.

The faces are very different from one another. One of the faces is blank except for a joker-like expression painted on to make the face look like a mask. The other face is relaxed and does not show any emotions. Its mouth is open and it is apparently eating a round object. The backs of the faces merge into one another, sharing hair that is adorned with a bone and some flowers.

The drawing gives you a sense of lies and decay. A partially hidden rat and a rotting fruit, along with the garbage bags, show that it is a place for trash. The war helmets show that war and death would be common around these figures, and the joker face signifies lies, trickery, and deceit.

This drawing is a unique portrait of two different faces. The tributes littered around the tree vary from spears and doorknobs to feathers. Overall, Janus is not a joyful drawing.

Scott Greene. Janus, 2010; pen and brush and India ink on paper; 29 x 23 in. unframed; 41 x 35 in. framed. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Portraiture Post Facebook is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 7, 2012. This review was produced as part of the Art Smarts workshop held in conjunction with 826 Valencia.

Kyra Newcomb is twelve years old, and she likes: pie, manga, optical illusions, furry stuff, wings, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, messy projects, reading, Kirby, and robots.

Kyra Newcomb. Self-portrait sketch, 2012; graphite on paper. Courtesy of the Artist.

The sculpture Cure (orange, cherry, and grape) (2012) by Walter Robinson represents three different flavored lollipops: orange, cherry, and grape. Instead of candy, these “lollipops” have the almost life-size heads of a man on the end of their sticks. The man seems middle-aged or older because of his many wrinkles and expression lines, his baldness, and his facial hair. Each head is exactly the same except for its color. The heads are sparkly and shiny with clear glassy eyes staring straight at you.

I really connected to this piece because it reminds me of when I am sick. If I am sick, a Popsicle or lollipop can be part of a “cure.” Even though candy is supposed to make you feel better, the lollipops in Cure actually scare you. The man does not seem happy, so the work does not want to make you eat these lollipops even if you could.

The expression on the man’s face can be confusing at first. It is hard to know exactly what he is thinking or responding to. His stern gaze and turned down mouth gives you the impression that he is frustrated or angry. Although this is not what the piece's artist looks like, I imagine that these sculptures represent his internal feelings at difficult, maddening times of his life. He must feel as though he is held back in some way, which might cause him to lose his temper.

When I first looked at this piece of art, the colors were deceptive. The way the light shines on each different color makes the face seem more and more angry: the orange head looks the least angry, whereas the purple head looks the angriest. I think it appears this way because purple is the darkest color, so the facial features look darker and more menacing. Because there are no details and viewers do not know what is going on around him, we make up our own stories about this man. We may never know who he is or why he's angry, but that’s the fun part—it leaves you with a mystery to solve.

Walter Robinson. Cure (orange, cherry and grape), 2012; polyester resin, wood, epoxy, metalflake; 36 x 6 x 6 in. each. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco

Portraiture Post Facebook is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 7, 2012. This review was produced as part of the Art Smarts workshop held in conjunction with 826 Valencia.

Lilah Beldner is a thirteen-year-old seventh grader who goes to Live Oak school in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. Her favorite subjects are humanities and math. Lilah goes to the San Francisco Ballet School and loves to dance. Part of her interest to do the Art Smarts workshop comes from her parents, who are both involved in the art world.

Noise Study 001 (2012) by Anthony Discenza is a roughly four-by-five-foot, black-and-white picture made up entirely of what looks like Quick Response codes (QR codes). The picture is sort of an optical illusion. At a close-up glance, it looks like one big QR code, but when you look at it from about ten feet away, you can see that the slightly lighter shapes make up a picture of the famous singer Britney Spears.

Even though she almost looks like a shadow, she looks like she is posing for a picture. There is no background, just grayish black-and-white shapes. You can tell it is Britney Spears because of her face, facial expression, and hair, which you can tell is blond because it is lighter and you can see shadows behind it.

I feel that the artist was trying to show how he sees Britney Spears. The reason the picture is made of what look like QR codes is to make it more interesting and more eye-catching. When you are looking at the picture, you really have to look at it carefully to see the image inside.

Anthony Discenza. Noise Study 001, 2012; archival inkjet print, edition of 3; 44 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Portraiture Post Facebook is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 7, 2012. This review was produced as part of the Art Smarts workshop held in conjunction with 826 Valencia.

Bella is eleven years old and goes to Ocean Shore School. She is in sixth grade and likes to read fiction, listen to music, and hang out with friends. Bella plays the trumpet in her band class and has been playing for about a year.

When a twenty-three-year-old photographer, Arthur Tress, arrived in San Francisco in March 1964, he discovered a city on the brink of a cultural revolution. Bay Area students were ramping up their civil rights protests and preparing for the Summer of Love. In one short month, Cow Hollow was the stage for both the twenty-eighth Republican National Convention and the Beatles’ first North American tour. Tress documented it all on his Rolleicord camera.

With the sensibility of a surrealist-cum-street-photographer, Tress blends the absurd with the real. In one photograph, Untitled (Ocean Beach), a police officer on horseback appears beside a toy tricycle. Whether the photograph is staged is unclear, but the unlikely combination of the three subjects renders the scene humorous and, on further inspection, unsettling. The tricycle lacks a rider. The officer’s face is obscured by dark sunglasses and twisted into a grimace. The image suggests that childlike wonder shrinks in the presence of authority, and humor is complicated with anxiety and absence.

Tress also transposes these playful sensibilities onto more overtly political subjects. At a rally for the Republican senator Barry Goldwater, in Untitled (Cow Palace, Daly City), a young woman bedecked with buttons tilts her head with sass. Her largest button reads, “If I Were 21, I’d Vote for Barry.” At the same rally, Beatles fans protest the Goldwater supporters with “Ringo for President” posters. One of Tress’s photographs, Untitled (Union Square), shows a Goldwater marching band brushing against this Beatle mania: a steady line of marching band hats organizes the frame, but the photo bursts with a cacophony of discordant shapes, slogans, and agendas. Tress evokes unease through sidelong glances and the friction of opposing camps in close contact.

Untitled (Coit Tower), 1964; Printed 2010–11; Selenium-toned silver gelatin print; 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The political tension Tress documents extends to racial anxieties. San Francisco’s Auto Row erupted into protests when car dealers refused to hire minorities. In Untitled (1000 Van Ness Avenue), an African American man in front of a Cadillac showroom glares intensely at something beyond the lens’s frame. Yet, amid the turmoil of rapid social changes, Tress still spots whimsical moments. In another photo also named Untitled (1000 Van Ness Avenue), a delicate girl in a square-patterned dress watches an Auto Row protest from a stairway. We see the scene from behind her head and are left to imagine what she glimpses. Tress asks us to look at the highly charged summer of 1964 in San Francisco from the perspective of this child: with anxiety and a dose of wonder.

Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964 is on view at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, through June 3.

Rebecca Huval has written for The Miami Herald, Mother Jones, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. You can find her on Twitter @bhuval.

John Cage once told the philosopher and poet Joan Retallack that his system of indeterminacy—often misunderstood as a complete abdication of control—shifted the province of intention “from the responsibility to choose…to the responsibility to ask.”¹ Cage’s questions bounded his work, determining, for example, the range of colors, lines, or images from which his chance operations would “choose.” This approach limited but did not eliminate the intrusion of intention in his artistic process. It complicated and reframed the idea of artistic agency, long before appropriation artists were cutting and pasting. At Crown Point Press, on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Cage’s birth, visitors can view a selection of the visual work Cage produced with the help of the press’s founder and pioneering printer, Kathan Brown.

Despite Cage’s process, nothing in the appearance of his work suggests a silencing of intention. In Without Horizon #33 (1992), a meandering brush line evokes a hill. An object in front of the line evokes seaweed or a beached sea animal. A smudge above the line resembles a hazy sun. Without Horizon #33 seems deliberately  representational, but the placement of every mark is the result of a chance operation.

Cage was deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism’s “whispered truths,” especially “Make no impression.” He touches a paradox within this statement, revealing how the almost impressionless (and intentionless) registers deeply in a viewer even twenty-five years after a work’s making. At one moment, Eninka #28 (1986), for which Cage both smoked and branded the paper, appears gentle and suggests a leaf seen from above, falling to the ground. At another moment, it appears violent: a current, a vortex, an abyss. Cage told Retallack that Mark Tobey's painting, Untitled (1961), was his "guiding star," exclaiming: “What’s so beautiful is that there’s no gesture in it.” In Eninka #28, Cage’s process results in a product that is perhaps not gestureless but defiant of the stability of any single gesture.

Where R=Ryoanji: R3 (1983) is, at first, anything but ethereal or gestureless. The page, covered by the outlines of fifteen stones drawn 3,375 times (or 15³), is concrete, resolute.

John Cage, Eninka 28, 1986; one in a series of fifty smoked and branded prints on gampi paper chine colle; 25 x 19 in; published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco. Courtesy of Crown Point Press.

Yet even in a piece so worked by Cage’s hand, the gestures seem gestureless, defying the very mark of his insistent mark-making. The work does not fade into a mass of grayness but resolves instead into an intricate web, a forest of chance encounters.

Cage’s retreat from intention and his predilection toward the gestureless underpin the work at Crown Point. It would be a mistake, however, to conceive of the results as illustrations of a theory. Cage was delighted when he found beauty in the works he made, and an unexpected beauty is, indeed, the lasting impression of the exhibit.

JOHN CAGE IS ON VIEW AT THE CROWN POINT PRESS GALLERY, IN SAN FRANCISCO, THROUGH MARCH 31, 2012.

Rob Marks has an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the California College of Arts and writes for DailyServing. He is also the Publications and Training Manager for the UCSF Alliance Health Project.

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NOTES:

1. All quotations from Joan Retallack, ed., Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1996).

The works in Afterimage all stem from Hillary Wiedemann’s fascination with and research on the sun and the phenomenology of perception, but the tactile and participatory qualities of the works on display dominate the experience of the exhibition. In Sun Shadow (2012), a three-channel projection, viewers’ bodies cast shadows that block parts of the red-green-blue (RGB) spectrum. Their movements expose the science of color in light, while creating a tantalizing kinesthetic experience, in which viewers direct the mixing of color.

Viewers have no choice but to interact with Untitled (for Goethe) (2012), an installation of glass microspheres that coat the white floor tiles. The microspheres elicit an immediate tactile response: viewers not only see the changes in illumination as the light is reflected on the microspheres but also experience the spheres’ sandy texture underfoot. These sensations are constant throughout the exhibition, resulting in an involuntary yet sustained interaction with the piece. Indeed, the only aspect of the show that was physically separate from the floor tiles was Wiedemann’s looped audio installation 8 minutes, 18 seconds (2012), which includes processed and slowed recordings of solar oscillations. Wiedemann presents the ominous low buzzes and booms of the solar oscillations in a small room covered in black felt, with the window blackened by vinyl. In this absolutely dark void, an audience listens to the sounds of the brightest light.

The work in Afterimage illustrates the artist’s keen understanding of how light operates, as well as a serious

Sun Shadow, 2012; three-channel projection, looped; 72 in. diameter. Courtesy of the Artist and MacArthur B Arthur, Oakland. Photo: Kija Lucas.

dedication to a research-based practice. Many of the works have specific references and material sources (for example, solar recordings), but there is no didactic impulse, nor is the exhibition’s checklist annotated. Viewers can react only to what they visually and aurally experiences. This speaks to the title of the exhibition, which refers to a visual image or other sense impression that persists after the stimulus that caused it is no longer present. Wiedemann’s research acts as a stimulus producing an experience whose provenance is not overtly legible to its audience, creating a semblance of what was once present. Viewers are left not with a cerebral interpretation of the content of the work but a kinesthetic and aesthetic experience of awe, inspiration, and play.

Afterimage is on view at MacArthur B Arthur, in Oakland, CA, through April 1.

Dana Hemenway is an artist based in San Francisco. She received her MFA in Studio Art from Mills College in 2010.

Subterranean Gallery director Ayla Rexroth and cocurator Clayton Skidmore have organized the Hot Tub Dialogues, an unconventional discursive platform that brings members of the art community together in a hot tub inside the basement-level apartment gallery in Kansas City, Missouri.

The inaugural event took place February 11, 2012, with experimental sounds by the local composers Leah Sproul Pulatie and Gregory Gagnon kicking things off. In the hot tub were the artist Hesse McGraw, chief curator of the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and the architect Josh Shelton, a principal at the Kansas City–based firm el dorado inc. Their slideshow format emphasized forward-thinking methodologies for negotiating art through nontraditional spaces, such as a storage facility, with tongue-in-cheek exhibition titles like Hopey Changey Things (adopting Sarah Palin’s phrase). The rich collaborations that result in the Hot Tub Dialogues between architects, curators, and artists often play with undefined boundaries and raise questions about what conditions enable boundary-pushing work.  

One week later, Kate Hackman, codirector of the Charlotte Street Foundation, and Raechell Smith, chief curator of the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, entered the tub. The local band Metatone opened the evening. Hackman and Smith’s format made the audience privy to an intimate conversation between these long-time friends and professional colleagues. Initially theatrically loud, the conversation volume soon dropped to a whisper,

Hot Tub Dialogues; Kate Hackman and Raechell Smith, February 18, 2012. Courtesy of Subterranean Gallery, Kansas City, MO.

causing the audience to listen intently in order to catch the speakers’ words, including snippets of information such as a brief reference to “Twenty-Six Big Ideas,” which was never fully explained.¹

Indeed, the intimate and brief nature of the sessions left questions unanswered and trajectories incomplete. For example, McGraw’s opening line, “We are trying to catch up to Duchamp,” left plenty of lingering questions even after a fifty-minute discussion about it. Although ephemeral, these conversations set the groundwork for creative communities to reach across divisions and to demonstrate optimism for future dynamic exchanges. 

Nicole Mauser obtained an MFA from the University of Chicago in 2010 and was a recipient of a Post-MFA Teaching Fellowship in 2011. Mauser is a painter as well as cofounder and codirector of Plug Projects, an artist-run gallery based in Kansas City, Missouri.

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NOTES:

1. The "Twenty-Six Big Ideas" are a part of the Visual Arts Constortium's plan for the arts in Kansas City.

In April 2011, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art installed Ferment, the twenty-fifth iteration of Roxy Paineʼs steely Dendroid franchise, on the south lawn of the museum. It arrived with great fanfare, of course, with speeches and panels and ribbons and bows. It was hailed in the press as a new icon on the cityʼs cultural horizon. Films of the installation were posted on the web. Social networks were employed.

The museum’s newly-appointed director, Julian Zugazagoitia, declared: “This tree will bear fruit for future generations of artists.” Jan Schall, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, proclaimed: “Ferment will be the reigning monarch on that hillside.”

The carefully staged unveiling of Ferment came off without a hitch, and the public has since embraced the piece accordingly. Its theatricality is undeniable, and its implications are comfortably vague—yet it almost suggests that dystopia might not be such a bad place after all.

Apart from the general public, however, and contrary to Zugazagoitiaʼs bubbling Edenic optimism, many artists in Kansas City cast wary eyes on this Dendroid. Its arrival seems more akin to the opening of a new Bass Pro Shop, or an IKEA, than an art event. Its benefits are remote, its dialogue rehearsed, its beauty wholly subsidized—a hollow meme of contemporaneity. 

But there is hope.

Shortly after the dedication of Ferment, another tree appeared on the museum lawn, just south and east of the Dendroid: a tidy sapling, Acer saccharum, otherwise known as a sugar maple. This particular tree does not belong to the museum.

A Tree for Roxy Paine was planted in the middle of the night by the Minister of Information, a local artist who resides in the margins of the art scene. As of this writing, nearly a year later, the museum is still unaware of its presence.

The Ministerʼs tree is not a critique. Quite the contrary; its effect is to make Ferment soboliferous, as if the sculpture has 

The Minister of Information. A Tree For Roxy Paine, May 2011; digital photo. Courtesy Warrior Ant Press.

underground stems that form new plants nearby. It presides as a subliminal volunteer, ennobling a piteous monarch that would otherwise stand lifeless and alone upon the hill. It is a gesture that indemnifies both Paine and the museum against the childish notion that the world should behave any differently here than it does anywhere else.

Sooner or later, the museum will recognize the Ministerʼs tree as an unwelcome visitor, and it will be removed. It must be done. In the meantime, A Tree For Roxy Paine is well worth a visit. It reminds us that beneath the rigid canopy of an inevitable market there exists another world, teeming with life.

A Tree for Roxy Paine is currently on view on the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, MO.

A. Bitterman is an artist and writer in Kansas City where he lives with his cruel, rancorous wife, Mrs. Bitterman, and their five despicable children. Since his last good night's sleep in 1998, he has spent the better part of 12 years trying to use the word "soboliferous" in a sentence.

Mariah Robertson’s installation activates Grand Arts’ gallery space: framed works lean against temporary walls jutting at odd angles, photographs descend from the ceiling and tumble over the concrete floor. All eight of the New York–based artist’s photographs on display in Let’s Change—five framed, one rolled into a cylinder, and two draped from the ceiling and over walls—simultaneously function as sculpture, painting, and photography.

Robertson employs traditional darkroom techniques, such as cutting negatives and exposing chemical-coated paper to light, but to atypical ends. In 13 (2012), her process is akin to an abstract expressionist painter’s: she splatters and drips chemicals, creating splashes and streaky fields of colors. The artist’s controlled exposures leave behind silhouettes of her hands in 100 (2012); they are visual remnants of the work’s creation. Elsewhere, the photos lead a viewer’s eye in a nonlinear fashion from one recognizable image to another, as in the high-rise buildings and beach landscapes in 4 (2011) or the cartoonish skulls and crossbones replaced by male nudes in 11 (2012).

But it’s not always easy to get a good look at those figures and landscapes. The undulating folds of 4 obscure much of the imagery covering the one-hundred-foot-long by thirty-inch-wide sheet of Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper. It’s impossible to see the entire one hundred feet of either 4 or 11 from a single vantage point. Viewers must walk around the gallery and crane their necks, stoop, or squat to take in an entire tableau. Robertson’s photographs are sites of a tug-of-war between two-dimensional image and three-dimensional form—with gallery-goers’ bodies in the middle. Here, photographs transcend their pictorial dimensions, becoming the materials for a sculptural installation that directs a viewer’s four-dimensional movement.

Mariah Robertson. Let’s Change; installation view, Grand Arts, Kansas City, 2012. Courtesy of Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO.

In Let’s Change, Robertson revels in her medium’s process and materials, all the while pushing its limits. Instead of capturing an instant in time or relating a narrative, Robertson’s photographs record the moment of their making and reveal themselves over time and space to the viewer. It’s a revelation worth taking in.

Let’s Change is on view at Grand Arts, in Kansas City, MO, through April 7, 2012.

Theresa Bembnister’s art writing appears regularly in the Pitch.

The World Series, a 2011 photographic project by the San Francisco–based artist Allan deSouza, comments on the paradoxical nature of today’s global travel and migration. Some of the artist’s pictures, such as beautiful aerial views of ocean and clouds like Specter (2011), invoke romantic notions of boundlessness. Others, however, contrast that ideal of unfettered mobility with images that reflect a society increasingly concerned with armoring itself against “alien” elements.

It must be mentioned that deSouza’s project was envisioned as a contemporary response to Jacob Lawrence’s epic The Migration Series (1941), sixty paintings on panel that commemorate the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North. DeSouza’s photographs deal with the same narrative of immigrants’ hopes and their struggles for survival in conditions of hostility and adversity, though his treatment is more indirect.

A number of photographs on view address the restriction of movement. Prohibitory signs are amply featured, the most memorable of which is a red sign with the words “No Entry” on an airport runway. It’s an ironic juxtaposition, considering that runways and planes have long been symbols of global connectedness and the freedom of movement. In another image, the person greeting visitors with outstretched arms on a “Welcome” billboard is a policeman. That uncertain welcome is echoed in an image of a “No Crossing” sign, in which the human figure is not just covered by red lines but also torn and mangled. The photograph speaks of the violence of trespass, of illegal border crossing, the punishment for doing so, and the

No Entry, from The World Series, 2011; Chromogenic print, 12 x 16 in. Courtesy of Talwar Gallery, New York, and SF Camerawork, San Francisco.

debate about who is or is not fit to immigrate. Fittingly, one of the photographs directly concerns animosity towards immigrants: protesters hold anti-immigrant signs, and some of them point their cameras at the artist (who was born in Kenya to Indian parents).

DeSouza’s series illustrates a number of tensions: between capitalism’s desire for the free movement of people and capital and the need for ever-increasing control; between immigrants and nativist reactionaries; between the frequent-flying upper classes who feel entitled to a global welcome and the involuntarily mobile members of global precariat. These tensions are ably summarized by Pressure (2011), a photograph of a passenger plane with a warning on the side that reads: “Contents may be under pressure.”

The World Series is on view at SF Camerawork, in San Francisco, through February 25, 2012.

Julia Glosemeyer is a writer based in San Francisco. She is the art correspondent for the Eventseekr blog.

As the collective vision of the art historian Arlene Raven, the designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and the artist Judy Chicago, the Woman’s Building produced a prolific, inclusive system that ensured adequate press, professional visibility, publishing, and studio and exhibition spaces for women artists. While the exhibition Doin’ It In Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building may appear to be heavy on documentary material, it stands to reason that the legacy of a space that emphasized performances, happenings, consciousness-raising sessions, screenings, and action-based works, would be manifest on paper. The second volume of the stunning two-part catalogue for the exhibition quotes Derrida regarding this archival impulse: “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory.”¹As an ephemera enthusiast, I see the inclusion of these  materials as a necessary and expected aspect of the presentation of this history.

Combining a variety of documentation in addition to artworks, the exhibition demonstrates the various ways these goals were accomplished: Levrant de Bretteville’s Womanhouse catalogues (1972); a moving 2006 video tribute by Cheri Gaulke to the late Arlene Raven; and selected responses submitted to What Is Feminist Art? (1976–77), a project in which Raven, Ruth Iskin, and Lucy Lippard asked women (such as Harmony Hammond and Rita Mae Brown) to respond to the titular question. In the video First Day Feminist Studio Workshop (1980), filmed by Nancy Angelo, the students speak about their expectations and initial impressions of female-centric learning. They almost unanimously wanted the relationships, conversations, and activity to continue after classes ended. The program’s philosophy encouraged collaborative work rather than the art school paradigm of breeding a few celebrated and solitary

Doin’ It In Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, 2012; installation view, Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design. Photo: Susannah Magers.

artists. It challenged participants to cultivate community with lasting political impact. The exhibition’s documentary archive details the activities and efforts to build and sustain the community of the Woman’s Building in order to ensure its availability for generations to come.

In a letter written upon the decision to close the Woman’s Building in 1991, the Board concludes with the following statement, about donating its archives to the Smithsonian: “We are proud to have insured that the extraordinary history of the Woman’s Building will be visible.” Following the Smithsonian’s involvement in one of the most inflammatory censorship cases in recent history—the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire In My Belly (1987) from an exhibition—the control over the presentation of history is more important than ever. Doin’ It In Public continues the tradition of self-historicizing as a mode of preservation.

Doin’ It In Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building is on view at the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles, through February 26, 2012.

Susannah Magers is an independent curator currently based in San Francisco. She received her MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts in 2011.

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NOTES:

1. Alexandra Juhasz, “A Process Archive: The Grand Circularity of Woman’s Building Video” in Doin’ It In Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, 111 (Los Angeles: Otis College of Art and Design, 2011). Originally published in Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Shotgun Reviews is an open forum where the broader community is invited to contribute reviews and commentary. It includes short format pieces (250-400 words) that, as the name implies, offer quick and timely responses to an exhibition, event, or even something you’ve read here. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review for an upcoming issue, please contact Alyse Mason Brill at alyse@artpractical.com for guidelines.

Shotgun Review was founded in 2005 by Joseph del Pesco and Scott Oliver. Most of our current regular contributors began their relationship with Art Practical as writers for Shotgun Review. Since October 2009, all shotgun reviews have appeared as part of the issues for Art Practical, and you can see the site's archive at http://www.artpractical.com/shotgun_review_archive/

Oceans and Campfires: Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue, curated by Hou Hanru, is the first exhibition to bring together the work of Sekula and Serralongue, two prominent contemporary artists who investigate the potentials of documentary film and photography. The similarities between their practices quickly come into focus: both artists are globe-trotters, both challenge mass-media images of the world, both strive to portray human subjects in a non-exploitative way, and both refuse to make overly dramatic images. But even without excess drama and pathos, it’s clear where the artists’ sympathies lie.

The only film in the exhibition, The Forgotten Space (2010) by Sekula and Noël Burch, focuses on the transportation of goods by sea—a fairly unpopular subject in an age infatuated with the concept of immateriality. Consumers of these goods are embedded in a complex network that includes the extremely underpaid workers in manufacturing (and primarily third-world) countries, the people whose homes are lost to expanding ports, and those who labor for the transport system in a deregulated field where precarious conditions and low wages are the norm. For Sekula, the ocean is not an empty or neutral space: it is where the paths of consumption, exploitation, and struggle converge.

Also on view are images of life at sea and the activity of the ports from Sekula’s series Ship of Fools (1999–2010), as well as cabinets with little objects, such as flags, toy ships, and figurines, which are arranged to form scenes of maritime exploitation, as in Docker’s Museum (2010). Nearby are extended quotations from the artist. One poignant example is a story about a crewman who had to paint over the ship’s name during an oceanic passage because the vessel had been sold. Again, Sekula makes clear the links formed between the clean (information exchange and trade) and the dirty (dangerous manual labor).

Allan Sekula. Churn, from the series Ship of Fools, 1999–2010; chromogenic print; 48 x 52 in. Courtesy of the Artist; Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica; and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris.

Bruno Serralongue’s photographs also eschew spectacle in favor of complexity. The artist is interested in struggle and change: his subjects are the workers’ strikes in France (New Fabris, Châtellerault, jeudi 30 juillet 2009, from 2009), the festivities celebrating the newly won independence of South Sudan (Carnival of Independence, 2011), and the aftermath of the formation of the state of Kosovo (Kosovo (ensemble 3), 2010). All of those situations and events have the potential to engender iconic, emotionally charged images, but Serralongue forgoes melodrama in favor of the prosaic. He prefers a down-to-earth perspective on radical events and their consequences, which encourages a connection with the viewer. Overall, Oceans and Campfires is a very timely exhibition. After the tumultuous events of 2011, this exhibition reminds us that politics is entwined with everyday life.

Oceans and Campfires: Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue is on view at the Walter & McBean Galleries at San Francisco Art Institute through February 18, 2012.

Julia Glosemeyer is a writer based in San Francisco. She is the art correspondent for the eventseekr blog.

Bold lines, audacious coloration, and hidden images characterize Fernando Orellana’s latest series, Slideways, currently on view at the Satellite66. From painting to electronics to robotics, Slideways showcases Orellana’s multifaceted art practice in a series of two-dimensional works that combine traditional techniques with digital tools. Orellana rejects the notion that painting is “dead,” instead demonstrating that postmodern works can abide by longstanding traditions, albeit through nontraditional tools. Orellana has found a way to create something wonderfully enticing and fresh at the convergence of old and new technologies.

Orellana’s primary tools, a Wacom tablet and stream-of-consciousness method, allow him to produce prolifically. Orellana’s work, like neo-expressionist paintings, employs a wide array of color and bold, non-tentative line work. Because Orellana makes no preliminary sketches, his pieces emerge from his instinct in the moment and follow no particular order or guidance. The gesture of the work is steeped in the use of blind and modified contour drawing. Unlike the modern style, the work is filled with unmarked surfaces reserved purely for color rather than the textural quality and visible brushstrokes of Neo-Expressionism. In Invisible Canine (2011), the intense and laborious-appearing visual elements of line, shape, and form coalesce into a dense subject matter that not only make the canine visible but also a crucial part of the composition.

Invisible Canine, 2011; Archival inkjet print; 48 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Satellite 66, San Francisco.

Slideways engages a dialogue between the perennial traditionalist and postmodern artist. Orellana’s work presents an unlikely intersection of technology-enabled production and organic notions of the creative process. Slideways reminds viewers that, technological tools and seamless lines notwithstanding, the artist, not the technology, created this body of work.

Slideways is on view at Satellite 66, in San Francisco, through December 31, 2011.

Dorothy Santos is a freelance art writer based in San Francisco. She holds a BA in both Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco.

The Soldier’s Tale, created by Igor Stravinsky with C.F. Ramuz and first performed in 1918, is presented at the Aurora Theatre Company as a mix of music, acting, dance, and puppetry directed by Muriel Maffre and Tom Ross. Performances take place on a small stage that measures about ten by twenty feet. The intimate venue is a vital part of the success of this production, which is both sparse and riveting.

The story is a classic Faustian tale about human vulnerability and temptation. Donald Pippin’s translation of the text is poetic and, in this version, three actors play four characters: a soldier named Joseph, a narrator, the devil, and the daughter of the king. The performers transform each of the character’s interactions into enchanting exchanges. Maffre controls Joseph, a four-foot puppet, and embodies the character’s emotions and demeanor as she manipulates the figure’s limbs. When Maffre plays the daughter of the king, she steps away from the puppet and provides a fleeting moment of balletic grace in a sweeping solo. Her versatility as a performer and co-director of the production is extraordinary.

In her utilization of a puppet to represent the soldier, Maffre emphasizes the way that the military, the devil, and the lure of money manipulate her character. But more importantly, her use of the puppet brings into view the separation of the character’s mind and body. Though the narrator, L. Peter Callender, speaks the voice of Joseph, Maffre is on stage separately manipulating the puppet’s body. The tension between ambition and compassion is palpable. The disjuncture makes visible the conflicts between desire and responsibility and makes heard the pressures of Joseph’s internal voices. Maffre excels at encapsulating Joseph’s emotions, particularly while he is tempted by the devil or accrues enormous wealth, but remains despondent and lonely.

The production is stunning both visually and acoustically, with four musicians beautifully performing a score that comments on and propels the narration. These elements combined offer a brilliant commentary on the themes of greed and desperation that are enhanced by the audience’s

The Soldier puppeteered by Muriel Maffre in The Solider's Tale, 2011; performance. Courtesy of the Aurora Theatre Company, Berkeley.

 placement around the edges of the stage. The seating arrangement makes it possible to see the reactions of other viewers behind the performers and to consider our own encounters with temptation. It’s an innovative interpretation manifesting in a fascinating and thought-provoking production that reinforces how theater can enrich self-awareness and reflection.

The Soldier’s Tale is on view at Aurora Theatre Company, in Berkeley, through December 18, 2011.

Though she participated in only a handful of exhibitions during her lifetime, Francesca Woodman has been the subject of five major monographic exhibitions since her death in 1981. It’s tempting to evaluate Woodman’s work biographically, to root the poignancy of her work in her suicide at age twenty-two and to credit her current fame to her parents’ art-world connections. Yet to so summarily dismiss this retrospective-like exhibition of Woodman’s work would be brash. Drawn largely from her undergraduate years at Rhode Island School of Design from 1975 to 1978, Woodman’s photographs draw their strength and allure precisely from their exploratory, inchoate nature, possessing all the expectancy and contradiction of youth.

She was an artist of her time, and many of her black-and-white, mostly nude self-portraits employ familiar strategies of feminist artists from the 1960s and ’70s, as she used her own body—pinched, painted, hidden, and exposed—to examine female subjectivity. Concurrent with a burgeoning critical discourse surrounding the medium, Woodman’s photography is self-referential, grappling with light and shadow, the imprint of the female form, and the construction of identity itself.

Among these recognizable dialogues, however, is something more enigmatic, more personal, and ultimately more alluring. In the space of a decaying Victorian house, Woodman posed nude or clothed, and appears often as a blur of movement, half hidden by a fireplace or swath of wallpaper. She resembles a child hiding and a self-possessed woman, at times ethereal, like Alice after she’s passed through the looking glass, both trapped by and master of her crumbling surroundings. Often she meets the gaze of the camera, and just as often her face is eclipsed in a blur. Some images are scrawled with diaristic inscriptions. In one untitled study, three nude women stand wearing masks of the artist’s face. In a video shot in her studio, Woodman writes her name across a large sheet of paper, then slowly tears it apart to reveal her naked body behind.

House #4, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976; gelatin silver print; 5 ¾ x 5 ¾ in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman; © George and Betty Woodman.

Woodman’s is an unformed oeuvre of disparate glances, not a honed argument. We can speculate about the direction her art might have taken in maturity, but what is more interesting is the puzzle we discover by looking; the fertile space of liminality—a girl-woman on the cusp of adulthood—whose struggles still resonate today. In these remarkable photographs, we see Woodman grappling with her own body, how it is perceived, how it fits in space, and how it can express the mind within.

Francesca Woodman is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 20, 2012.

Lauren Schell Dickens is an independent curator, and now writer, currently living in San Francisco.

John Chiara’s milky, murky, mesmerizing pictures of Northern California landscapes at Von Lintel Gallery, in New York—1890s artillery nest roads, sun-rich scrub, sloping San Francisco neighborhoods—work slowly and plaintively. Gradually, shrubs, weeds, and mid-century flat-roofed hillside homes give way to fine details and a suffering that suggests estrangement and unresolved events.

Chiara was raised in the 1970s and ’80s in the Bay Area and watched patiently as his father slowly developed prints in a makeshift darkroom inside the family’s garage. Today, he crawls in and out of a large-scale hand-built camera he transports to outdoor locations on a flatbed trailer and prints directly onto paper he cuts out of the camera. The results are jagged, lustrous pictures.

In interviews, Chiara mentions legendary photographer Richard Misrach, a mentor, and Lewis Baltz, a member of the seminal New Topographic photographers, with whom he shares a tendency to list the precise location where photographs were taken.¹ However, it is Chiara’s interest in chance that recalls Italian conceptualist Silvio Wolf, whose photochemical Horizons (2003–2009) produced hypnotic, emotional results. It also aligns him with American landscape photographer Bryan Graf and his Wildlife Analysis pictures.

Unfortunately, Chiara’s Endura transparencies appear less like accidents and more like feats or tricks. It is his sun and fog-rich, emotionally soaked Cibachromes, all from 2011, that stand out instead. Each image evinces a gentle struggle or decline.

In Bunker Road at Coastal Trail, Fort Barry Range (Right), fluorescent yellow buttercups glow faintly alongside a fogged-in caramel-colored dirt path like redemption; a long, close look reveals scores of the tiny flowers in the undulating, misty

Bunker Road at Coastal Trail, Fort Barry Range (Right), 2011; image on Ilfochrome paper, unique photograph; 33 1/4 x 28 3/4 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Von Lintel Gallery, New York. 

emerald wilderness. In Coral: Starr King: Beacon, dense scrub glint and vibrate as if holding a secret; nearby circlets of smokelike fog seem cinematic. And in Funston at Cascade, a neighborhood seems to sink helplessly into moist fog or a gray-green sea; a hazy, translucent band hovers mystically above. 

For the patient, Fort at Lime Point incrementally releases a kind of sadness. Chiara’s pictures, which wear his cuts and tape, call to mind found photographs, and the inscrutable way memory works, or grief. There’s a burnt, raw quality here. There’s also eloquence.

Fort at Lime Point is on view at Von Lintel Gallery, in New York, through January 7, 2012.

Brent Foster Jones lives in New York and previously taught at California College of the Arts.

________
NOTES:

1. Pier 24 Photography. "Bridge Project 2011, John Chiara." http://www.lightdark.com/TVD.html

Through an anthropological perspective of documenting the socially invisible, Sharon Lockhart brings to the forefront a working culture overlooked by the same society it helps sustain. Lunch Break is the result of the artist’s yearlong study into the everyday routine of the shipyard workers’ schedule at Bath Iron Works, in Bath, Maine. After traveling to Vienna, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Maine, St. Louis, and Milan, the exhibition is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, though this iteration includes only a handful of photos and one video, rather than the show in its entirety.

Displayed within an installation resembling the interior of a massive pipeline, the eighty-three-minute-long video Lunch Break (2008) is a single shot along the factory’s corridor in slow motion. Lockhart is known for redefining spatial boundaries between social disciplines and various artistic mediums, and Lunch Break is no exception. The dark interior of the enclosed screening area creates the illusion of that featured corridor extending its boundaries toward the audience, while the monotonous and overpowering industrial hum of the accompanying audio further heightens the work’s immersive quality. The awkward feelings of impatience and unease that surface as a result of the film’s manipulated speed physically remind viewers of the uncomfortable distance between their world and the workers’. Lockhart’s technique of fusing the boundaries between photography and film transforms a passing moment—a lunch break—into a more permanent condition and forces viewers to stop, take notice, and consider the realities of working class culture. The film demands that viewers take a closer look into the socio-cultural foundations of America’s geopolitical economic structure, to a subtle yet disenchanting effect.

Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine) (still), 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min. Courtesy of the Artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. © Sharon Lockhart.

The photographs of the break room and lunch boxes in the adjoining room provide further insight into the workers’ cultural lifestyle, while the free newspaper-style brochure that accompanies the show invites the viewer to participate in that lifestyle. The Lunch Break Times is the second edition of a paper initially launched at the opening of Lockhart’s first version of the show, in Maine. It includes diverse content, including recipes, crosswords, historical photos, workers’ obituaries, material related to lunch breaks in general, Bay Area narratives, an article on historical Bloody Thursday, and Lockhart’s mother’s account of her daughter’s relationship with newspapers. Another nostalgic symbol of a dying culture, and one closely affiliated with the labor force, the paper constitutes yet another means through which Lockhart successfully pauses time and unites the past with the present, the relevant with the forgotten, the local with the international, and the transient with the ongoing.

Lunch Break is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through January 16, 2012.

Maria Nicolacopoulou is a London-based independent curator currently conducting curatorial research at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  She holds a BA in Philosophy from CUNY, a Master of Research in Humanities & Cultural Studies from the London Consortium and is working towards a further MA in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University.

Given how routinely the word freedom becomes a political refrain that obscures blatant abuses of the very existential state it names, it is easy to feel cynical when seeing or hearing it used in the public realm. But FREE 2011, a new conceptual work by Taraneh Hemami now adorning the glass facade of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, offers a nuanced commentary on some of the ways this term circulates in contemporary social discourses.  

Hemami overlaid two patterns drawn from Islamic ornamental traditions across the full height of the window facing Yerba Buena Gardens. Against them, she hung a steel structure that supports concentric circles made of neon lighting, each reiterating the word free in English and Arabic scripts. The English words are programmed to light up slowly, one after the other, until the entire circle is illuminated, at which point they all turn off and the sequence begins again. These forms create a web of associations that temper exhilaration with sobriety and visual allure with grounded watchfulness. The loveliness of glass, color, and light celebrates the aspirations and courage that gave rise to the protests of the Arab Spring, while the workaday materials of vinyl tape, neon, and steel evoke the process of social repair impelled by the ordinary people sustaining the ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa. The erosive properties of Hemami’s materials, as well as the experience of time built into the lit scripts, communicate that revolutions are fragile and their progress is not linear—bringing about social change involves work and dogged perseverance.

FREE 2011 (2011); neon and vinyl on glass; 27 x 54 feet. Courtesy of the Artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Hemami’s decision to use the adjective free instead of the noun freedom also conveys some welcome irony. Although free is more flexible semantically and carries less explicit ideological freight, it easily slides into other rhetorical registers, such as commerce, where the seduction of getting free wares usually obscures the price that someone, somewhere, has paid for our good deal.

By mixing references to disparate realms—aesthetic, symbolic, temporal, and geographic—Hemami’s installation suggests affinities among them. The forms and languages Hemami brings together in a public location invite viewers to consider that social visions might be represented and shared across cultural differences and tired national divides and that dramatic struggles occurring in distant places resonate within the American context. Recent events in cities throughout this country should spur us to accept the invitation. 

FREE 2011 is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, through Spring 2012.

Noga Wizansky is an artist and independent scholar based in Oakland. She holds an MA in Design and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in History of the Visual Arts, both from UC Berkeley.

How would you respond if you were asked to have a solo show at a major San Francisco museum? Sanjay Patel, animator at Pixar and author and illustrator, responded, “That would be sweet!” Originally asked to “activate the exterior of the building,” Patel conceived of the idea to create cartoon-like illustrations inspired by the Indian miniature paintings featured in Maharaja: The Splendor of India’s Royal Courts, currently on view at the Asian Art Museum.¹ Initially envisioning his colorful figures plastered to all four sides of the museum, Patel thought, “This is totally boner worthy.”² Although his plans for the museum’s exterior fell through due to complications with the city, Patel edited his idea for the interior of the Asian Art Museum.

For Patel, the artistic process always begins with pencil and paper. Researching and sketching for months, he creates a sketch that is a dialogue between past and present, as it reveals his contemplation of the Indian miniature. Maharaja sketches (2011), mounted on the museum wall in its South Court, depicts imagery of the royal court. Through exhibiting the origins of Patel’s artistic process, the works in Maharaja become relatable, stimulating a viewer to engage in her own conversation with the work.

The discourse between present and past is furthered in Patel’s Maharaja procession (2011), which is inspired by depictions of the royal procession in Indian miniatures such as Procession of Ram Sing II of Kota and His Son at Kota (1850), both featured in the Maharaja exhibition.

Sanjay Patel, Maharaja procession, 2011;digital output. Courtesy of the Artist.

 Symbolic of the concept of darshan, the procession is a portal into the world of the maharaja.³ Patel emulates the typical rendering of the grand procession in works like Procession of Ram Sing II of Kota and His Son at Kota by depicting the king atop an elephant and surrounded by the splendors of the court. Re-creating the Indian miniature in a large-scale mural using digital illustration, Patel’s work reactivates the past. A “marriage between South East Asian iconography and a modern aesthetic,” Patel’s reinterpretation is simple and approachable.⁴

Sanjay Patel’s work makes traditional Southeast Asian culture and art accessible to all. Maharaja sketches and Maharaja procession are just a taste of Deities, Demons, and Dudes with ’Staches: Indian Avatars by Sanjay Patel, which juxtaposes iconic Southeast Asian sculpture and painting with Patel’s modern reincarnations. Fusing traditional and pop imagery, Patel reinterprets the maharaja for an audience of all ages and backgrounds.

Deities, Demons, and Dudes with ‘Staches: Indian Avatars by Sanjay Patel is on view at the Asian Art Museum, in San Francisco, through April 22, 2012.

Charlotte Miller is the Assistant Director at Brian Gross Fine Art and part of the research team at Pier 24 Photography. Miller graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.A. in Art History in 2008 and from the San Francisco Art Institute with a M.A. in Exhibition and Museum Studies in 2011. She is a finalist for the ACAC Writing Fellowship.

________
NOTES:

1. Interview with Sanjay Patel, November 7, 2011.

2. Ibid.

3. “The propitious act of seeing and being seen by a superior being, whether a god or king.” Anna Jackson, Amin Jaffer, Deepika Ahlawat, Maharaja: The Splendor of India’s Royal Courts, (VA Publishing, 2009), 14.

4. Interview with Sanjay Patel, November 7, 2011.

The weight of information and its imminent obsolescence presses outward from the series of large paintings and videos by Xiaoze Xie now on view at the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery. Grand, lush, and exquisitely crafted, the works seem to contradict what they document: stacks of old newspapers temporarily shelved in library archives as objects of value, yet always awaiting their inevitable disposal.

As they emerge from the blurred, illusionistic folds of February-March 2011, D.T. (Daily Telegraph) (2011), the words “Army,” “Libya mission,” “Reactor 3,” “Gaddafi,” and “cyber bullies” still resonate. Xie imbues the archive with unexpected prescience, suggesting that what was once discarded history lives on for days and months after its disposal as old “news.” Hot colors of yellow and orange underpainting lick the edge of the canvases like flames, suggesting an urgency to bear witness to the transience and impermanence of knowledge before the “now” of news becomes the “then” of history.

We hear the relentless ticker-tape flow of information as the rhythmic noise of the New York City subway, the soundtrack of the video October-December 2001 (2002), which documents the subway’s public readership in a post-9/11 environment. “Like trains,” Xie says, “images are unstoppable.” They survive their mediation by dozens of hands and their consumption by readerly bodies that rustle the newspaper’s unwieldy leaves. 

At heart is Xie’s understanding of the newspaper as an object of contemplation as much as a vehicle for history. Residing somewhere between still-life and history painting—and grand in scale (the largest is over seven feet wide)—the paintings demand a kind of meditative reading in order to

Xiaoze Xie. February-March 2011, D.T. (Daily Telegraph), 2011; oil on canvas; 52 x 85.25 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, Santa Cruz, CA.

reconcile the internal tension between pictorial legibility and deceptive illusionism. Another video work, Transience (2011), reveals the lyrical and sublime intensity of an object when it is tested in time and space. Old books, illuminated by golden light, fly through the air, their pages unfurling in slow motion. Transience becomes an aesthetic meditation on the material form of thoughts and memory, and on the beautiful tension between levity and gravitas.

Xie, who trained in Beijing and the United States, has long been concerned with the fugitive, deteriorating existence of knowledge, whether through the book’s vulnerability to physical decay or the mutability of historical memory under the distortions of ideology. While his earlier work voiced criticism of regimes that eliminated threatening ideas (China’s Cultural Revolution; the book-burning campaigns of Nazi Germany), the work in Resistant Archaeology is not about censorship, but about sublimation: heavy tomes made light, and obsolete, fragile information made sumptuous.

Xiaoze Xie: Resistant Archaeology is on view at the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, in Santa Cruz, through November 23, 2011.

Ellen Tani is a graduate student in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. She is a finalist for the ACAC Writing Fellowship.

Mini protest signs declaring “Every Artist is a Thief” or “Take Back Art” seem to protest the patina-tarnished ancient artifacts in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. They are a part of artist Imin Yeh’s current intervention, SpaceBi. Yeh purchased a high-level museum membership, called the Jade Circle, for $3,000; it offers donors a yearlong host of perks, including access to the Peterson Room, the museum’s exclusive members-only lounge. Subversively, Yeh has offered up her membership access for others to propose their own projects. She uses the room as a pseudo-studio, employing this sanctioned donor access for unsanctioned reasons. Occupy the Asian is one of the inaugural interventions in which Yeh and three other artists/activists made small protest signs in the Peterson Room that they displayed and photographed throughout the museum.

Yeh is a former museum store employee, so her position as an interloper is constantly in flux. Her past work investigates the intersections of race, identity, and politics through the spaces and practices of cultural consumerism and labor, specifically in terms of America’s consumption of Asian goods and culture. Yeh’s purchase of the membership situates her squarely within the tensions she typically explores from a critical distance. As a donor, Yeh implicates herself by financially supporting the institution as much as any other affluent consumer of Asian antiquities, history, and culture who would typically fall within her critique.

The Brundage collection is one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of Asian artifacts, and the museum is beholden to the expectations of its endowment and institutional politics. In effect, the exhibitions have a tendency to position Asian art and culture from a particular Orientalist lens of Asia, which is in direct tension with the complex needs of the broad and diverse Asian diaspora. Yeh might be a donor, but she is also an unsanctioned Asian American contemporary artist. Her presence puts the diaspora of Asian artists on the frontlines of confronting Orientalist consumption and the fixed cultural narratives produced within these displays of institutionalized histories.

Jade Circle Members Lounge (exterior view), Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2011. Photo: Imin Yeh.

Yeh interrogates the institution but also the closed and fixed dialogue around the potentiality of what Asian art could be. With SpaceBi, Yeh affords herself and others the opportunity to exhibit and directly confront these issues within the institution itself. SpaceBi questions the creation and interrogation of the discourse around Asian art and by default the entangled cultures, histories, and diasporas of cultural spectatorship and consumption. Yeh takes engagement into her own hands, and offers us the same opportunity.

For more information, please visit www.spacebi.org.

Michele Carlson is a practicing artist, writer, and educator whose interdisciplinary research investigates the intersections of history and memory, loss, race, gender, transnational adoption, racial melancholia, and popular culture. She is a finalist for the ACAC Writing Fellowship.

As I left my apartment for San Francisco’s First Thursday art night of November, I texted one of my best friends who was born in Tehran and asked her if she was Asian. She’s an actress who is typecast as “ethnic,” so I didn’t know what she was, so maybe I was totally wrong that I was going to an Asian exhibition. I was on my way to Hadi Tabatabai’s Portals at Brian Gross Fine Art. Tabatabai was born in Iran in 1964. By the time I got to the gallery and stood in front of one of his paintings, my friend texted me back, “Technically yes, but really whatever my agent wants me to be,” but it didn’t matter because I had already become aware of the cultural nuances within the artwork.

Lines of thread are everywhere—vertical gray strings perfectly spaced a few millimeters apart and floating above a black panel, and horizontal words in the titles, like Thread Painting #36 (2010). When I stepped back from the symmetrical diptych Thread Painting 2011-9 (2011), the right angles of the black-and-white color fields reminded me of the capital Fs of the Fendi logo on cheap handbags sold in New York City’s Chinatown. Tabatabai’s paintings rival the intricate construction of designer knockoffs made by the hands of Chinese workers competing in the luxury market. Those hands also performed in the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. Tabatabai’s surfaces of thread after thread after thread are like the matrix of the 2,008 synchronized Fou drummers that initiated the opening ceremony. In her graduate course Global Perspectives on Modernity, Robin Balliger (the current chair of Urban Studies at San Francisco Art Institute, Tabatabai’s alma mater) referred to that spectacular event as the end of modern Western hegemony. 

Hadi Tabatabai. Thread Painting 2011-9, 2011; thread, acrylic paint and wood on Dibond panel; 17.13 x 33.5 x .94 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco.

Are Tabatabai’s paintings an expression of Iran’s emerging position as a contemporary global power?

I had jumped through Tabatabai’s portal to a space that he defines in the exhibition statement as “empty space,” he writes. “It’s not this or that.” With only a square piece of black wood enveloped by a bare loom of string to inspect, a subtle form of hypnosis takes hold and there is permission to meditate. I drifted right into the complicated nature of Asian identity and I hadn’t even had any wine yet. Rather than get drunk and say something possibly racist to someone in the gallery (though I’m technically Filipino so I have some kind of inherent hall pass), I turned on my “Assembled in China” iPod and my “Assembled in China” Bose headphones and listened to some electronic dance music as I walked out of the gallery wondering if Tabatabai even knew what Fendi was or if his agent wanted him to be Asian for the night.

Portals is on view at Brian Gross Fine Art, in San Francisco, through December 23, 2011.

Jeffrey Augustine Songco is a New Jersey–born artist based in San Francisco. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from San Francisco Art institute. He would like to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale 2023. He is a finalist for the ACAC Writing Fellowship.

We approach most art as a kind of vessel, whether it takes the form of a flat canvas or a three-dimensional object. In both the making and the interpretation of art, our shared task seems to be to fill it up—with color, with figures, with gods, with language, with scraps of culture, with things. As critics, we add to the brimming mass, drawing out meanings, cobbling together associations, and pouring our guesses into the cask.

Approaching the works of Hadi Tabatabai currently on view at Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco requires a shift in focus. Tabatabai's "thread paintings" contain neither color nor figures; with the visual markers of meaning withdrawn, these works speak in the language handed down from twentieth-century Minimalism. For Tabatabai, as for artists of earlier generations, the tasks of paring down and emptying out have become redemptive though rebellious gestures. Privileging form over figure, our attention shifts away from all of the messy content within and focuses instead on the vessel itself: its surface, shape, and materiality.

The geometries and simple expanses of Minimalism did more than evacuate content; they provided us with a new language and way of seeing. The flat planes of Tabatabai's works are populated by black-and-white threads pulled taut over dark fields. From a distance, these threads melt into one another, forming bolder shapes where negative and positive space is interchangeable. In Portals, the Iranian-born artist's second solo exhibition at the gallery, many of the works assume the familiar outlines of passageways—a simple rectangle gesturing towards the shape of a doorway, the panes of glass in a window.

Thread Painting 2011-1, 2011; wood, thread, and acrylic paint on Dibond; 17.13 × 33.5 × .94 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco.

Articulated in the accented tones of Agnes Martin's visual vocabulary, whose graceful geometries converted Tabatabai to the use of simple forms, these works are experiments in repetition and focus that strive toward perfection. Critics have written elsewhere of the "meditative" quality of the works. They are steeped in stillness, but have a tendency to open up as viewers draw closer; the fibers of the threads disrupt the crispest line, reminding us that these are the marks of the artist.

Though they mimic the hollowness of a vacant vessel, Tabatabai's works are not empty. Conceived of by the artist as gestures rather than static lines, Tabatabai's threads both capture and conceal. For the artist, these threads are documents of his actions and expressions of his intentions, quiet as they may seem.

Portals is on view at Brian Gross Fine Art, in San Francisco, through December 23, 2011.

Liz Glass is a writer and curator interested in performance, media, craft, avant-gardism, and liminality. She has her Master's in Curatorial Practice from CCA, where she ran the PLAySPACE Gallery and worked on exhibitions at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. She is a finalist for the ACAC Writing Fellowship.

For Intersection for the Arts resident Erika Chong Shuch, time and place have resonated with our global feelings of unrest; there must be something in the water. It’s too important to label and too grave to let slide. Sitting In A Circle, a new work by the Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project (ESP Project), is on the verge of revealing a common emotionality stirring in and around us.

Within a spartan black box theater and with minimal props, the ESP Project invites viewers to blur the boundaries between audience and performer. The performers act partial narratives loaded with emotional baggage. The audience works through these emotions with the performers by participating in group therapy, crafts, and role-play charged scenes. However, before there is a final emotional resolution, Shuch suspends time with blossoming moments of choreography. Conceptually, Sitting In A Circle is a loosely structured exploration of the spaces occupied by isolation and fellowship. The performance is in a constant state of becoming. It jams or seamlessly territorializes the reality of performance boundaries, by co-locating motivational speaking, mantra chanting, musical theater, life coaching, dance ensembles, operatic outbursts, and monologues. It enables the performed moment to be shared between the participants, both audience and performers.

Shuch, a San Francisco-based artist, is fluent in the language of performance. The transparency with which she directs her projects offers insight into her collaborative process. The audience’s absorption into the performance takes root from

Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project, Sitting In A Circle, 2011 (still); performance. Photo: Pak Han, San Francisco.

the self-conscious media references that the cast brings to the content. Shuch’s skillful method of contrasting visceral moments makes certain the audience doesn’t get lost in the maze of references. Through the duration of two scenes, a performer is coached through stages of sustained agony. At first it’s playful, but the performance quickly elevates into a full-fledged breakdown. The next moment, participants are invited to enact a protest exercise by repeating the phrase, “I am mad as hell, and I am not going to take it anymore.” The artist samples the language of cinema and organically lets the participants follow an alternate cultural context, suggesting a more valuable experience of media and time. Sitting In A Circle provokes an array of emotions and sustains a cathartic release reminiscent of the current Occupy movement. We shall continue to see how Shuch converses about time and place, ultimately exposing us to our own emotional experiences.

Sitting In A Circle is being performed on various dates at Intersection for the Arts, in San Francisco, through November 19, 2011.

Joshua Kim is an artist and independent curator. He is currently working on publications to support his touring collective ONTOLOGUE, exhibiting in Seattle and Detroit in 2012. He is a finalist for the ACAC Writing Fellowship.

Pacific Standard Time (PST) unites over sixty venues throughout Southern California to address the art scene that emerged there between 1945 and 1980. Edward Kienholz: Five Car Stud 1969–1972, Revisited, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), is the first U.S. public exhibition of Edward Keinholz’s electrifying Five Car Stud (1969–72/2011), which, for me, is the work that conveys the same raw power it did in its initial presentation in Germany nearly forty years ago. Viewers walk within a human-scale installation of inanimate figures in the throes of enacting graphic, racially motivated violence. Car headlights illuminate the scene, while country music provides an eerie background soundtrack. Though it is a fictional depiction representative of racial tensions during the 1960s and ’70s, the work feels anything but distant. Just as Kienholz intended, and to which the curatorial statement alludes, the viewer is implicated. In Speculation: The World of Ed Kienholz, Keith Berwick’s 1971 documentary, which plays in the didactic space outside the installation, Kienholz asks if Berwick will model for one of the perpetrator body molds—a move that visibly unnerves Berwick even as he agrees.

In contrast to LACMA’s less-is-more curatorial model, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) contribution, Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981 attempts to unite over five hundred works by over 130 artists and unfortunately suffers as a result. Though described as a survey and apparently organized thematically, the exhibition proves overwhelming to navigate. While I understand the curatorial impulse to demonstrate a pluralism that speaks to the conflicting cultural zeitgeists during the time period, placement and attention to space is inconsistent in the

Edward Kienholz. Five Car Stud, 1969–72/2011; multi-media installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: Tom Vinetz.

exhibition. Chris Burden’s The Reason for the Neutron Bomb (1979) and Eleanor Antin’s The Nurse and the Hijackers (1977) have ample room to breathe, while Betye Saar’s Secrets and Revelations (1980/2011) and John Outterbridge’s Broken Dance, Ethnic Heritage Group (1978–82) are given inappropriate, awkward treatment in corners next to exit doors. (Luckily, both Saar and Outterbridge have an excellent showing in the Hammer Museum’s PST exhibition, Now Dig This!, and Outterbridge’s solo exhibition at LAXART is not to be missed.) Other works that escape suffocation are a smartly grouped set of engaging works by Ilene Segalove, including The Mom Tapes (1974–78) and Carl Cheng’s Natural Museum of Modern Art (1979–80), a coin-operated public artwork originally installed at the Santa Monica Pier. For the price of a quarter, it quietly invites individuals to patronize the creation of an abstract sand sculpture through a sophisticated, mechanized system. It is, in the midst of the dystopian spirit of much of the other work included at MOCA, a reminder of another, more hopeful spirit from that period—both of which PST aims to resurrect.

Pacific Standard Time is on view at various locations throughout Southern California through February 2012.

Edward Kienholz: Five Car Stud 1969–1972, Revisited is on view at Los Angeles County Museum of Art through January 15, 2012.

Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981 is on view at Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles through February 13, 2012.

Susannah Magers is an independent curator currently based in San Francisco. She recently earned her master's degree in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts. 

In Mary Fernando Conrad’s solo exhibition at icTus Gallery, such familiar and functional refuse as polystyrene packing material, plastic sheeting, and cardboard boxes are collected, investigated, assembled, and sewn into what amounts to a contemporary cabinet of curiosities. Yet while traditional Kunstkammern displayed mysterious specimens from far away lands, Conrad’s cabinet contains objects so much a part of daily life as to be deemed disposable. By recrafting and displaying them in a gallery context, she declares them worthy of reflection. Her work begs the question: What is valued, what is not, and why?

Conrad’s investigations take the forms of installations, small- and large-scale sculpture, neon signage, and drawing. Against the gallery’s back wall, four striking, amorphous assemblages, Ground Control, Common Carrier, Vapor Trail, and Airport Hotel (all work 2011), are backlit to reveal contents that seem to glow under the light. Drayage and Palette, two drawings on paper, reiterate those organic shapes and vivid colors, and Wheres, a grid of small acrylic boxes filled with wood, plaster, and string lend a sense of mystery to the disposable objects that compose them. Each of these pieces takes a slightly different formal approach, but the inquiry itself is deep and persistent, like getting to know a hilltop by hiking all of its paths.

IMMATERIAL, installation view, icTus Gallery. From left to right: Ground Control; 29 x 36 x 2 in.; Common Carrier; 33 x 56 x 4 in.; Vapor Trail; 25 x 48 x 3 in.; Airport Hotel; 24 x 30 x 2 in.; all works, 2011; sewn plastic sheeting. Courtesy of the Artist and icTus Gallery, San Francisco.

Installations at the gallery’s entrance are quieter than Conrad’s other work and almost hidden. But these pieces have secrets to reveal. In Is Light Is Mechanical, strategically placed refuse highlights the gallery’s familiar and functional components. Cardboard boxes and packing paper spew like water from a painted-out electrical pipe. A tableau of string, packaging, tape, and cardboard interacts playfully with humble architectural features such as the window, the doorframe, and an industrial light switch—yet another homage to the ignoble. Framing and highlighting such objects using discarded materials exposes the concealed elements to the light of day, simultaneously suggesting the textural beauty of the everyday and revealing the blemishes of contemporary life. Here, the question of value receives an answer: these things tell us something about how we live, and because of this, they matter.

IMMATERIAL is on view at icTus Gallery, in San Francisco, through November 18, 2011.

Melony Bravmann is a Bay Area artist and art writer. Her artwork reflects upon themes of preciousness, perfection, and balance. She received her MFA in Painting from CCA.

Two works in Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) reveal primary elements of the artist’s practice. The first is Hands Tied (1968), in which a man’s hands (likely Serra’s) are shown bound together at the wrists with rough, hairy twine. Over the course of three-and-a-half minutes, the fingers struggle to reach and untie a central knot. The hands bob in and out of the frame, sometimes centered but often almost disappearing from view in the course of extricating themselves from confinement. Eventually the cord is un-looped and with a slight flicking motion the hands are free of the twine, but then the video begins again. Like all of Serra’s works, it is concretely physical but also symbolic, a work whose straightforward presentation states its intentions with hyper-masculine clarity. But metaphor and allegory lie just underneath the surface of the direct and unmediated action. The hands of the artist, bound and struggling, become free, and then the process begins again anew: is there a better allegory for creation? After all, it is not the freedom gained at the end (the apparent goal) that creates the drama of the piece—it’s the limitation imposed by the cord and the way in which the hands exert themselves against confinement, over and over again.

The use of constraints, both invisible and apparent, comes up repeatedly in Serra’s work, in everything from his ascetic lexicon of materials for sculpture to the creation of drawings only in black. Another piece that reveals in direct fashion the innermost workings of both the artist’s mind and his actual constructive processes is Verb List (1967–68), a catalog of actions that Serra used to investigate the physical and

Richard Serra, Hands Tied, 1968; 16 mm black-and-white film transferred to DVD; TRT: 3:30 min.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Circulating Film Library. © 2010 Richard Serra /Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

metaphysical properties of his materials. “To roll,” “to bend,” and “to fold” tell us about the ways in which Serra conceived of the phenomenal aspects of making his work, but “to expand” and “to distill” are more than merely corporeal. Further still, “of friction,” “of location,” and “of context” show the expansiveness of his thinking and relate closely to the drawings in the galleries. And ultimately, “to continue,” the list’s final action, signals not only the omega but also the alpha point in his work.

Those new to Serra’s work might want to view these works first, using them as a foundational intellectual platform from which to view his drawings and sculptures; those already accustomed to Serra’s work may want to use these pieces as a way to reinvestigate the familiar.

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through January 16, 2012.

For this related pair of stunning exhibitions, Rex Ray has sent in the clowns. But they are not those happy whacky clowns celebrated in Steven Sondheim’s old-timey anthem, oh no.¹ Rather, they are of the scary, creepy ilk that have been circulating through popular culture for the past several decades, similar to those that went mainstream when Heath Ledger played the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight. In other words, they are the kind of clowns that exaggerate their own fearfulness insofar as those people who are terrified of clowns are concerned, and that’s what makes them fun in the case of Ray’s clown paintings.

The paintings make up only a portion of Ray’s exhibition at Gallery 16, which also includes abstract collage paintings and digital prints that are more in keeping with the colorful and complex floral abstractions for which he is well known. The clown works are a surprising deviation from those works and posit a kind of inversion of the psychological phenomena termed coulrophobia, the fear of clowns. The twelve clown works at Gallery 16 and twenty-one at Four Barrel Coffee are composed as portraits running from small to medium scale. They are, in fact, complex multi-generational works featuring digital manipulations of photographs of the artist’s collection of glass clowns that were output onto canvas and subsequently treated with layers of silkscreen and diluted acrylic paint. Garishly bright colors make it hard for the viewer to see where one process begins and another ends, and this squares with the reason why some people find clowns so terrifying—their makeup both confuses and exaggerates the distinction between true face and fake face, flipping the subconscious panic switch. The analogy that can be drawn between the atavistic fear of clowns and the art world’s antiquated phobia for digitally produced images is quite amusing.

Nutzo, A3 #1; 2011; oil and pigment print on canvas with silkscreen overprinting. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.

This is not the kind of work to be appreciated by those sentimentalists who lack the courage to face their inner bozos. One can easily imagine the hard working staff of Four Barrel Coffee taking secret delight in the way that the paintings resemble some of their regular customers. So, in this case, site specificity carries with it a most amusing double-edged sword, or balloon animal, as the case may be.

Rex Ray is on view at Gallery 16, in San Francisco, through October 29, 2011, and at Four Barrel Coffee, in San Francisco, through December 1, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. Send in the Clowns is a song from Steven Sondheim’s 1973 musical titled A Little Night Music, which is an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film titled Smiles of a Summer Night. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_in_the_Clowns

Writing about violence, grief, and vulnerability, Judith Butler observes that war “works to undermine a sensate democracy . . . disposing us to feel shock and outrage in the face of one expression of violence and righteous coldness in the face of another.”¹ She also suggests that this emotional disconnect becomes possible when the social and political narratives we live by determine implicitly or tacitly that the suffering of some humans is less worthy of our concern than others. The events surrounding last month’s decision by the Museum of Children’s Art (MOCHA) to cancel an exhibit of children’s drawings from Gaza provided a depressing confirmation of Butler’s thesis.

The exhibit consists of twenty-five to thirty drawings made by children who lived through Israel’s military operation in Gaza in the winter of 2008-09. Like other drawings of war by children from Iraq, Chechen, Indonesia, Darfur, and Theresienstadt, these pictures depict awful things: bombs exploding on living spaces, eviscerated buildings, tanks firing on civilians, and people bleeding and dying in the street. But seen up close, their materiality, scale, and mark-making also look devastatingly familiar. They are like the drawings our own children make—untrained, but frank, searching, and immediate. The recognition that at the level of touch and responsiveness to a lived-in world, these drawings are like the ones on our refrigerators and in our family scrapbooks brings a terrible contradiction into view. The children who made them are as alive as we are, but their testimonies and existence are shamefully precarious in our current political landscape.

While a full discussion of the events and politics driving the assault lies beyond the scope of this review, there is no

Aya Gashlan. Untitled; watercolor and pencil on paper; 10.25 x 14 in. Courtesy of Middle East Children's Alliance.

question that the power differential between the sides involved in the conflict—the crushing firepower wielded by the Israelis and the number of civilian deaths, including 260 children, suffered by the Palestinians —was enormous. Still the idea that these drawings would be made visible to the Bay Area public so offended several local Jewish organizations that they mounted a successful campaign calling upon MOCHA to cancel the show. It now hangs in an unnamed retail space on 917 Washington Street in Oakland.

The attempt to remove the drawings from public sight amounted to a denial that the lives they are tied to matter. Theorists of visual culture have taught us that the act of looking is never neutral. If this denial disturbs you, go to 917 Washington St., and look.

A Child’s View from Gaza is on view at 917 Washington St., in Oakland, through November 27, 2011.

Noga Wizansky is an artist and independent scholar based in Oakland. She holds an MA in Design and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in History of the Visual Arts, both from UC Berkeley.

________
NOTES:

1. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2009), 52.

Drawing inspiration from principle Antarctic adventurer Earnest Shackleton, Better a Live Ass Than a Dead Lion, a group exhibition curated by David Kasprzak, hoists “the idea of exploration as a creative process” as its motivating theme.¹ The natural world occupies the seven featured artists’ works almost ubiquitously; mist-enshrouded vistas and other scenes of elemental encounter predominate. True to the exhibition’s intention, however, nature as place cannot be said to be the subject in the show’s best works. The tired attitudes of reverence, rapture, and antagonism drop out and, instead, exploration as process takes the fore.

Lindsey White supplies the exhibition’s only fully natureless work. Pittsburgh, PA (2011) is a photograph of a glittery stage curtain, spotlight beaming on its center divide, announcing the imminent emergence of the performer. As is often the case with such conspicuous outliers, Pittsburgh, PA is actually a good place to begin working through the exhibition’s core themes. The curtain may symbolize concealment and revelation; sure enough, many of the exhibition’s remaining pieces investigate the dynamic between these very processes—what is, in fact, the very essence of exploration. Also notable is the fact that this stage could be located virtually anywhere; the specificity of the title ironically points to the extraneousness of this scene’s specific location.

Exploratory engagement with concealment and revelation appears most literally in the show’s video works. Matthew Kennedy’s It’s Come Down To This (2011) features a close-shot man’s foot desperately working to clear away a thin covering of algae on the ground to reveal the dark, rocky soil underneath. In Joshua Churchill’s Rise and Fall (2011), a roving flashlight illuminates patches of what appears to be a furious blizzard at night and exposes conditions of total concealment.

Lindsey White. Pittsburgh, PA, 2011; chromogenic print; 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of Eli Ridgway Gallery, San Francisco.

In Elisheva Biernoff’s contributions, some painted and one projected, the conceptual divide between revelation and concealment is more confused. Her visually enticing Inheritance (2010) projects a series of eighty slides depicting endangered wilderness areas onto mist from a humidifier, resulting in blurry, billowing patches of refracted light. The work simultaneously offers and disrupts visual information, again dissolving whatever specificity of place the images might have had. As the frustrating, yet captivating images emerge, withdraw, and emerge in rhythmic succession, the interim absences fill with the very sense of palpable apprehension—excitement, even—evoked by Pittsburg, PA’s simple image.

In presenting nature through a predominately theatrical lens, Better a Live Ass Than a Dead Lion upends the usual privileging of place over time in representations of nature. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, it appears that an enthrallment with the latter rather than the former is what compels us to explore.

Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion is on view at Eli Ridgway Gallery, in San Francisco, through November 5, 2011.

Alex Bigman is a Bay Area-based arts writer focusing on visual art, music, and theater. His work has also appeared in ZYZZYVA, The San Francisco Appeal, and 7x7 Magazine. He holds a BA from UC Berkeley in his personalized field of study, “Cognition in Language and Art.”

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NOTES:

1. From the Better a Live Ass Than a Dead Lion exhibition catalog, http://www.eliridgway.com/index.php/mainexhibitions/current-exhibition/better-a-live-ass-than-a-dead-lion

Landscape art represents the cultural, political, and spiritual aspirations of a particular group of people. Because humans are nostalgically inclined and landscapes are forever in flux, people may often find it challenging to appreciate the vistas before them, instead preferring to wax sentimental about the past or to anticipate a gilded future. Michelle Fleck’s paintings, however, don’t offer viewers such pastoral panoramas. Instead of arcadia, Fleck foregrounds overfilled dumpsters, stripped billboards, and construction sites. These scenes are familiar, but nothing in the pictures Fleck includes in Somewhere, her solo exhibition at Park Life, indicates a particular locale. Because of their ubiquity, dumpsters and construction netting generally go unnoticed, and if people do pay attention to them, it’s scornfully. Fleck’s strongest pictures encourage viewers to look more conscientiously; she critiques increasing cultural homogeneity while calling attention to the abundant opportunities for aesthetic pleasure in contemporary American urban and suburban landscapes.

The artist’s sense of composition and economical handling of paint are strong suits, but in Your Ad Here (2011) and Coming Soon (2011), where Fleck’s line of sight is angled up at rooftop billboards or over walls, the skies read slack and the paintings lose energy. When her focus shifts towards the ground, however, things get exciting. In two of Fleck’s standout works, Blacktop (2011) and Repaving (2011), common road repair supplies—an orange-and-white barricade, piles of asphalt, netting—are vignettes in the center of the paper, their colors and shapes turned into lean, formalist bricolage. In Convenient Parking (2011) and New Acquisition (2011), stakes and nylon fencing encircle piles of sand and gravel, setting them apart from their surroundings  as if the materials were sacred offerings. By focusing on these demarcated forms, Fleck highlights the potential for aesthetic experience in quotidian settings.

Repaving, 2011; acrylic and aerosol on paper; 11 x 14 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Park Life, San Francisco.

 In Fleck’s Picket Fence (2011), the exhibition’s finest work, an orange construction fence snakes over ground littered with debris. The crooked path of the fence moves across and out of the picture plane, calling to mind Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence, a 24.5-mile-long and eighteen-foot-tall white nylon fence installed in Northern California in 1976. Whereas Running Fence was a grand, Romantic gesture that questioned the concept of boundaries (e.g., private property lines or socio-political barriers like the Iron Curtain), Fleck’s Picket Fence is less heady and more utilitarian. She reclaims the fence for workaday service while also calling attention to its inherent aesthetic appeal, thereby ennobling the prosaic with her discerning eye.

Somewhere is on view at Park Life, in San Francisco, through October 30, 2011.

Christopher Reiger is a writer, artist, and curator currently living and working in San Francisco. Artwork can be seen at his website, and essays on art, natural history, and miscellany can be read at his long-running blog Hungry Hyaena.

Representations of death often tend toward the trite: holograms, star clusters, or gilded gates leading to puffy buoyant clouds, for example. None of these conventional methods of representing death are currently on view at the Chapel of the Chimes, the Julia Morgan–designed crematorium in Oakland, though. Instead, viewers will find more unorthodox artifacts—pop-up children's books and Shakespeare, a pair of Dixie cups, a reproduction of a Buddhist stupa, or a spider weaving her web–among the more customary flowers and well wishes.

The placement of art in this non-traditional space defies convention but adheres to definition; after all, a museum is “a building in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are stored and exhibited.”¹ Architect Julia Morgan, best known for building the extravagant Hearst Castle, created an elaborate but discernibly more subdued place of repose in the Chapel of the Chimes. The Chapel was a proud recipient of the 2009 Best of the East Bay award, “Best Place to Spend Eternity.” Levity aside, the curatorial collective OFFSpace believed the Chapel was the perfect venue for art that engaged a living public with examinations of the hereafter, and spent months persuading the establishment's administration to allow art to be installed in vacant niches. They succeeded, and Ever After became the first official art exhibition for the Chapel of the Chimes.

Since each work is limited to a niche, the works tend toward two extremes: minimalist or sensationalist. Luther Thie’s piece, The Count (2011), humorously depicts a pair of battling sock puppets. The playful skirmish is a duel to the death (pun intended) that counters and rivals the romanticized view of a peaceful, regret-free death. Although some artworks appear as part of the environment, others, like Thie's puppets, are clearly meant to stand out, and become further magnified by their unlikely surroundings.

Luther Thie. The Count, 2011; mixed media; 18.5 x 24.5 x 11.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Dorothy Santos.

Although art in a crematorium may seem unlikely and, to some, a discourteous or flippant look at loss, Ever After seeks to flesh out our collective presuppositions and neuroses surrounding eternal rest. OFFSpace prevails in testing the boundaries of exhibiting art in alternative spaces, and consistently creates well-curated, provocative exhibitions. The bottom line: a show without controversy is a show that’s probably not worth seeing.

Ever After is on view at Chapel of the Chimes, in Oakland, through November 13, 2011.

Dorothy Santos is a freelance art writer based in San Francisco. She holds a BA in both Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco.

_____
NOTES:

1. From the New Oxford American Dictionary, Third Edition.

So, what is a mausoleum to do with that pesky extra space yet to be rented for all of eternity? The Chapel of the Chimes temporarily opened some of its real estate for utilization by local artists, allowing its few empty niches to operate as ad hoc installation spaces scattered throughout its otherwise packed walls of monogrammed ashes and personal keepsakes. The result is Ever After, which installs the work of thirteen artists throughout Julia Morgan’s historic building.

The front desk offers a map with locations of the artists’ works, but unplanned meandering permits viewers to linger over occupied niches that are particularly artful in their own right. The urns of the deceased lie within tenderly prepared curio cabinets full of everyday possessions, from bank books to pipes to personal journals—all of the items to be emptied out of one’s pockets upon returning home at the end of the day. Each everyday object now sits carefully arranged next to its owner’s remains. Some artists in Ever After riff off this display of the everyday, quietly blending in with the Chapel’s permanent inhabitants. Phil King’s installation Frames (2011), for example, appears to be just a simple pair of glasses placed in an empty niche, yet the work has a haunting reverberation. Though it is the only object that remains anonymous within a wall replete with engraved markers of ownership, its shape bears the slight bend of regular use, the personalized form that results from the unknown individual’s repeated wear.

Andrew Witrak’s Dixie Cup Phone (2011) makes apt use of the glass divide between an interned loved one and living visitors. A paper cup hangs from a string threaded through a small hole drilled in the glass partition, which is tied to another paper cup lying on the interior of the niche’s floor. By utilizing a child’s tool for covert conversation, Witrak is able to both playfully and tenderly address the often saccharine and overused notion of communication with the “other side.”

Exterior view, Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland, 2011. Photo: Lia Wilson

Two artists had their works removed from the chapel due to complaints from visiting patrons. The impact of those absent works is not diminished, though: in an already conceptually and emotionally loaded environment, their removal serves as a reminder of the human tendency to impose limits on reflections of death, as well as the need to curtail what we are willing to ponder or confront.

Ever After is on view at the Chapel of the Chimes, in Oakland, through November 13, 2011. 

Lia Wilson is a writer and arts education administrator living and working in San Francisco. She holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts and a BFA in Printmaking from the College of Santa Fe. 

Jessica Williams has a show of seven paintings and a drawing at Important Projects in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood. They’re almost all vertical. All of the paintings are colorful and full of leaves, flowers, cloth, and bodies. They draw on Matisse, with greens and fuchsias in inch-long strokes that, in several of the works, suggest the shapes of clearings and interiors. The paint itself is layered, applied thinly in places and in some cases, wiped away. The result is a slow build-up that doesn’t seem to strive for thick monumentality of paint; instead, pencil and wash show through. 

In the show’s sole drawing, Self portrait (fragonard) (2011), a girl lies in a bed surrounded by curtains, holding what might be a small dog, given the Fragonard reference. The painted version of the drawing, Awake in dream (fragonard) (2011), is the largest work. Once painted, what was a loosely drawn but clear figure sinks into a cloudy silhouette couched in firmer furnishings. The ostensible subject becomes the most purely suggested and least substantial element of a painting already staged with pictures of a frame, bows, and curtains.

These are girls’ paintings; titles include Girls club no.2 (2011), Girls (2011), and two girls looking (2011). Where identifiable, the represented subjects follow this pattern. Additionally, the way these paintings are made suggests a play on long-standing and often criticized conceptions of femininity. Many of the marks, such as the yellow bows around the edge of Awake, are ornamental. The works all seem to veil and adorn their subjects, softly playing with revealing the hidden. These curtains of paint, cloth, and trees are pulled back to reveal shadowy and elusive female forms. two girls presents the eponymous figures, lounging Katz-like through paint-as-venetian-blinds that allow viewers to see through. Rococo frills and soft brushstrokes seem to self-consciously reject expression and the modernist struggle for essence.

Hideaway, 2011; oil on panel; 9 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Important Projects, Oakland, CA.

Due to the works’ insistent subject matter and the gendered aspect of historical discourse on painting, it is difficult to move beyond this reading to one that is more dimensional than simply drawing upon traditional representations of femininity. Girls, the last painting in the show, epitomizes this dilemma. The paint is applied thickest here, finally pushing back at the viewer. It shows a picture of large door either advertising those toiling within or announcing the privileged few admitted to the club: GIRLS.

Stick Like Glue is on view at Important Projects, in Oakland, through October 24, 2011.

Ian Dolton-Thornton was born in Santa Cruz, California, and attended Bennington College.

Space feels awfully passé these days—a subject outmoded by the digital march of progress. As we collectively turn our attention from social networking to cloud computing to the next space-defying phenomenon, the notions of sheer distance and wide open pastures gather dust and threaten to resolve into romantic ideals. Jake Longstreth’s solo exhibition brings the danger inherent in this to the fore—the idealization of space is bound to discard the social realities of the places where space actually refuses to disappear.

These places are the subjects of Longstreth’s paintings. In particular, he depicts midwestern exurbs: freshly minted communities plotted in the agricultural plains beyond the suburbs of cities such as Toledo or Cleveland. These places are where folks who have been squeezed out of the middle class but wish to maintain the semblance of their old lifestyle have the option to go. Between the seemingly endless expanse of farmland on one side and the long commute to the suburbs on the other stands a sparse smattering of big-box retailers, fast food joints, and parking lots. Here, space still reigns supreme.

Longstreth divides his canvases into horizontal strata. Typically he depicts a field, backyard, parking lot, or road in the foreground and rows of gradually less saturated color fields beyond to suggest the receding hills, producing an illusion of both openness and profound depth, such as one sees in Danbury (2010). Far more striking, however, is a pervading sense of absolute vacancy. There are no people, no cars in the lots, or any other hint of human life nearby. 

Naples Commons, 2011; oil on canvas. Courtesy the Artist and Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco.

Together with the paintings’ lack of detail—in Bob Evans (2011), for example, grass is a bladeless, smooth green color field—this absence weds space to a still, eerie silence that drives out what otherwise might have been placidity. The simply geometric, unpeopled paintings ultimately come to feel more like pared down memories or graphic renderings of proposed constructions than unmediated views. In this sense, they do hint at an ideal of bucolic or of suburban space, only to subvert it through the injection of an unmistakably exurban signifier: the backside of an electric, off-highway fast food directory in Naples Commons (2011), for example.

In thus igniting and then frustrating our desire for an idealized version of space as conveyed by a pasture, the exhibition reminds us that there is a reality corresponding to its representations. For the inhabitants who opted for longer commutes and a life at further remove from a cultural center, space is still a hard fact to ignore.

Pastures is on view at Gregory Lind Gallery, in San Francisco, through October 15, 2011.

Alex Bigman is a Bay Area-based arts writer focusing on visual art, music and theater. His work has also appeared in ZYZZYVA, The San Francisco Appeal and 7x7 Magazine. He holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley in his personalized field of study, “Cognition in Language and Art.”

The original purpose of a space’s architecture may not always be obvious, but its interior design often serve as an indicator as to what the location has witnessed. This is most certainly the case with the current exhibition at Incline Gallery. The space, which is essentially a series of ascending ramps, was originally a morgue; these inclines were used to wheel bodies to the embalming room on the top floor. Manifest 770, a group show curated by Scott S. Jennings and mosshouse, SF, explores this building’s history through artists’ explorations of life and death.

Though ranging a variety of styles and mediums, Manifest 770 is a surprisingly cohesive exhibit. Jason M. Aumann’s photo transfer Memory No. 31(The Space Between) (2011) is a diptych of black-and-white mirrored images depicting a figure in a wooded area. With its faded, blurred images, the piece is reminiscent of a Rorschach test. The left side of the work creates a sense of unease through its use of the horizontal lines that typically appear on static television screens, while the right side has a faded, distorted, vortex-like quality. Memory No. 2 (Lethe) (2010) and Memory No. 26 (2011) both include images of people with no faces, leaving viewers to fill in the blanks with their own memories. Positioned at the top of the ramp next to the embalming room, Aumann’s works evoke the people, now faceless, who once passed through this space.

Jason M. Aumann. Memory No. 26 (2011); pigment, resin, and beeswax varnish on birch wood; 18 x 12 in. Courtesy the Artist and Incline Gallery, San Francisco.

JR Doty’s photographs of Graceland capture another building where the memory of the dead has preserved the space. In the photograph Where We’re Not Allowed (2011), a piano sits waiting as though Elvis were to walk in at any moment. Doty’s richly colored images capture a home that has been dedicated to keeping the memory of a person alive for visitors who are strangers. Her photographs remind us of the unwillingness to let go of the dead and the spaces they inhabited. At Incline Gallery, the memory of the people who once ascended these ramps may be long forgotten, but the history of the space persists.

Manifest 770 is on view at Incline Gallery, in San Francisco, through October 8, 2011.

Emily Vigor received her MA in Art History from Richmond University in London in 2008. She is currently working towards a degree in Library and Archival Science from San Jose State University and works as a cataloger at the Academy of Art University Library.

Looking Through Trees, Pamela Jorden’s first solo exhibition with Romer Young Gallery, presents a group of paintings whose subtle complexity requires prolonged and ideally repeated viewing.

The majority of the paintings exhibited showcase the characteristic style that Jorden has crystallized over the last few years. In such works as Fragments of blue dense (2011) and Quarry (2011), Jorden uses angular streaks and arching sweeps of paint to create dense, tangled webs, whose fractal energy not only bursts, but also quietly shimmers. Painted on darkly dyed canvas, these pieces are ingeniously anchored by bleach under-painting. The resulting batik-like marks inform the placement of Jorden’s overlaying brushwork and provide some of the paintings’ most poetic moments. Jorden’s palette centers on a bruise-like mix of blues, purples, and blacks, but she deftly orchestrates these otherwise somber hues to produce tones that are tranquil rather than dour—more like open expanses of night sky than funereal shrouds.

Diverging from the main group of works are two symmetrically structured paintings, entitled Smoke and Vega (both 2011). Their geometric stability nicely balances the amorphous energy present in Jorden’s other paintings and creates a dialogue that expands the show’s otherwise tight boundaries. In these paintings, as in her signature style, Jorden’s playfully angular brushwork retains much of drawing’s immediacy, while simultaneously exploiting paint’s viscose potential. Triangular edges fade and bounce into one another, creating shifting relationships that evade fixed comprehension. Jorden’s nuanced compositions rub against each other, causing energy to pool in these works until it leaks into the gallery space and contrasting nicely with the way her other paintings seem to recede infinitely.

Quarry, 2011; acrylic and bleach on fabric; 33 x 33 in. Courtesy the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco.

Considered in relation to one another, the paintings in Looking Through Trees make it clear that Jorden’s title is metaphorical if not philosophical. While the fragmentary forms in some of the works could be seen as abstract foliage, they more accurately embody mediated perception. Like flickering light passing through leaves, Jorden’s paintings present a subjective and perpetually moving target. They create fleeting perceptions that elude memory but leave ghostly traces in their wake.  

Looking Through Trees is on view at Romer Young Gallery, in San Francisco, through October 15, 2011.

Incline Gallery is a relatively new addition to the Mission arts scene. In the past year or so, the San Pancho Arts Collective has produced a variety of exhibition projects there and has invited guest curators to do the same. The wide ramp that constitutes the bulk of the hanging space was designed for use by the mortuary that once occupied the building.

In the current exhibition, guest curator Scott S. Jennings has not bypassed but drawn upon the building’s history to make a statement about narrative and media, while giving a nod to site-specificity. Jennings pursued research on the site and turned up not only a succession of mortuaries at what was once 770 Valencia (the building has since been renumbered) but a cabaret and comedy club called the Valencia Rose. Jennings assembled an array of approaches and artists to excavate the history of the gallery site through their individual mediums to tell the age-old story of life and death.

It is an ambitious project that perhaps exceeds the capacities of the space. The curator made the most of the multiple, fragmentary segments of the gallery, and the show admirably builds from works preceding the front door to a spectacular array of pieces visible from the top of the ramp. Many works are subtle and sophisticated, but the most successful ones fairly explode from their little nooks and corners. Joseph Melamed’s sculpted self-portrait, Skeletal Man (2011), is an arresting opener, with its brooding head, supported by a skeletal infrastructure, staring at an iPhone. Mitsu Okubo’s wall paintings are much too large to see in the space, but they continue the conversation on human physicality and add a healthy dose of theatricality. Viewers’ bodies brush up against images of truncated body parts; sex, death, and fantasy merge in a narrow passage that seethes with subconscious impulses.

Farther up, body and world merge in Bassem Yousri’s Pulse (2011), which combines the sound of a thumping heart with images filmed from a window during the recent revolution in Egypt. The pairing of abstract and figurative photography in the works of Jessica Skloven and Lane Coder further

Joseph Melamed. Skeletal Man, 2011; plastic and steel. Courtesy of the Artist and mosshouse, San Francisco. Photo: Scott S. Jennings.

de-corporealizes the self and points to the impotence of images to adequately frame both body and soul. The cut-paper sculptures by Claire Jackal impress with their precision and their sagging vitality, reminding us how brief this spell of life must be. At the top of the ramp, the viewer can survey larger works in the open gallery and reconsider the show by looking back from whence one has come. It is a fitting close, to reach the end of the line and take a quick glance back.

Manifest 770 is on view at Incline Gallery, in San Francisco, through October 8, 2011.

Stan Shellabarger has sandpaper on the soles of his boots. With these boots, the Chicago artist uses walking as a performative mark-making gesture in order to create process-driven artworks rich with metaphorical significance. Selections from Shellabarger’s Walking Book series are currently on display at Western Exhibitions.

On a low pedestal rests the book Untitled (2001)—an unfolded, eighteen-foot long wood block print featuring two rough parallel lines connected by loops on either end. At first the lines seem to be greenish-brown on a steel-blue field, but closer examination reveals reds, greens, and blues mingling together through glaze-like layers of printed ink. To create the image, Shellabarger walked back and forth over a row of ten wood blocks, scuffing a path with his sandpaper-affixed boots. After each walking session, which lasted at least four hours, the artist would pull a print from the increasingly worn blocks using a different color for each successive layer. The final product is a single large-scale image that looks like a long multi-colored abrasion.

Unlike other artists who use walking as an artistic practice to explore the natural world or the urban environment, Shellabarger limits his movement to the confines of discretely scaled art materials and restricted distances. The spatial limitations of the areas the artist traverses are just as significant as the extensive duration of his activity. It is within these boundaries that walking more closely resembles pacing, a meditative exercise of interior focus, and the circularity of his movements evoke seasons and the life cycle. 

Untitled (Large Walking Book, Chicago, IL) (2009) is a large-scale hanging piece made of pink craft paper and marked

Stan Shellabarger. Untitled (Large Walking Book, Chicago, IL), 2009; pink craft paper; 240 x 105 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Western Exhibitions, Chicago.

with a labyrinthine spiral. Creating something like a monoprint here, the marks that constitute the spiral are actually holes in the paper patterned from the artist walking over a corrugated metal floor covered by a single sheet of 240-by-105-inch paper. Unlike Untitled (2001), in which the act of walking becomes an autographic gesture in an image-making process, here Shellabarger acts directly on the paper. In both cases, his actions are at once self-affirming and self-erasing. The marks made are uniquely the product of Shellabarger’s body in motion, even if the process obscures any trace of his individual identity.

Walking is a core component of Shellabarger’s creative process. Action, however, is not the end in itself but a means of constructing a brilliantly symbolic object: a book or corpus. Like skeletal remains, his prints are both evidence of action taken and a culmination of that action. Through gesture, the works created by the artist are at once self-portraits and statements of broad commonality.

Stan Shellabarger is on view at Western Exhibitions, in Chicago, through October 15, 2011.

As the common wisdom goes, when an animal is backed into a corner, it will attack. In his solo show titled Zachary Cahill: USSA 2012 The Orphanage Project at threewalls Gallery, multimedia artist Zachary Cahill fights back against the onslaught of United States imperial power and capital that he considers a threat to free expression. The show ostensibly sprung from the artist’s failed attempt to found an orphanage on Chicago’s South Side, a calculated fiasco meant to highlight the hypocrisy of conservative rhetoric about rescuing the children of welfare recipients—more specifically, Newt Gingrich’s reverie in which he imagines installing the saved children in a state-run orphanage. Predictably, the project collapsed due to funding issues. What is presented at threewalls—drawings, sculptures and prints that brood on oppressive US imperialism—is nothing short of a political broadside.

Like a brand, the letters “USSA” are prominently scattered throughout the show, most notably in the large pink MDF wood blocks that make up USSA (2011). In blurring distinctions between America and the former Soviet Union, the show’s primary conceit rests on the assumption that viewers unquestionably recognize the authoritarian similarities between the two countries.

The bear, Russia’s traditional spirit animal, is Cahill’s overarching metaphorical embodiment of empire and paternalistic state authority. Chicago Bear (2011), featuring a Care Bear with a hammer and sickle on its tummy, is a poster from an ink jet print series titled USSA 2012: The Orphanage Project Posters (2011). In another poster from the series Orphan in the Graveyard (After Delacroix) (2011), a bear clutches an image of Delacroix’s painting Girl Seated in a

Zachary Cahill. Orphanage Birth, from USSA 2012: The Orphanage Project Posters, 2011; inkjet print. Courtesy of the Artist and threewalls, Chicago.

Cemetery (1824). The phrase “Our Propaganda Eats Your Art,” which appears in another part of the show, would be a fitting subtitle for this piece. But bears also appear in entirely different contexts, as outlaw creatures such as artists and members of the LGBT community. Within a matrix of thirty ink drawings, the word “bear” is defined as a gay subculture known for its heavy-set men. These are curious points of reference that begin to give definition to Cahill’s interest in orphans as marginal figures.

Amongst the noise and the unfettered political growl of the show, Cahill’s more subtle ruminations on fringe communities are nearly lost. The art presented bellows with the bombast of agitprop, and in offering a forceful response to the rightward shift in the nation states of the West, the artist risks credibility by playing fast and loose with comparisons between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. Propaganda eats art, but it can also wreak havoc on resistance strategies.

USSA 2012: The Orphanage Project is on view at threewalls, in Chicago, through October 15, 2011.

Jay DeFeo is a Bay Area legend who has a huge local following, so it may come as a surprise that it has been fifteen years since her work was shown on the West Coast. Luckily, we will not have to wait so long again, since a retrospective, organized with the Whitney Museum, is scheduled to land at SFMOMA in fall 2012. The current show at Hosfelt is perhaps an amuse-bouche, a precursor to the main event, but the complex and rich experience is not to be missed.

Almost everyone knows, or knows of, The Rose (1958–66), the artist’s legendary work that took her the better part of a decade to produce and had to be craned out of her studio in 1965 before it was even completed. Her tendency to paint and repaint led to the most impressive accumulations that a painter had ever dared; she layered the surface until it became a sculptural mass. Alongside one of her paintings, SFMOMA recently showed some of DeFeo’s photographs, exposing this lesser-known aspect of her production, wherein she built associations through layers of meaning rather than through layers of paint. The current show brings together photographs, drawings, paintings, and a group of very intriguing studies made like low-tech photograms with a copy machine.

The exploration of everyday objects, such as a compass or a tape dispenser, could be a fount of aesthetic discovery in the hands of DeFeo. She imbued everything she touched with a visionary quality that made things into evocative if incomplete symbols. This exhibition demonstrates how she employed a variety of mediums to build a complex constellation of forms. There is a quality to these works that forces a viewer to keep looking and prevents clear resolution. As one bounces from photo to drawing to painting, it is difficult to know which is the study and which is the finished work. If one compares Untitled (White Spica) (1973) to Untitled, 1980 (1980), one sees the same spiraling form, first drawn, then photographed and collaged, then drawn again in another medium. The reciprocity of form and process is profound. The effect is like walking into an artist’s sketchbook and being surrounded by an evolution of imagery.

This is not to say that these works are not powerful on their own. Samurai No. 8 (1987) is as forceful a painting as one

Untitled (Architecture series), 1983; graphite, acrylic and tape on paper; 17 x 14 in. ©2011 The Jay DeFeo Trust/Artists Rights Society/ARS, New York.

could imagine despite the absence of color (the monochrome show is both characteristic of DeFeo’s work and a choice of the curator). Here, the vivid dynamism of Abstract Expressionism finds belated form, but it has not lost anything in a generation. Yet the lesson to be learned in this sensitive and intelligent presentation is that such force does not emerge from the brow or the hand of the artist. This picture arrives as a result of a conscientious development of form over time, passing through multiple mediums on its journey.

DEFEO is on view at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, through October 22, 2011.

Brice Bischoff, Tabitha Soren, and Ellen Black’s exhibition, on view at Johansson Projects through October 15, is appropriately titled with only the artists’ last names. The simple title is a fitting, definitive invitation to an exhibition of distinct bodies of work, but it can also be understood as a naming of three mythologies that reference the ways we use landscapes and oceanscapes to represent the otherworldly.

Bischoff uses the Bronson Caves in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park as a background for his rainbow-colored specters created from colored paper that he photographs using long exposure times. The results are blurry, amorphous, multicolored shapes that hover in the caves’ foreground. He manipulates the photographs to reveal an image that exists only in the final print, turning on its head the idea of a photograph being used to catch a picture of a ghost. Bischoff takes the photograph, but the final product does not reveal what the camera captured. As viewers, we are delightfully caught in the middle of the actual and the imagined.

Black pulls viewers far back from the landscape. In three video pieces that jut out from angular boxes on the wall, small video screens show views of people walking along the beach. The videos are slightly off; the contrast is high, and the timing is intentionally skewed. While struggling to focus and recognize what is happening in these innocuous scenes, we realize that we are too far away to be a part of this landscape. Still, we are somehow in it, perhaps as voyeurs, or perhaps we are partially recalling a bit of a dream or nightmare. The unsettling tone is uncanny in its familiarity and upsetting in its size, effectively placing viewers in a darker position, right there on what should be a beautiful beach.

Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 15759-3, 2011; pigment print; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Johansson Projects, Oakland.

In the four photographs that make up Soren’s Panic Beach series, the all-encompassing terror of water and light comes crashing down and, in the case of Panic Beach 00107-7  (2011), literally comes off the wall and onto the floor. These fantastical works are brilliant and painterly, bringing about sacred and profane references to landscape and ocean with one glance.

Each artist wisely uses the photographic medium to push his or her conceptual undertaking, and their approaches are refreshing. In this current age of technology, the seemingly infinite choices of filters, Photoshop, and digital renderings are often utilized simply because they can be. With Bischoff, Soren, and Black, however, their choices are thoughtful; their images become objects, both beautiful and ominous. This exhibition allows a viewer to relish in the darkness of the landscape, to experience the danger of the unknown natural world while standing at a safe distance, close enough to feel the discomfort but not far enough to look away.

Bischoff Soren Black is on view at Johansson Projects, in Oakland, through October 15, 2011.

What is the value of collaboration? When two artists work together on one project, should each individual’s vision be present, resulting in a dialogue? Or should the work bleed into one cohesive body in which neither artist’s presence is distinct? Piero Passacantando and Gareth Spor, who worked together on the exhibition The Magic Mountain, at NOMA Gallery, would certainly answer the latter.

The project is based on Passacantando’s research in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Thangka painting. Passacantando worked with professional Thangka painters to emulate their use of geometry and color in painting. For his part of the project, Spor created films that play on loud and clunky film reels, introducing movement into the paintings’ simple circles and patterns.

The work’s color palettes are dusty pinks and serene blues; only one of the video pieces, a collaborative work by both artists, uses brightly colored circles, which move at a glacial pace in a pattern resembling a Venn diagram. The result is so meditative and quiet that it transcends Thangka painting—the work’s source and inspiration are secondary.

The work becomes a respite from the cacophony of media and images that surround us at all times. The “Magic Mountain,” it seems, is a place inside where our individual voice and reactions can stop spinning and become momentarily lost in the simplicity of a circle and the nostalgic clacking of a film projector.

Piero Passacantando. Infinity Circle, 2010; acrylic on muslin; 38 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Noma Gallery, San Francisco.

Magic Mountain: Piero Passacantando and Gareth Spor was on view at Noma Gallery, in San Francisco, from August 6 to September 10, 2011.

Christian Marclay’s work varies greatly in media and effect. Some pieces, such as those showcased in last year’s Christian Marclay: Festival at the Whitney Museum of American Art, are stunning, while others suggest that he compromises his conceptual integrity to meet market demands. For Cyanotypes, currently on view at Fraenkel Gallery, Marclay presents large-scale cyan-blue photographic prints of cassette tapes and cases, as well as a single-channel video projection, in an exhibition that infers relationships between analog technologies, music, the machine, and the hand, but doesn’t fulfill that conceptual promise.

There are two variations to the images: the Allovers, in which unwound cassettes reference Abstract Expressionism and the Cases, in which cassettes and cases are neatly laid in grids with a nod to Minimalism and Conceptualism. While these formally arresting images suggest an underlying strategy regarding his selection of albums and the cyanotypes themselves, I failed to discover a cogent idea to give purpose to what seemingly presents itself as conceptually driven work. The photogram process captures the cassettes’ variation in opacity, design, and form, and sometimes the names of the artists or bands, albums, songs, and record labels. Moreover, some of the works’ titles include the musicians’ and bands’ names—such as Gloria Estefan, Nat King Cole, Queen, and the Dixie Chicks—to reinforce that they are central to how the work operates. However, Marclay’s selection seems random and doesn’t come together to foreground a single idea. The works are void of risk and experimentation; after viewing two galleries of images, I never arrived at a deeper meaning, formal exploration, or synergy.

Looking for Love, 2008 (still); single-channel video; TRT:32 min. Courtesy of the Artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

While I was initially drawn to Marclay’s exhibition at Fraenkel for the cyanotypes, the strongest piece is his video projection in the back gallery, Looking for Love (2008). In one tight shot, Marclay records a series of needle drops and album changes. Without relying upon his amazing editing skills, Marclay’s action reads as a performance, in which he remixes songs emphasizing the word “love” in their lyrics. The video captures the idiosyncratic qualities of analog sound as the records spin or even wobble with his imperfectly timed needle drops. While Looking for Love reveals the repetition, variety, and reverberations of songs about love, the most interesting aspect of the work is the tension between his hand and the machine. While dubbing has largely shifted to the digital realm, Looking for Love references the early days of early hip hop when the DJ’s craft of remixing was performative.

Cyanotypes is on view at Fraenkel Gallery, in San Francisco, through October 29, 2011.

In Some of My Equals, Yuval Pudik departs from his gothic drawings of surreally fused animals, machinery, and fashion. With varying degrees of success, Pudik has pared down his imagery, almost obsessively, to a proto-taxonomical study of megalodon teeth. The megalodon was the fiercest and largest prehistoric shark, and its teeth constitute the bulk of the animal’s fossil record. Most of the gallery is dedicated to an installation of large framed wall drawings and two vitrines, each showcasing meticulous drawings of these fossils that strive to, as the press release indicates, “evoke the language of natural science, such as the drawings of Charles Darwin, while offering a voluptuous and poetic critique of power, sexuality and social evolution.” While the drawings are a rich synthesis of abstraction and rendered forms, Pudik is perhaps unnecessarily reaching to layer content onto the work.

Pudik’s framed images seem to address abstraction more than sexual politics and evolution. In each of the images, a solitary megalodon tooth floats on an artificial horizon line that divides the compositions into a darkly shaded upper area and a blank lower field. In contrast to previous work where his darkest values were frantically filled in, these fields are now more expansive and considered. The horizontal and vertical movements lend them enough purpose and substantiality to stand against the refined draftsmanship of the teeth; the drawings shimmer with their rich graphite lines and forms. The expansive fields contrast Pudik’s minute detail, pushing and pulling the eye. From a distance, the forms become almost unrecognizably abstract, but within each tooth, they undulate to create grotesque, mouth-like areas.

Although the framed works have the greatest impact in the gallery, I found the vitrine pieces more reflective of his intentions, although still slightly puzzling. With a museological sensibility, Pudik has labeled and displayed numerous intimate drawings of megalodon teeth within each vitrine. On the bottom of each image, Pudik has copied Craigslist personal ads for proposed sexual exchanges, largely

Some of My Equals Cabinet No. 4, August 24th 2011 4:56PM, 2011; 17 drawings: graphite on paper, linen, archival tape, museum board, and foamcore; 25 x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

between gay men. While the ads allude to the biological sex drive, I hesitate to conclude that they are Darwinian “critiques of power, sexuality, and social evolution.” Although these pieces don’t seem fully realized, Pudik seems to be searching for ways to connect his content with the work he’s produced.

Some of My Equals is on view at Silverman Gallery, in San Francisco, through October 22, 2011.

Oliver Ressler’s Socialism Failed, Capitalism is Bankrupt. What comes Next? at Bunkier Sztuki in Krakow, Poland, starts with a meaningful and timely question but ends with a hollow sound. The physical space of the exhibition is huge, and Ressler attempts to fill it with monumental wall text, Too Big to Fail (2011), and three videos projected onto massive screens. In the first room, the video Comuna Under Construction (2010, with Dario Azzellini) is a single-channel projection filmed in Caracas, Venezuela that features interviews with self-organizing local residents working together to better their lives. The artist is invisible and silent behind the camera, letting his subjects play out their daily dramas or address the viewer directly without interference. In the next room, the two videos from the 2010 work that share the exhibition’s title present a different place in a similar format. On the left, a colossal projection displays interviews with workers from the largest bazaar in Yerevan, Armenia, while on the right, a slightly smaller screen shows still shots of factories and manufacturing centers in Armenia that have been privatized, operate with reduced production, or are closed.

Despite the enormity of scale, the exhibition fails to deliver on the provocation of its original query. While it’s evident that the work is meant to impart a sympathetic understanding of both the micro-economies of these specific places and of the global impact of late-market, “bankrupt” capitalism or failed Soviet-era socialism, the information-only

Oliver Ressler. Socialism Failed, Capitalism is Bankrupt. What comes Next?, 2011 (still); video. Courtesy of the Artist and Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow.

presentation is problematic given its contemporary art context. Because there is no analysis or interpretation by the artist, there is no transformation from the appearance and tone of straight television journalism to the potentially influential and moving experience that art can provide. This reviewer feels it’s an opportunity lost. After all, these are stories that have been heard before; what’s there to call attention to these particular plights in a sea of collapsed financial systems?

While Ressler may have struggled with his own conscience in the making of these videos—one imagines he might have thought to “let the people speak for themselves”—what he provides seems restrained to the point of prosaic superficiality. In the end, the most apparent lesson of this exhibition is that it’s no longer subversive or daring to go to a destitute city and film its residents; instead, it might be more radical to display an opinion about it.

Socialism Failed, Capitalism is Bankrupt. What comes Next? was on view at Bunkier Sztuki, in Krakow, Poland, through August 28, 2011.

Wind, like energy, is hard to visualize except in its effect, action, or aftermath. What we see is tousled hair or an overturned lawn chair. Similarly, while we certainly appreciate that the lights come on when the switch is flipped and that we feel our socks stick when we take them out of the dryer, it still takes a certain amount of faith to believe in electrons. In Lauren Marsden’s recent exhibition at Oakland's Sight School, Set for an Altered State, “absent presence” seemed the name of the game. An artist known for her performance work presented an installation that resembled an empty stage set: the aftermath of a happening that never happened. And since Marsden also had to move back to Vancouver from the Bay Area just after the opening, she inhabited this show in a way that was doubly phantomic. Sight School's front window displayed a discarded swimsuit buried in a pile of dirt, crowned with a beauty pageant-style sash emblazoned with the initials “D.O.E.”

In the past, Marsden’s work has shown an interest in the bureaucratization and administration of the natural resources we ought to be sharing. Those familiar with this aspect of her work might know that the glamorized bureaucrat who might have worn this costume was a character she sometimes inhabits for her performances. If this wasn't already clear, a lit podium

Miss D.O.E. Has Left the Building, 2011; swimsuit, cotton sash, and sand. Courtesy of the Artist and Sight School, Oakland.

cradling a crisp transcript ready for official declaration, a freestanding flagpole with a shiny flag inflated by artificial wind from an electric fan, and a video of windmills spinning at irregular and disrupted rhythms should have be more than enough indication that the acronym on the sash stood in for "Department of Energy." Sight School, like Marsden, is soon to withdraw from our Golden State landscape as an active and immediately visible presence, but both forces leave us with lasting and thought-provoking effect.

Set for an Altered State was on view at Sight School, in Oakland, from August 5 to August 31, 2011.

Chez Panisse turned forty a few weeks ago, and the anniversary was marked by any number of food-centric fundraisers and celebrations, as well as a flurry of media attention. The Chez Panisse Foundation is also officially changing its name this fall to become the Edible Schoolyard Project. It is launching a national expansion of the school lunch and education program it started in Berkeley in 1996. OPENrestaurant is a collective founded originally by Chez Panisse employees who have been cooking and serving food in intricate events at arts institutions since 2008. A bevy of artists and activists have since joined the group to work together to create ever-expanding and more complex events, albeit still anchored on the production and distribution of meals.

OPENrestaurant celebrated Chez Panisse’s anniversary on the lawns and outdoor ramps around the UC Berkeley Art Museum on August 27, 2011 with OPENeducation, a daytime event with the feel of a small-town food festival. Fare included watermelon, fancy baloney sandwiches, tamales, and fresh grilled corn. Goat milking, pickling, bee keeping, and chapati-making demonstrations took place throughout the day. La Cocina presented perfect, fresh, handmade tortillas and salsa. Complimenting these activities were the Digger Bread Workshop, who baked on site, and Alison Pebworth, who produced refreshing herbed aguas frescas and lemonade with students from METAS, an educational enrichment program at Contra Costa College. With all this activity, it was hard to go hungry for food or conversation engaged with the

Students from METAS at Contra Costa College and artist Alison Pebworth mix custom sodas at a lemonade stand for alternative beverages. Photo: Claudine Gossett.

potential for political and social transformation, any way you worked it. Evoking the stand Mario Savio took in 1964 by climbing up on a police car at a student protest on the UC Berkeley campus, a series of talks on "the corporatization of our school systems and the industrialization of our food systems" were delivered from the roof of a sedan on the lawn.¹ There was a copyleft-oriented library of cookbooks, food books, and art books from which to duplicate and sample. Like the "three sisters" garden that Amanda Eicher planted to replace the ornamental beds at the entrance to the museum, the infusion of carefully considered conversations and eats felt like a substantial and nourishing contribution at a moment when it seems especially important to reconsider the potential for keeping the food movement OPEN to as many publics as possible.

OPENeducation took place at the UC Berkeley Art Museum on August 27, 2011.

________
NOTES:
1. As described in the printed material distributed at the event’s entrance entitled “OPENeducation: Your Notebook.”

Julie Heffernan’s new paintings resemble what would likely happen if the painters of the French Rococo had suddenly gained access to powerful psychotropic substances. Each of the thirteen new works presented here is an elaborate, multi-dimensional composition featuring multiple cascades of signs, figures, and other heaps of ominous still-life objects. All are set in bucolic natural surroundings, where sublime abundance and the obsessively over-manicured collide in a manner that bespeaks the moment when the contrived harmonies of eighteenth-century painting can be imagined to run horribly awry. In most cases, the effect is one of high comedy, even as it is also a bittersweet reflection of a world where the nostalgia for historical order gives way to post-historical chaos.

Viewers, however, keep coming back to being rather astounded by just how much is going on in each individual painting, as each teems with a profusion of visual incidents. Most of these are quite specific and maddeningly peculiar, and in all cases, they seem even more so when they are read in the context of others formed of the same degree of descriptive consideration.

Seven of the thirteen works in this exhibition feature a young blond-haired male figure, a semi-nude “Adonis type” to borrow a term from the old Winkelmanian typology, and he is placed in a central position amidst each of these paintings’ profuse compositions. The figure is in fact a portrayal of the artist’s grown son at the age where he is beginning his adult life, and his position as the protagonist within these works is

Self-Portrait Holding Up, 2010; oil on canvas, 68 x 66 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery.

not dissimilar to the way that Heffernan has used self-portrait figures in previous works, three of which are also included here. The figures are convincing, but in terms of sheer interest, they pale in relation to the insanely complex worlds surrounding them, in which veritable avalanches of allegory-laced objects and situations are heaped up like piles of forgotten treasure in forlorn forests of melancholic delight.

Boy O Boy II is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in San Francisco, through October 29, 2011.

Throughout Residency Projects II, there is explicit interest in physically activating two-dimensional works on paper. (The exception is Jessica Ingram’s photographs, which explore a distinct set of questions that space constraints do not permit review of here.) As noted in the press release, both Zachary Royer Scholz and Renée Gertler explore the “relationship between sculpture and photography,” using these media in concert to create trompe l’oeil objects that underscore art’s status as once-removed from reality.¹ Gertler’s faux-disposable bags and matchbooks each hold within a miniature constellations of stars. Gertler has created her own tornado in a teacup, the cosmos in a container, each equally as mystical as the night sky. Scholz has created several works of varying opacity that explore the physical displacement of different surface textures. Perhaps the most successful is the installation 43.543.523.511 (shelf displacement) (2011), consisting of a wall-mounted shelf and two equally sized photographic prints, one depicting the messy, dappled gallery floor, adhered to the top of the shelf, and one the same pure white as the shelf, replacing the perpendicular piece of floor that appears to have been stripped away. By effectively switching these starkly contrasting surfaces, Scholz makes us aware of their unique characters that would likely be overlooked outside the gallery.

Elisheva Biernoff and Jennie Ottinger are both painters who consistently use the multifaceted nature of paper to activate their work beyond two dimensions. Among other work on view, Biernoff has created a book of screen prints titled Long Story Short (2011) in the style of a children’s picture book. Immaculately detailed scenes of natural disaster are printed on cut-out pages that overlay onto one recurring scene of a

Jennie Ottinger. Candide, 2011; oil on canvas paper; 16 x 13 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley.

lovely cluster of candy-colored houses on a rolling hill. Biernoff’s signature WPA-style use of color translates perfectly to both the medium of screen-printing (she typically works with acrylic paint) and the idiom of children’s-book illustration. Ottinger has animated her loosely painted figures, pulled from the story of Candide, in a stop-motion digital video, cleverly employing disembodied eyes and mouths, which also appear floating in the accompanying works on paper depicting each character, to animate them on screen.

This exhibition showcases the results of a residency experience that allowed four artists to push their experiments with two-dimensional works on paper into active space. While these artists may be quite familiar to many frequenters of Bay Area contemporary art galleries, Kala affords viewers a new lens through which to see their work.  

Residency Projects II is on view at Kala Art Institute, in Berkeley, through October 15, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. Full disclosure: the author has worked with Elisheva Biernoff, Jennie Ottinger, and Zachary Royer Scholz in a curatorial capacity.

These days, site specificity is where one finds it. In the case of the four works presented by Claire Jackel at Gallery 555—an outreach program of the Oakland Museum of California—one finds it in a plush corporate lobby housing some Internet companies, accounting firms, and other LLP-type organizations proclaiming themselves to be “equity partners.” Around the corner is another building that is home to the Department of Homeland Security, meaning that one always sees a small flock of DHS vehicles parked nearby, and where inside the lobby, one finds a train wreck. Hanging from the lobby’s high ceiling is a small locomotive made of carefully cut translucent paper, towing over a dozen similarly scaled passenger cars formed out of the same material. All of these are jackknifed against each other in a way that suggests that the whole procession had run off the rails, mirroring the work’s title, You’ve Gone Off the Rails (2010). Adding some spice to the scene is the fact that, from certain angles, the jackknifed cars look like volatile stock market graphs, making the work read as an allegorical representation of recent catastrophes in the global financial markets.

This reading is supported by other works, such as a box-like cluster of eighty upside down paper houses titled Make Me New (2010), which seems to say something about mass foreclosures and the tragic human stories resulting from same. Another work, titled Sink and Subside (2009), gives us a sextet of paper backhoe shovels reaching out from under a pile of dirt, obviously trying to dig themselves out from under a small mountain of unsustainability. Given the magnitude of the recent financial crisis, it seems odd that so few artists have made work that reflect upon its ongoing ramifications, but Jackel has done so, with an impressive degree of wit and lyric poignancy.

Make Me New, 2010; paper, monofilament; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 555, Oakland.

Claire Jackel is on view at Gallery 555, in Oakland, through November 10, 2011.

Lightspace, a group show at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, includes works by four female artists.

Cathy Cunningham-Little’s lightboxes are self-illuminating studies in geometry and saturated color. Housed in neutral wood frames, they cast a diffuse, greenish glow into the dark room. Blue Transformation (2011) is a green square with a bright red center that references HAL 9000’s pulsing user interface from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and suggests an abstracted, technological intelligence.

Amy M. Ho’s installation is also self-illuminating and consists of a projection of a curving hallway perfectly calibrated to fit the gallery wall. Like the proverbial tunnel of light recounted in anecdotal near-death experiences, the light emanates towards the room from a distance, and the ultimate destination is obscured. The visible grain of the projection source creates a sense of a permeable veil between the gallery and beyond, as though Ho is presenting a view of what lies beyond a metaphysical boundary. The hum of the projector is a reminder of the constant production of the illusion in the space and its transient immateriality, as if at any moment it could completely disappear.

Keira Kotler’s urethane and acrylic paintings employs the same wide pattern as conceptual artist Daniel Buren uses to integrate and disrupt architectural spaces, though Kotler renders her stripes with the milky iridescent materiality of a Robert Irwin sculpture. The mechanically-straight regular lines lay embedded within thick layers of light-capturing plastics, creating a relationship with the ambient lighting in the gallery.

Amy M. Ho. Wall Space III, 2010; single-channel projection; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Oakland.

Kana Tanaka’s sculptural installation is made up of transparent beads suspended in a cylindrical column of red thread. Together, these beads suggest an organic shape beginning to taking form within a sphere, but their progress seems frozen moments before fulfilling its promise. The work plays on the perceptual impulse to connect the dots into a cohesive shape, but reveals only a trick of the light caught in individual points.

Collectively, these works illustrate how contemporary artworks continue to engage with ambient light, materiality, and the gallery situation, evoking Minimalist and California Light and Space strategies of the past while continuing to explore technology and materiality in beautiful new ways.

Lightspace is on view at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, in Oakland, through September 24, 2011.

Circumspect at Robert Berman/E6 Gallery was an exhibition of photographs by Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French. Using only darkroom compositing processes and no digital manipulations, these images make use of cinematic mise-en-scène and elaborate staging to evoke mysterious, childlike narratives.

Dividing Sums (2010), is a large landscape-format, black–and–white photograph of women standing in a concrete space wearing mod, graphic dresses. Lined up near them are four large weather balloons printed in subtle white shades, casting shadows of varying degrees of density. The visual rhythm created by the stark darks and lights of the image recalls the dynamism of Ruth Bernhard’s 1930 iconic Lifesavers, another image involving round shapes and repetition of light and dark. The difference in scale between the women and the weather balloons makes the figures seem small and childlike, an impression reinforced by their bold costumes.

That visual rhythm is developed further in Long Before Pluto (2010), which features the same concrete setting occupied by several women wearing white dresses, two white weather balloons, and several shadow-like black balloons. One of the women has a long sheer black train attached to her 

Dividing Suns, 2010; c-print. Courtesy of the Artists and Robert Berman/E6  Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

clothing, and another wears a sheer skirt, creating a subtext of sexual or marital tension in addition to contributing to the design of the composition. Shot from above, surrounded by the spheres as if in orbit, the women in both of these photographs seem to occupy that tricky adolescent space often characterized in fairytales such as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, or Alice in Wonderland, in which small and infantile characters possess latent, mysterious power. 

These fairytale themes continue through the rest of the works in the exhibition, and Charbonneau and French are at their best when deploying their elegant, spare visual sensibility.

Circumspect was on view at Robert Berman/E6 Gallery, in San Francisco, through September 14, 2011

Why Paint?

When Matisse was asked in a 1942 radio interview why he painted, he said: "Why, to translate my emotions, my feelings, and the reactions of my sensibility into color and design, which neither the most perfect camera, even in color, nor the cinema can do. ... [Artists are] useful because they can augment color and design through the richness of their imagination intensified by their emotion and their reflection on the beauties of nature, just as poets or musicians do."¹

Miranda Putman’s elegant but tough-minded abstract paintings and drawings use an intuitive, personal syntax that points to anatomical illustrations, to the strata seen in geological formations, and, less directly, to the influences of writers and musicians like Tolstoy and John Coltrane. She works in layers of pasted paper, ink, graphite, charcoal, and paint, mapping her physiological and emotional geography as she works. Each piece relies on its own internal logic, and her paintings navigate a terrain full of hidden paths, twists and turns, surprises, and concealed messages that write over themselves, both canceling and echoing one another’s meaning. 

Though her paintings are expressionist in spirit, Putman sites the work of Matisse and the compositions of Tintoretto as some of the influences for her recent show at b.sakata garo in Sacramento. Combining understated colors with rhythmic mark-making, Putman’s bold and exuberant compositions look exactly right. Her works achieve a deeply satisfying level of complexity, transmitting the fruits of many years of painting and drawing directly to the minds of her viewers.

Miranda Putman. Untitled #37, 2011; mixed media on panel; 48 x 36 in. Courtesy of the Artist and b. sakata garo, Sacramento.

Miranda Putman and Susan Preston was on view at b sakata garo, in Sacramento, through September 3, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1.Jack D.Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Untitled (Compass series), 1979; graphite, charcoal on paper 13 1/2 x 11 1/16 in. ©2011 The Jay DeFeo Trust/Artists Rights Society/ARS, New York.

In keeping with the broad spectrum of media, the works in DEFEO cover numerous representational styles, thereby contributing to a fuller picture of DeFeo’s oeuvre. This includes photographs that echo the geometric structure of The Rose; photocopies of compasses that DeFeo has messily altered through drawing, painting, or further photocopying; and clean-edged abstract drawings and paintings: mystical totems that are similar in intent to The Rose, but more modestly executed. This exhibition could be the beginning of a rediscovery of DeFeo’s rich and varied output, expanding upon the artistic and spiritual inquiries that she explored throughout her career.

DeFeo is on view at Hosfelt Gallery, in San Francisco, through October 22, 2011.

________
NOTES:
1. Hosfelt, Todd. DeFeo Exhibition Catalogue. San Francisco: Hosfelt Gallery, 2011.

Matt Borruso’s latest solo exhibition at Steven Wolf Fine Arts is one of those rare occasions when the ideas illustrated by a group of work so perfectly reflect the character of the artist himself. The exhibition’s title, The Hermit’s Revenge Fantasy, says it all: Borruso is decisively smart and snarky, enchanted by the camp genres of science fiction and fantasy, and is himself somewhat of an obsessive shut-in.¹ This exhibition includes a selection of Borruso’s immaculate pencil and paper drawings, paper collages made of vintage magazines, board books and LP sleeves, and a two-channel video installation, all made within the last two years.

Borruso has crafted his fascination for the grotesque into a signature artistic style. His collages ruminate on gross and bizarre combinations of food and forms, such as Spam growing out of an orange slice or an afghan partly covering a disgusting alien. He finds aesthetic harmony in the most discordant pairings, whether using the horror-movie tropes as metaphors for overconsumption or using super-saturated colors to heighten viewers’ alternating sense of fascination and disgust.

The back room of the gallery showcases How to See (2011), a two-channel video that pairs a looped scene of violence and struggle from each of the films They Live (1988) and The Miracle Worker (1962). Again, Borruso has observed a poignant connection, this time between two unlikely films. One is a sci-fi thriller about a drifter who discovers a pair of sunglasses that reveals the elite upper class to be, in fact, a race of disguised evil aliens trying to take over the world, and the other is a dramatization of Anne Sullivan’s struggle to teach Helen Keller how to communicate in the human world. Both orbit around the idea of sight as a metaphor for enlightenment and agency in a world stacked against us.

Borruso’s work offers the possibility that both artists and viewers “through creative means…can construct a personal universe: a world that is both a reflection of the self, and an ideal place to escape to."² The video installation in particular suggests the potential of art to help us see, in all senses of the word, in a time fraught and uncertain. I am left thinking that learning how to see is the hermit’s ultimate revenge fantasy.

In Search of Space, 2011; cut paper collage; 22 x 14 in. Courtesy the Artist and Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco.

The Hermit’s Revenge Fantasy is on view at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, in San Francisco, through October 8, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. Full disclosure: the author has worked with Borruso in a curatorial capacity and visited his studio in 2008.
2. from the exhibition press release.

The new group photography exhibition at Stephen Wirtz Gallery aims to turn the definition of an idyll on its head. On the surface, each work in the exhibition presents an idealized and bucolic view of the relationships between humans and landscapes, especially of rustic life. With further scrutiny, however, there is a sinister undercurrent in which the fallacy of this utopian vision becomes apparent.

The exhibition takes as its starting point Larry Sultan’s Homeland series (2006-2009), which captures day laborers on the fringes of a suburban American paradise. Many of the other photographers show the influence of traditional conventions of landscape painting, yet each artist complicates these conventions in their own way. Alec Soth’s The Farm, Angola State Prison, Louisiana (2002) resembles a humble seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, with a low, flat horizon dotted with figures. As the title suggests, however, this is not an image of agrarian independence, but a prison work detail. Jim Goldberg’s The Orchard (2007) recalls Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862-1863) as populated by aimless youths. Taking such conventions to the present, Sultan’s Backyard Film Set (2002) and Catherine Wagner’s images of Tokyo Disneyland reveal the artificial construction of modern landscapes. 

Stylistically, these works find themselves somewhere between the New Topographics aesthetic of the 1970s and more theatrical contemporary photography as epitomized by Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall. The photographs in Idyll are not dispassionate visions of man-made landscapes, but they do capture the underside of the American Dream as reflected in complex relationships with environments. See,

Jim Goldberg. The Orchard, 2007; chromogenic print, edition of 7; 40 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco.

for example, Goldberg’s Home, Hyderabad (2008), which finds an echo of this dream in India by portraying a dilapidated drainage culvert, presumably home to the family pictured. Melanie Pullen’s Zanotti’s Sunflare (Barrel Series) (2003) seems to portray a pristine winter scene, until one notices the pair of feet sticking out of a barrel. Though the photographs are not elaborately staged spectacles, some contain a sense of fabrication and there’s a mysterious narrative to many of them.

With a few exceptions, notably Doug Rickard’s #33.408196, Louise, MS. 2008 (2011), all of the works share a striking stylistic similarity; the clear, dusky light appears to depict the same time of day in each photograph. While this lends the exhibition a necessary coherence, it left me wanting a more varied and nuanced perspective.

Idyll is on view at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, in San Francisco, through September 30, 2011.

Posing Beauty in African American Culture, curator Deborah Willis’s latest exhibition, features eighty-four photographs carefully culled from the 2009 publication of the same name. Although Willis offers no guiding definition of beauty here, the exhibition purportedly interrogates how black beauty is imagined, constructed, and represented in popular culture through a variety of printed matter from studio portraits to reportage and historical documents.

Willis’s selection of images indicates that desire may be mistaken for beauty. From Edward Curtis’s A Desert Queen (1898) to John Mosely’s Atlantic City, Four Women (c. 1960), the photographs express the desires of both the photographers and the subjects to see and be seen, to indelibly mark their presence as witness or participant. For example, in Atlantic City, Four Women, the women pose in slinky bathing suits on a beach. Contemporary audiences rarely see such images because Jim Crow laws prohibited blacks from swimming on public beaches. However, as seen in the photograph, these women created their own recreational spaces. With broad smiles, they look directly at the camera, commanding attention and exclaiming their presence in a contested space.

Other images suggest a desire not only to get closer to frightening and confounding stereotypes about blackness but also to demystify and abate those same stereotypes, as in Stephen Shames’s 1970 photograph of a shirtless Huey P. Newton in his Berkeley home. Newton epitomized the enigmatic, fearsome Other, especially when depicted wearing Black Panther regalia. Dressed in only white jeans and holding a Bob Dylan record, Newton here is transformed from a threat to just another man.

Newton and the other subjects are attractive, but it is difficult to identify a specific articulation of black beauty. The terms

Ken Ramsay. Susan Taylor, as Model, c. 1970s; silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

“black” and “beauty” are elusive and continuously debated in society; beauty is subjective while the range of skin tones and hair textures makes blackness an extreme variable. Posing Beauty may not get one closer to defining black beauty, but the exhibition successfully proves the diversity and fluidity of blackness. It also reveals lost histories of black Americans living “behind the veil,” such as the women in Mosely’s image¹. This disclosure of rich, vibrant lives, despite sociopolitical challenges, is arguably more valuable than considerations of beauty.

Posing Beauty in African American Culture is on view at USC Fisher Museum of Art, in Los Angeles, through December 3, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, New York: Bantam Company, 1989.

In Yoshua Okón’s Octopus, a four-channel video installation on view at the Hammer Museum, dueling factions of day laborers engage in pantomimed warfare outside of a Los Angeles Home Depot. Equipped with wheeled palettes and orange shopping carts, they spy using gloved hands as binoculars and guard themselves with pistols simulated with single fingers. They duck under trucks and tumble over sedans. Passing shoppers ignore casualties sprawled next to prefabricated tool sheds; a white pickup rolls over a speed bump.

Okón, a Mexico City-based artist-in-residence at the Hammer, recruited the actors at the Home Depot where the video is shot. Each had fought in the Guatemalan civil war for the military, for the insurgency, or for both over the course of the thirty-six year struggle. Though the staged, abstract action forgoes the depiction of actual clashes, the piece points to a hushed history deeply tied to American commerce. In 1954, the U.S. State Department and the CIA engineered a coup d’état ousting the president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, whose progressive politics were perceived as a Soviet-socialist threat, and whose agrarian reform seized and distributed large plots of unused land to be farmed by families. The U.S.–based United Fruit Company (nicknamed "the octopus" for its reach) lobbied for the overthrow, seeking to maintain its grip on the country’s ports and infrastructure and to retain hundreds of thousands of hectares. As a result, Guatemala’s people were embroiled in four decades of war.

By relocating the hostilities from Guatemala to a Los Angeles Home Depot parking lot, Okón’s video repeats the

Yoshua Okón, Octopus, 2011 (still); four-channel video installation, color, sound; TRT: 18:30 min. Courtesy of the Artist and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

displacement the men themselves have undergone. It also makes evident the excision of their specific, lived histories from the dominant narratives circulated in the United States, which often assume that immigrant populations travel across the border in search of economic opportunity. It makes visible the workers’ removal from visibility—and from the legitimate workforce—as day laborers. As a site where men who fought on opposite sides occupy the same space, the Home Depot setting testifies to the arbitrariness of the artificially initiated conflict. But the big box store also serves as a stand-in for multinational corporations, tying the messy legacy of U.S. foreign policy to its mercenary alliance with big business. Though these subjects are ripe for melancholic response, Octopus institutes one more displacement: humor supplants cynicism, calling for an emotional response other than resignation. With its lack of solemnity, the video does not tell silent histories; instead, it puts them in play, implicating viewers without accusation in the skirmish over what stories are told and made valid.

Yoshua Okón's work is on view at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, through November 6, 2011.

There is something to be said for an artist who, in the midst of all the memorializing of the tenth anniversary of September 11, decides to focus on the no less tragic, but less sung, Hurricane Katrina. British artist Kelly Barrie, now based in Los Angeles, has made a singular haunting statement about Katrina’s aftermath in the form of a large-scale photographic drawing.

Commissioned by the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Mirror House started as a press photograph of a house and a large tree submerged in hurricane floodwaters. Barrie recreated the photograph through a performative process using photo-luminescent powder on seamless black paper and dance-like movements to draw with his feet as a visceral response to the source image and the events that created the photograph’s scene. Barrie left the completed drawing on his studio floor, where time and ambient interference such as insects and pets and wind from an open window enhanced the trailing effect of his sweeping feet. All this movement mimics the stains roiling floodwaters leave on damaged homes and personal mementos left behind. The final steps in the process included photographing the drawing on 35mm film while exposing it to sunlight in varying intervals and building a digital collage with the scanned negatives. These final two steps enhance the weathered condition of the final image, drawing further parallels to the damage New Orleans sustained from the hurricane.

Mirror House, 2010; digital c-print; 94 x 24 in. framed. Courtesy of the Artist and Santa Monica Museum of Art. Photo: crystal am nelson.

The final effect is gothic, suggestive of an old daguerreotype of Dixieland’s distant past when lynched bodies hung from trees and floated in rivers. Only upon reading the wall text does one realize the image is from the contemporary landscape, the flooded streets of which also bore the dead in the weeks following Katrina. In this way, Barrie reminds the viewer the past is always present. His reliance on highly detailed wall text, in which he explains his source material and process on a piece of vinyl almost half the size of the image, seems problematic at first; ideally, memorial art needs no interpretive text. Yet its inclusion emphasizes the problematic of public memory and memorial rituals on a national scale. Who decides who or what is publicly remembered? Barrie’s tribute to Katrina exposes the United States’ answers to these questions as well as the pathology of this country’s history, selective memory, and rituals in honor of that selective memory.  

Mirror House is on view at Santa Monica Museum of Art, in Santa Monica, through December 10, 2011.

As part of the one-night event, Critical Campout, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers and members of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) led museum–goers along a looped trail beginning at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and dipping into Central City East, a fifty–five–block swath of the city more commonly called Skid Row. The Rangers named the route the Downtown Ecotone Trail, employing a word usually used to describe species-rich, liminal patches of land between dissimilar environments such as forest and tundra. Initially defined as a “stress line,” an ecotone not only connects the habitats on either side but also thrusts them into dynamic interaction.¹

At the museum “trail head,” Rangers informed participants about “alternative” tent making and asked them to draw their ideal forms of habitation. Campers who reserved sites set up tents in MOCA’s outdoor plaza. As the sun set, hikers set out in small groups down a groomed, grassy patch of Bunker Hill. They walked under strings of lights draped across the Historic Core, and beside yoga studios and restaurants staffed with private guards. The sky darkened and streetlamps became scarce as the group progressed over plastic bags and clogged gutters, alongside alleyways fenced with barbed wire, and around improvised bedding on Wall Street.

Along the way, guides described city ordinances that confine the homeless population to Skid Row, allowing for “downtown development” by cordoning off a portion of the city’s population. Residents responded to the group’s presence in varied ways. Two heckled the crowd from behind, whooping loudly to interrupt a note about S.R.O. hotels. After a few rattled seconds the group moved to the next block, where another man joined the tour and reopened the narrative.

Los Angeles Urban Rangers,. Critical Campout (2011). Courtesy of the Artists and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Christina Edwards.

He spoke about how his neighborhood has changed: “This used to be the real downtown.” At the edge of Skid Row on a well-lit corner, another’s comment seemed acerbic: “You’re taking a tour? I’m proud of your bravery! Welcome to poverty!” Throughout the course of the trek, hikers were asked to note changes in the environment and in themselves. Upon returning to MOCA, they sat in circles to swap stories. The group I traveled with stayed quiet unless prompted. Though those in attendance had succeeded in obtaining one of the tour’s scarce reservations, many felt uncomfortable.

In this charged socioeconomic scenario, the Rangers’ operative metaphor of the tour linked the activity to more gauche, exploitative forms. While the program offset associations with high-walled resorts by offering contextualizing discussions and guest speakers, the frankness of the tourism metaphor was what made the campout critical. The uneasiness of being a tourist on Skid Row demonstrated how deep the moat marked by Main Street is and made visceral the sense that the separation fails to serve the people on either side.

Critical Campout took place at Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles on September 1, 2011.

________
NOTES:
1. Koen Hufkens, Paul Scheunders, and Reinhart Ceulemans, “Ecotones in vegetation ecology: methodologies and definitions revisited,” Ecological Research, vol. 4 issue 5 (2009), doi: 10.1007/s11284-009-0584-7 (accessed September 15, 2011).

As an arts writer, I found Wrapping Traditions: Korean Textiles Now at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art to be a surprising challenge. Unsatisfied with the lack of breadth in my own arts coverage, I intended to approach this exhibition as any other hip and orthodox contemporary art show. The problem is that, feeling oh so progressive and inclusive, I did just that.

One of the works I was drawn to was HaeHong Chang’s Black Project, 10-1 (2010), a nearly six-foot long bojagi, traditional Korean wrapping cloths that are the subject of the exhibition. The mostly black cloth is neither clearly abstract nor clearly figurative. Divided into either similar or identical segments, I could only process this piece as resembling a strip of film picturing what might be a tree. My brain scoured its archive for references to Bazin, Benjamin, and Eisenstein before moving on.

Moving from analog to digital, I was confronted with JungSook Ham’s Mold (2010), a palette of one hundred multicolored squares. Peculiarly, each of these squares has two seemingly random black threads streaking erratically across each monochromatic swatch. The perfect grid and glitch-like effect of the threads combine to give the impression of digital media, and my mind wandered to Lev Manovich, thoughts of algorithms, and acronyms such as CMYK and RGB.

None of my forced interpretations were readily apparent to me until I reached ChungIm Kim’s beautiful and slightly haunting Trance (2010). Her bojagi is comprised of 120 beige squares of industrial felt that bulge at their corners. From a distance, the silhouette of a vague natural landscape appears on the surface, which when examined up close, is revealed to be a screen print. Up close, one can also see dozens, if not hundreds, of thin black threads protruding from the seams of the textile. Intertwining chaotically with one another before ultimately draping down towards the floor, the threads resemble a spider web that’s been destroyed by an unassuming passerby. This synthetic yet organic look immediately reminded me of Eva Hesse, and it was at this point that I realized exactly how I had pre-determined my experience of the exhibition before I even entered the museum.

To place these works in the context of traditional art history or theory is not problematic; in fact, it can be productive. But what I noticed was not just that I tried to force the works of Wrapping Traditions into a context I understood, but that I effectively ignored those that I couldn’t easily read through an academic, critical theory framework.

ChungIm Kim. Trance, 2010; industrial felt, threads, digitally engineered images, silk screen printing, hand-stitching; 43 x 23 x 1 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco.

I viewed them through a lens I could easily digest, but this meant I was cognitively unable to experience most of the sixty-seven pieces in the show, and now remember nothing of them.

Wrapping Traditions: Korean Textiles Now is on view at Museum of Craft and Folk Art, in San Francisco, through October 22, 2011.

Illusions of Grandeur, at 111 Minna Gallery, showcased the abstract and Surrealist-inspired work of two local painters, NoMe Edonna and Lee Harvey Roswell. Both self-taught, each artist possesses an eye for composition and favors bold colors, as exhibited by the great visual impact of the works on display. Their paintings are also provocative on an intellectual level, employing more familiar and obscure symbolism, inventive and perplexing juxtapositions of elements, and a darkly humorous tone that contrasts with the often-grim themes they explore.

In Edonna’s Blue Room (2009-11), a naked woman braces the sidewall of a stage, as if attempting to hide from both the imagined audience behind the slightly open curtain and the CCTV camera upstage from her. It vividly portrays the vulnerability of the most private self to the aggression of a culture of overexposure. Adding to the menace is the camera, which extends like the head of some prehistoric beast whose body is an amalgam of modern-day grotesques: factories emitting foul eructations; a single rotting arm reaching into a high-end handbag; a reptilian snout bedecked with Mickey Mouse ears and a giant diamond ring; the Washington Monument oozing petrol. Edonna's painting is so effective precisely because of its allegorical pull. It invites viewers to recognize themselves in each of its three “characters”: the monster of detritus, the naked figure trying to escape, and the unseen audience ready to gawk at this spectacle. Blue Room suggests that our culture is haunted by its dependence on the very vices it has created.

Roswell’s work, on the other hand, is sometimes so surreal as to make concise interpretation difficult, perhaps deliberately. One of his most complex pieces, Bacchus Fermentus (2011),

NoMe Edonna. Shelf Life, 2011; acrylic on panel; 16 x 20 in. Courtesy the Artist and 111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco.

is based on Caravaggio’s masterpiece Bacchus (c.1595). While Caravaggio casts a louche teen as his god of wine, Roswell’s Bacchus embodies the mythological figure’s darker aspects as bestower of madness, hallucinations, and epiphanies. The famous drooping lids and unfocused gaze of Caravaggio’s original are here rendered as a series of eyes that progress from realistically aged and swollen organs into more abstract biomorphic versions of themselves. Elsewhere, the painting’s other details—fingers poking out from wood, ghostly forms distorting the objects behind them, tentacles waving—create a febrile atmosphere at odds with the subject’s languid posture. Roswell’s Bacchus, true to his Greco-Roman roots, smiles upon but is not affected himself by the madness that swirls around him. It is up to the viewer to consider whether Roswell’s benediction summons nightmares or ecstasy.

Illusions of Grandeur was on view at 111 Minna Gallery, in San Francisco, through August 27, 2011.

E-waste gets its metaphorical charge from its sense of scale and mortality. The stuff has an accelerated lifespan, almost instantaneously going from plastic sheen to useless obsolescence. We pay to have it responsibly removed, convincing ourselves that it won’t end up in toxic electronics graveyards in China or as the subject of an oversize Edward Burtynsky photograph. He took pictures of dazzling metallic heaps of refuse in 2004, and since that time the piles have certainly enlarged, though their impact as an activist art subject has been subsumed by techno ambivalence: I’m Green—and I want my iPhone 5!

Anna Sew Hoy’s commissioned installation Nothing All Day (2011) takes computer trash in a more minimal, ambiguously funereal direction. In the past, her sculpture has evoked perverse ceramic talismans and macramé fetishes. Her practice could conceivably instill abandoned motherboards with something more than LEED-certified visual panache. Part of the San Jose Museum's Beta Space series, the project involved providing the artist with “locally sourced e-waste” from which she made sculptures that together suggest a low-tech IT mortuary. Ergonomically outmoded keyboards are stuck vertically in plaster blocks becoming prosaic beige headstones set on funky orange-stained worktables.

As literal excess baggage, e-waste proves a stubbornly inert material that Sew Hoy doesn’t attempt to demonstrably transform; instead she highlights a tension between the quick pace of technology and the deliberate slowness of the handmade—yet it’s a self-neutralizing, formal merger.

Cordage is a Sew Hoy staple, and here fiber is replaced by pliant plastic-coated wire. Large handmade glass urns are

(Foreground) 6 brands, 6 species (detail), 2011; PC keyborad and mouses, plaster, and wood. (Background) mockett and keyboard décor, 2011; color Xerox and black and white Xerox. Courtesy of the Artist and the San Jose Museum of Art. Photo: Kathi Cambiano.

filled with mortal coils, a Halloween candy cauldron of inedible DSL cable. On the floor, mice, with their cord tails inserted into a block of plaster, are a tethered rodent family that’s perhaps too obvious an illustration of their name to extend their gestures in any particular direction.

The most signature Sew Hoy work is made from denim pant legs, some acid washed, others a deeper blue, filled with some poly fluff and bound into a lumpy sphere with computer cords. The materials, however, are questionable: were these jeans worn by Silicon Valley techies or did the artist rescue them from her studio? The piece resembles a planet of puffy brain matter, though it's suspended so close to the ground as to be practically huggable. If it's about the mind, the pant legs are conceptually contrasting elements from below the belt. The show, however, doesn't quite compute in either place.

Nothing All Day is on view at the San Jose Museum of Art through February 26, 2012.

Ben Venom’s massive See You on the Other Side (2011) is a thirteen-by-fifteen-foot quilt made out of heavy metal T-shirts, fabric, batting, and thread. The quilt’s central image shows the skull of a fanged humanoid with a nest of live and terrifying snakes inside a black and red circle. The circle itself is supported by two smaller circles, inside of which are pyramids; at the top of the quilt are looming lightning bolts; pentagrams emblazon each of the four corners. The pentagrams, pyramids, and the fanged skull with snake-hair are collaged out of ripped heavy metal band T-shirts on which some band names are legible: Kreator, Metallica, Judas Priest, Cannibal Corpse. Other animal and humanoid forms emerge from the chaos of color and shape that forms the skull and snakes: snarling wolves, cartoon monsters, a bruised Jesus holding a cross, more skulls, and more snakes.

See You on the Other Side, a title that itself both alludes to a gospel tradition and could be a sinister invitation to hell, argues for an association between two traditional American crafts: quilting and metal. Yet such an uncanny association is belied by some obvious structural affinities—quilting and metal are both genres that emerge as working class productions, and so can be read as eschewing the conceptual rigor and moneyed sophistication that mark the urban work of bourgeois art. Both quilting and metal are virtuosic displays. Metal, just as one example of its craft, is not punk; this is simply to insist on its intricacy and speed and the necessity of training for the aspiring rocker. Quilting, too, is a laborious and learned craft that parades as utilitarian object, providing warmth while reveling in its scale and elaborate patterning.

At the same time, what could be further from the fiery demonic yawp of a spectacular metal performance than the 

See You on the Other Side, 2011; hand-made quilt of heavy metal T-shirts, fabric, batting, and thread; 155 x 175 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

quilter in repose? While See You achieves much in its reminder that metalheads are, after all, crafty in their appropriation of materials and that quilters “shred” in the virtuosity of their craft as much as anybody plying an axe, this dialectical triumph is still a little uneasy, anxious, over the top. That is, it challenges the traditional reception of either of these artifacts as facile modes. Also, it rawks.

See You on the Other Side is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, through October 11, 2011.

In Charles Baudelaire’s 1855 essay “On the Essence of Laughter,” the poet and art critic considers, among other provocative ideas, that laughter in adults is fundamentally demonic. He cites a conventional instance familiar to all of us—the reception of someone who slips and falls. Why would we laugh at this, if humanity weren’t essentially Satanic? Laughter is the expression of our inherent tendency towards superiority, force, domination, and cruelty.

Tammy Rae Carland’s series of five color photographs, each entitled I’m Dying Up Here with a parenthetical subtitle, depict the bizarre scene of stand-up comedy, that is, a space in which a crowd of people gathers and one person stands up front and tries to make them laugh. In Carland’s work, something has gone terribly awry in each of these scenes; such displacements suggest that the spectacular, institutionalized patriarchy is always already awry, and the rarified stage of stand-up is only one of its scenes.

Four of the five photographs depict the performing body as female bodies engaged in a struggle. In Mop Face (2011), for instance, the comic leans precariously forward, enveloping her own head into the head of a mop. In Upside Down (2010), the effort to maintain the awkward pose is clear. The appurtenances of the stage of stand-up are emphasized as stable icons against the precariousness of the figures, each of which is about to “flop.” The accoutrements in these images—a water bottle, a microphone and stand, a stool—are often explicitly phallic, robust vertical lines against the elegant horizontal stage set and the clumsiness of the body in the lights. The triumph of the setting reaches its zenith in Glitter Drapes (2011), a scene in which everything is prepared for the comic, and only she is absent.

I’m Dying Up Here stages what’s at stake in the relation between a crowd and the figure at whom they gaze. These

I'm Dying Up Here (Upside Down), 2010; color photograph; 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

photographs insist on the violence of that relation even as they approach their subjects with tenderness and sympathy. This is also to say that I’m Dying Up Here is an extremely finessed presentation of this spectacle. Yet, as part of a discourse that explicitly resists the optic debasement inherent to the sex-gender system, Carland’s photographs are also, among other things, funny. Even “funny ha-ha.”

I'm Dying Up Here is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, through September 25, 2011.

I once saw a documentary on Jeff Koons. Though I never gave much thought to Koons before watching the film, I held a vague and prejudicial negative reaction to the artist. I don't remember much about the film, but something about it made me appreciate Koons in a new light. Maybe it is Koons' irreverence towards the art world; maybe I find pleasure in knee-jerk postmodern rejections of postmodernism; or maybe I'm just an aesthetic nihilist, enthralled with the signifiers of late capitalism.

It is likely for one of these reasons that I enjoyed SuperDeux's (aka Sebastien Roux) exhibition, I WISH I COULD TALK, at Peek Gallery located in The Summit coffee shop in San Francisco. The brightly colored, cartoonish screen prints and sculptures make no reference, on first glance at least, to a transnational queering of the fundamentally alienating nature of the spectacle—this is refreshing and even subversive. Moreover, these works are just fun to look at. I like to look at things that make me happy. Sometimes I Google "funny pictures of bears" for no reason whatsoever. It's a delight; try it.

Don't you feel better now? Did the looming deadline on that budget report seem just a little less important for a second? Did your blood pressure drop just a tad? If you answered "no" to any of these questions, click the link again.

The focal point of I WISH I COULD TALK is Moody, a variously blue, pink, red, or yellow partially anthropomorphized fist. Moody has two feet and clenches a sharpened pencil with his four digits. Moody's face possesses two eyes, but no mouth. His pencil, however, seems to invalidate his expressed wish. The works are proof of the existence of non-vocal speaking; even without a mouth, Moody somehow speaks.

SuperDeux. I WISH I COULD TALK; installation view, Peek Gallery, 2011. Courtesy of the Artist and Peek Gallery, San Francisco. Photo: Jeremy Brautman.

Aside from the works that prominently feature Moody, the gallery wall is adorned with wood panels screen-printed with geometric figures in solid primary colors, and characters that could be from any generic 1980s video game. The works are less Pop Art, and more pop—the distinction for me stems from the lack of perceived irony. These works genuinely embrace vibrancy and play as central to the human condition, no matter how "in" it is to reject humanity in art.

At any hour of the day, The Summit is a high tech sweatshop. Freelancers spend hours staring at lines of code or writing arts criticism, but the coffee shop is a more humane environment than an office. And as Moody and his other googly-eyed brethren cast playful and pop glares at the customers-cum-workers, all of these things that need to get done, for just a moment, appear as they truly are: utterly silly.

I WISH I COULD TALK is on view at Peek Gallery at The Summit, in San Francisco, through September 29, 2011.

Concealing the seams is not a primary concern of the nine artists included in ALL THIS HAPPENED, MORE OR LESS. In fact, they seem to revel in cleanly imperfect edges of X-Acto knife slices and grids drawn by hand (with the aid of a handheld ruler). This is to say the show traffics in an elegantly funky brand of geometric abstraction. The works, more often than not, are evasively untitled, much in the same way that the show's title cryptically references a Kurt Vonnegut quote, and have some root in off-the-rack or scavenged-from-the street printed matter.

See Chris Baird's collage that kicks things off: it's a two-dimensional stack of fluorescent stripes excised from those thin cardboard posters you find stapled to telephone poles to advertise boxing matches or ethnic music events. The arrangement of the lines relies on repetition—the Southern California phone number for the poster printers is visible at the bottom—as do Eric Larson's Op Art matrix of CMYK registration marks cut from the edge of some offset print run. They could have come from some packaged confection, like Taha Belal's Date Bar (2011), a gridded deconstruction of a candy wrapper from a distant land—we wouldn't know the difference.

The show was curated by Jonathan Runcio and has the aesthetic stamp of an artist's highly selective eye. Astutely arranged in this impressively roomy new storefront gallery (where Runcio will mount a solo exhibition in October), ALL THIS is coolly elegant in its expression of a theme stated, perhaps overdetermined, in the checklist preamble: "...the artists collapse disparate sources or processes and embrace a

Chris Baird. Untitled, 2011; offset print collage; 24 x 21.5 in. Courtesy the Popular Workshop, San Francisco.

makeshift scatter in order to introduce a renewed legibility."

Mystery in the ordered disorder, rather than legibility, proves a strong suit. The strange collection of vessels and tchotchkes on Claire Nereim's pedestals exudes a spare Wiccan surrealism, while Jason Kalogiros' series of Oriental Seagull Gradation Study (2011) photographs manage a solarized apocalyptic ambiguity. But it's Mariah Robertson's #62 (2011) that seems to generate the most heat: it's a triangle slice of a shiny color photogram buckling in a frame that cannot contain its layers of alien color and full frontal male nudity. It happened.

ALL THIS HAPPENED, MORE OR LESS is on view at The Popular Workshop, in San Francisco, through September 30, 2011.

Los Angeles-based artist Betye Saar has been carefully crafting assemblages since the 1960s, using flea market and yard sale finds to explore the representation of race and history in pop culture. Her recent exhibition, CAGE: New Assemblages and Collages, features twenty new works that suggest that Saar’s focus has shifted from interrogating visual racism per se to attempting to address a collective refusal to reconcile contemporary inter- and intraracial conflicts with the traumatic histories that produced them.

True to the exhibition title, antique birdcages serve as the foundation for the mixed-media works, composed of stuffed blackbirds that appear to be crows, African-American memorabilia, chunks of coal, and cotton bolls. All of these materials make obvious the references to Jim Crow, as well as the influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s dark romanticism and Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). Each cage depicts dark scenes from a past repeatedly buried, exhumed, and reanimated while its complexities remain buried with each unearthing. For example, The Weight of Color (2007) is an assemblage of a patinated household scale topped by a caged crow, which is topped by a small mammy statue. The work’s title might have allowed the viewer to consider the seldom-addressed legacy of colorism within the black community; unfortunately, the scale and the mammy statue fix the reading within nineteenth-century race discourse that binds blackness with servitude. In the collage Nevermore (2010), two crows suspend an antique lace dress in front of a paper tombstone. From the center of the dress emerges a distinctive, fascinating pattern that seems to be a second layer of lace; however, as one takes a closer look, the pattern transforms into rows of black bodies, all in a supine position. An even closer inspection reveals an oft-used illustrated plan for the slave stowage on the infamous slaver, the Brookes. Fascination wanes quickly as the collage turns into the African-American version of “never again,” a familiar refrain among historically traumatized groups.

Betye Saar, Rhythm & Blues, 2010; mixed-media assemblage. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York.

This exhibition notwithstanding, Saar’s work continues to stand as an integral element of American culture. Her assemblages and collages not only ensure that certain histories and subjectivities have a stronghold on public memory, but also demonstrate that politics and beauty are not mutually exclusive in contemporary art. However, the beauty of the assemblages in CAGE fails to excavate more than what the audience already knows about the transatlantic slave trade and American apartheid.

CAGE: New Assemblages and Collages is on view at California African American Museum, in Los Angeles, through August 7, 2011.

crystal am nelson is an artist, writer, and designer based in San Francisco. She has contributed to Identity Theory and the African American National Biography, a joint project of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Oxford University Press, which was published in 2008.

The West Coast premiere of Carla Kihlstedt’s Necessary Monsters, a collaboration with poet Rafael Osés, brings the monsters under your bed to the stage but not to life. The performance, a cycle of songs based on Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings (1957), presents nine beasts. Each monster is embodied through either its possession of the female narrator-cum-curator or through the narrator’s interaction with a musician representing the creature.

Over the course of ninety minutes, each monster is released from its box for the duration of a song that reflects upon and symbolizes its characteristics and temperament. We’re first introduced to An Animal Dreamed (Pura Animalis Canticum), a creature that is “as pure as the unuttered word.”¹ It wonders at its own song as squealing and rough shrieks mark Rob Reich and Kihlstedt’s delicate piano and violin accompaniment. Possessed by this creature, the narrator variously curls up inside herself and dissects invisible prey, embodying the audience’s most singular and unselfconscious desires.

After being confronted with this “most delicate and glorious of beasts,” the audience meets creatures such as the Nisna (Dimidium Totius), which, being a half, is also a whole, and the One-Eyed Being (Sum Oculus): man at his most pompous, serving as “the light at the end of his own tunnel vision.”² The arc of this procession moves from the most primitive beings to those that have evolved beyond Homo sapiens. The cycle closes with the Odradek (Domi Stella Aeternum), which represents humanity’s remaining fragments and detritus. It is through this arc that Necessary Monsters comprises a sort of guided self-reflection: in each confrontation, we realize that these creatures, no matter how dark or disturbing, reside within a part of each of us. And each monster is indeed always a little familiar, its monstrosity resulting from the omission or strange combination of physical elements or characteristics.

This work speaks to a long history of field guides compiled through the eyes of writers who look outside their own boundaries and depict creatures that represent the world

Necessary Monsters, 2011 (still); performance. Courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Photo: Piotr Redlinski.

outside of established knowledge, works such as Herodotus’ Histories, the Chinese Guideways through the Mountains and Seas, and the Alexander Romance. In these guides, the creatures figure as parts of historical or scientific examinations that at one time were looked upon as reliable geographical texts, offering a hidden fiction of monstrosity that inverts the notions of self and Other. In these historical field guides, it’s the subtle veracity of the narrator—the distance and scientific nature of the examination of these creatures—that allows us to find our own strangeness mirrored back and makes these creatures so interesting, useful, and necessary for examining our internal realities and constructing a place for ourselves in the world.

It’s because of these beings, simultaneously credible and mythic, described in earlier types of field guides, that, for all the guidance provided, I didn’t believe in the creatures of Necessary Monsters. Perhaps the telling was too deliberate: we aren’t given the leeway to build these creatures for ourselves and adapt them to our own experiences, and we aren’t able to confront the Squonk (Lacrimacorpus Dissolvens) or the Double (Imago Intus Imago) that may live inside our own minds. Instead, this mythology is already constructed, perfected, and packaged for us, lyrically prescribed and embodied in a sequence of singular movement.

Necessary Monsters was on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, July 29 and 30, 2011. 

Catherine McChrystal is an editor and writer living in San Francisco, serving as an Associate Editor for Art Practical. She received her MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago and holds undergraduate degrees in Classical Civilization and English Literature from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

________
NOTES:
1. Carla Kihlstedt and Rafael Osés. Necessary Monsters Field Guide. 2011.
2. Ibid.

Parables, the exhibition at the first-ever Bangladeshi Pavilion included in the Venice Biennale, showcases the work of five artists from the Britto Arts Trust, an artist-led nonprofit committed to developing avenues for the creation of experimental, conceptual art in local communities across Bangladesh.

Visitors first encounter Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty’s Spring (2011), a sky of rainbow umbrellas arranged in a seemingly random fashion to create the effect of a technicolor cloud. The ensuing feeling of warmth is in sharp contrast to the experience of other works, which present a critical, sometimes disparaging examination of the perils of modern society. Mahbubur Rahman’s I was told to say these words (2010-2011) is a grisly portrayal of society arrested by prejudice and taboo. The installation of caged, fiberglass pigs accompanied by the mangled “moo” of a cow, which bears an eerie similarity to the word “Ma” (mother in Bengali), becomes an allegory for social restrictions. Given that Islam, Bangladesh’s dominant religion, forbids the consumption of pork, the tortured representation of pigs demonstrates that the demonized and the forbidden can be at base something innocuous and helpless—in this case, baby animals. Tayeba Lipi also addresses social norms in I wed myself (2010), a dual-channel wedding video in which she plays the role of both bride and groom. She challenges the notion that femininity and masculinity are mutually exclusive by embodying both qualities. Promotesh Das Pulak collapses time and memory in Echoed moments in time (2011), a series

Tayeba Begum Lipi. I wed myself, 2010; dual-channel video projection. Courtesy of Osmani Memorial Hall, Dhaka.

of photographs of the 1971 liberation war, in which soldiers' faces are replaced with his own. Romanticized by veterans, the war is considered by many to be the most promising time in the nation’s history. Pulak recovers this promise by transforming the objective truth of archival photography into the subjective experience of a new generation.

The combined effect is one of urgent self-awareness. Pulak’s reclamation of national history as personal memory reaffirms the promise of self-determination, while Chisty’s rainbow sky references new beginnings. Like India, which turned the 1991 crisis of national bankruptcy into an opportunity for reform and unprecedented growth, Bangladesh has channeled its social discontent into becoming one of the world’s fastest growing economies. The Pavilion is in essence an intimate look at the psychology of a society coming into its own. It is a demand for change prefaced by a hope for change. 

Parables is on view at the 54^th International Art Exposition of the Venice Biennale through November 27, 2011.

Samira Rahmatullah is working with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on its first-ever exhibition of contemporary Indian art, and is the founder of the soon-to-be-launched Alluvial Arts, an organization dedicated to promoting Bangladeshi contemporary art in the Bay Area. She has an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University.

Despite the sometimes disturbing effectiveness of Photoshop, we still expect photography to show us something that at least seems real. It’s understood that the freedom to contrive entire alternate worlds belongs to the painter, sculptor, writer, or dramatist—any artist whose work is to dream up and “craft” a subject from beginning to end. But for all the gimmicks available to the photographer, not only with Photoshop, but now also with the retro effects of Hipstamatic and Instagram, the camera still records what is in front of it, leaving us with the assumption that there is a limit to how outré the resultant images can be.

Fabricated Realities debunks that expectation. The artists, who represent fifty years of experimental photography, achieved their bizarre tableaux through various means, such as photomontage, collage, photogram, and even through the technique of photographing a subject’s reflection in a funhouse mirror, as with André Kertész’s Distortion #70 (variant) (1933/1979). In this image, a woman stands like a fashion model, hair coiffed in finger waves, hand on hip. She is naked under her overcoat, which hangs open to reveal one breast. That breast is central to both the composition of the photograph and to the mirror itself, so the distortion emanates from the focal point of the nipple, as if a visual representation of the warping effect of sex on the mind: a siren-song and resultant destruction in one. Florence Henri’s photomontage Composition (1936) recalls the scuola metafisica paintings of de Chirico, with its placement of classical subjects (in this case the fallen head of what looks like a Greek sculpture from the Archaic period) in a historically ambiguous environment delineated by sharply contrasting light and shadows. It also shares with de Chirico’s work a sense of stymied vitality, the flowing-haired gods of antiquity frozen like bugs in a static and desolate landscape.

André Kertész. Distortion #70 (variant) (1933/1979); gelatin silver print; 10 x 8 in. Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.

That Surrealism and experimental art depict "alternate worlds," as they are purported to do, isn’t quite accurate—or at least it is a lazy interpretation of the often bizarre, weirdly beautiful, or ugly "worlds" depicted, which happen not to look like what is normally seen through a camera’s viewfinder. Fabricated Realities highlights the fact that these creations can convey ideas about this world and our experience of it that are as vivid as anything Realism or any other genre has to offer.

Fabricated Reality is on view at Robert Koch Gallery, in San Francisco, through August 27, 2011.

Larissa Archer is a writer and theatre worker living in San Francisco.

Are We There Yet? takes as its central theme one of the most creative and potentially radical human impulses—the urge to ask questions—and combines it with cutting-edge technology, the emergent world of social media, the values embedded in a classic Jewish joke, and a unique gallery space designed with the biblical prohibition against figurative representation in mind.

As visitors enter the Yud Gallery, voices emanate from a handful of speakers arranged discreetly along the perimeter of the floor, reciting questions that anonymous viewers enter into the installation database. On the wall to the right of the entrance, additional written questions shuffle in and out of view on a projected website. The installation offers a participatory experience that shifts between agency and constraint, a balance (or tension) that will likely affect individual visitors differently, depending on their expectations of both the act of questioning and of works of art. The speakers are motion-sensitive and recordings are triggered by walking past them; viewers are invited to take delight in encounters with the ruminations of ordinary people and are led to realize, moments later, how carefully mediated these are. A visitor who expects art to stir up trouble and start difficult discussions, to seriously question the relationships and systems that order our lives, may be frustrated by a piece that both reaches out to a boundary-less community and at the same time, stages a gathering that allows no interactions, simulating the broad reach of social media as it withholds even the abbreviated space for active give-and-take such media provide.

Are We There Yet? 5000 Years of Answering Questions with Questions, 2011; Responsive sound installation. Courtesy of the Artists and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. 

However, it doesn’t seem that the artists in this exhibition were interested in provoking a charged debate on any single issue. The atomized questions washing into the empty, sculptural space instead create an auditory metaphor for beginnings and open-endedness. They enclose visitors within a suspended state of listening, deferring answers and certainty. The installation also engages visitors with the problem of representation posed by the space itself, with the possibilities and limitations of social media, and with the challenge of sustaining contemplation in an era suffused with information. Taken on these terms, the central question it raises is how might a light-touched and lyrical treatment of curiosity as a cultural value relate to a time in which so many social questions have either erupted into impassioned revolutions or remained disgracefully unaddressed by those who possess the responsibility and power to do so.

Are We There Yet? 5000 Years of Answering Questions with Questions is on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, in San Francisco, through July 31, 2011.

Noga Wizansky is an artist and independent scholar based in Oakland. She holds an MA in Design and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in History of the Visual Arts, both from UC Berkeley.

Visualize walking into a restaurant and being handed a menu in a foreign language. Most individuals would request a menu that they could read. For Tim Roseborough, such a menu served as the impetus for his latest work: Notes In/troducing Englyph. Much like the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roseborough examines human perception and understanding of language. Meanings and judgments within language frame our collective understanding and dictate our experience and engagement with one another. From texting to answering e-mail messages to updating a status on a social networking application, many of our activities are text-based and almost automatic. Yet, what does the cognitive process look like when a reader is confronted with an unfamiliar visual language or text? In Notes In/Troducing Englyph, print publication plays an integral role in how the message is carried, received, and perceived. In the same vein as Lynda Benglis, Robert Morris, and Dan Graham, Roseborough utilizes the distinct venue of the magazine advertisement to serve as a platform for exhibition and interaction with the public.

Though Englyph is a logographic language, it is also a text-based art form derived from English. The system taps into a human desire to understand the foreign. The audience visits a web site noted at the bottom right hand corner of the advertisement. Scrolling over the Englyph characters reveals Roman alphabet text. As the interactivity translates into familiar text, the meaning of the Englyph characters becomes a part of an inquiry and possible deductive attempts at de-coding this new visual language. A viewer’s inherent curiosity stems from an inclination to learn the language and is reinforced after the user encounters the English translation, which serves as a reference point. This is key in understanding the concept of Englyph. On a web site or graphics on a blog, all of the images and formatting are created with programming language configured for relatively easy visual perception and understanding. Roseborough eradicates this ease for the viewer. The work is challenging to understand and this is the very reason that its interactive nature plays such an integral role in its comprehensibility.

Another interesting aspect entails the distinct form and presentation of Notes In/troducing Englyph. Interactive

Notes In/troducing Englyph, 2011; magazine advertisement, June/July 2011 issue of Art in America; 8.5 x 11 in.

art uses an approach that reverses the act of consumption, and Roseborough requires a bit of work on the viewer’s end. The product, to some degree, is unknown. Roseborough’s unique venture forces the viewer or reader to question where the art object is actually embedded. Is it in the magazine, the advertisement itself, or in the virtual space where Englyph is translated into English? Unlike the work of his predecessors, Roseborough’s involves active questioning and engagement that supersedes retinal activity. It suggests the beginning of a new wave of text-based art. Instead of using  the magazine advertisement page as a means of tapping into the audience’s retinal sensibility, Roseborough uses Englyph to take this form of exhibition into uncharted territory, where the reader explores or relinquishes the desire to understand images alone.

Notes In/troducing Englyph is on view in the June/July issue of Art in America.

Dorothy Santos is a freelance art writer based in San Francisco. She holds a BA in both Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco.

I paint the way some people write their autobiography…. I have less and less time and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is, increasingly, something about the movement of my thought.

—Pablo Picasso

This collection of “Picasso’s Picassos” comprises 150 of the thousands of pieces amassed by the artist and bequeathed by his heirs to the French government to allay its vampiric inheritance tax. Arranged chronologically, the abridged but representative array of Picasso’s career reflects his belief that painting is “just another way of keeping a diary"; the works become a multifarious self-portrait spanning seventy years. The exhibit begins with what one would swear is a Van Gogh, not merely for its effulgent colors, rough, thick brushstrokes, and the almost material quality of the light beams emanating from the candle, but also for its morbid preoccupation. La Mort De Casagemas (1901) depicts Picasso’s friend and poet, dead from suicide over a failed love affair. Picasso was twenty years old and newly enthralled by the avant-garde movement thriving in his adopted city of Paris; he quickly mastered its various innovations before launching into his Blue Period.

Skipping ahead sixty-nine years, the final work before the exit is the self-portrait The Matador (1970). After a lifetime of depicting himself as a bull, a symbol of brute power and virility, the eighty-nine-year-old painter finally surrenders what has become, in his age and failing health, a delusive persona and refashions himself as the torero. However, as if unable to portray himself without some declaration of his potency, he does include two commonplace phallic symbols, the sword and cigar (off which rise womanly curls of smoke). The brushwork is crude and urgent; the colors, simple. Evident in this piece, as in so much of his work of this final period, is the rush to create while there was still time, the compulsion to further redefine himself and to proclaim the survival of what approaching death hadn’t yet taken away. It reminds one of the dying Boris Godunov’s final cry in Mussorgsky’s eponymous opera: “I am still the Tsar!”

Le Baiser, 1969; oil on canvas; 38.25 × 51.25  in. Courtesy of the de Young Museum, San Francisco.

Bookended between these is an array of possibly the greatest diversity of styles ever innovated and mastered by a single artist. However, it is difficult to surmount the often unflattering portrait of the man the collection creates: the embarrassing insistence of his sexual appetites, his penchant for portraying wives and mistresses according to his own capricious loyalties, and the disturbing conflation of sexuality and violence. I admit that here I’m bringing outside knowledge to bear; 1933’s drypoints Coupling I and The Embrace are almost identical, not only to each other, but to The Rape, which is currently on display across town at SFMOMA in The Steins Collect; but perhaps the artist’s vision of the consensual and the forced as indistinct is only disturbing to the modern sensibility. And yet what more powerful antiwar statement is there (besides the obvious one by the same artist) than 1951’s Massacre in Korea? The brutal destructiveness, and also the timelessness, of war is personified by robotic soldiers with weapons from different eras, such as clubs, medieval swords, and finally, futuristic triple-barreled machine guns. Keening, pregnant women and their children represent the fragile lives left savaged in its wake. It is the sort of painting one wishes hung in the Situation Room, or the U.N., anywhere the powerful of the world convene to decide the fates of the nameless millions. It is one of the few politically charged works Picasso did, and, strangely, one of the most sensitive.

Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris is on view at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, through October 9, 2011.

Larissa Archer is a writer and theatre worker living in San Francisco.

Ranu Mukherjee’s exhibition Absorption into the Nomadic and Luminous features eleven works: eight ink paintings and three hybrid films. One might be tempted to casually frame her work within a sometimes-essentialist postcolonial discourse, if one accepts postcolonialism as the study of two separate sites of cultural knowledge, one dominant and the other marginalized. Elements of this paradigm exist in the work, but they do so right on the surface, where any viewer can see them. This suggests that Mukherjee knows this reading is inevitable and presents it as a give-away, while daring viewers to look closer for what cultural theorist Homi Bhabha calls “the third space,” where cultural specificity gives way to ambiguity and hybridity.¹ By calling her video works “hybrid films” and using magical realist aesthetics, Mukherjee underscores the exploration of creolization in her art practice.

The first hybrid film viewers encounter, Auspicious Picture, Multiple Sources of Power (2011), depicts an anonymous ocean roiling toward the shoreline at dusk. At first, the waves are calm as a sunlike disc burns brightly above them, calling to mind saintly visions. As the bright image fades, the ocean waves appear closer and more violent, carrying with them an assortment of Indian tapestries and apparel. At one point, an uprooted tree appears in the bottom corner. This hypnotic and poetic film subtly introduces processes of identity destruction and formation that result from the collision of old and new paradigms.

Ecstatic Picture, Spilled Milk, 2011; hybrid film; duration variable. Courtesy of Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco.

The other two films, Abundance Picture, as told by the element of itself (2011) and Ecstatic Picture, Spilled Milk (2011), are densely layered environments where sacred and profane objects converge and transform into something unexpected but familiar, new and yet known. For example, in Abundance Picture, an array of golden objects, from traditional Indian jewelry to wrenches and tire rims, float across a partially painted landscape and land on the back of a crocodile where they shift into the form of a sacred statue. In Ecstatic Picture, cell phones cascade into view among floral wreaths and decorative feathers before they ooze colorful streams and fade away. One cannot help but think about India’s position as one of the world’s information technologies capitals and how this status relates to its identity as one of the world’s most sacred sites. Most importantly, these films raise questions about how communities cope with paradigmatic change and highlight the authority such communities assert in determining which of the old traditions they will maintain and marry with new cultural forms borrowed from colonial powers.

Absorption into the Nomadic and Luminous is on view at Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, in San Francisco, through July 31, 2011.

crystal am nelson is an artist, writer, and designer based in San Francisco. She has contributed to identitytheory.com and the African American National Biography, a joint project of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Oxford University Press, which was published in 2008.

________
NOTES:

1. Rutherford, J. (1990). “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. J. Rutherford. London, Lawrence and Wishart: 207-221.

Reinterpretations, remakes, and contemporary works are strategically placed throughout God Only Knows Who the Audience Is: Performance, Video, and Television Through the Lens of La Mamelle, engaging viewers in what is almost an infinite loop of observation that changes with every go-around. Douglas Davis’s The Last Nine Minutes (1977) welcomes viewers to the second floor of the exhibition. The video piece involves Davis walking around a space that simulates a dark cave. Viewers’ anticipation bubbles to the surface as they wait for him to acknowledge his audience. Within the uncharted territory of television as a means of engagement with a spectator, Davis’s gestures and acting serve as a metaphor and barrier between the artist and viewer. The onus falls on the viewer to acknowledge the artist.

In Mario Garcia Torres’s All That Color is Making Me Blind (2008), a lone black screen with scrolling green type reminiscent of a teleprompter provides context for the grid of televisions displayed across from it. The scrolling text imparts the language associated with the visual information received by the grid. The multiscreen artwork displays television spots artists have bought to disseminate art to the masses—a startling reminder of television’s osmotic effect on its viewers. Both Davis’s and Torres’s works require a curious and engaged audience. Yet, as the name of the exhibition suggests, the nature of questioning and understanding in performative and video-based art is inherently cyclical.

Pitch-black walls on the second level simulate a hermetic box, in which videos playing performative acts are the only stimulation. The works both insulate and isolate: much like the onscreen subjects, viewers become inaccessible once they are enveloped by the onscreen work. Although each artwork has been set up to replicate a living space, creating an atoll of

Mario Garcia Torres. All The Color Is Making Me Blind (Notes on the Beginning of the End of Video Art), 2008; nine-channel video installation. Courtesy of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Photo: Dorothy Santos.

viewing islets, there is an unrelenting cacophony from the other televisions. With the multitude of sounds and experiences working in tandem, viewers are forced to pay close attention and actively search for understanding or resonance. As a result, they concentrate on particular aspects of the video performances that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Active watching and viewer engagement are paramount in the works of the art collective La Mamelle/ART COM. The act of watching as a primary mode of experiencing the exhibition serves as the foundation for dialogue and conversation, which is imperative in the discussion of how arts and technology work together to explore the role of spectator. The work in God Only Knows Who the Audience Is demonstrates the creative and investigative processes of performance, video, and television, and the ways contemporaneous study is imperative in examining the evolution of performance art and spectatorship.

God Only Knows Who the Audience Is: Performance, Video, and Television Through the Lens of La Mamelle is on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, in San Francisco, through July 2, 2011.

Dorothy Santos is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. She holds a BA in both philosophy and psychology from the University of San Francisco.

In Detroit, a blurry dancing figure is frozen mid-jig in front of a collision repair shop that also sells cars. The sun sets behind a dilapidated house in West Helena, where large puddles and an upended child’s truck litter the side yard. A pit bull under stark light in Dallas suspiciously eyes the viewer as he crouches between a telephone pole and a severed tree branch.

Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture, which is rooted in traditional documentary photography, provides voyeuristic access to often overlooked lives. Like Walker Evans and Robert Frank, Rickard challenges viewers to be thoughtful readers of the stories of a widening social divide and its ensuing devastation, inviting them to contemplate life in those cities hit hardest by America’s most recent economic meltdown. However, his use of twenty-first-century technological artifacts as both source material and methodology take the documentary tradition to the next level.

Google’s cameras rove the streets of America like robotic paparazzi, snatching unauthorized panoramas of places and the people who live there, posting them online to be accessed by anyone able to type a street address. These images are Rickard’s raw material. He pores through them to select his frame, re-photographing those selections on his computer monitor and printing them large for display in galleries.

It is understood that the gallery audience is primarily middle to upper class and that this is far from his subject’s vantage point. Re-photographing further removes the image from its original context; the gap between viewer and subject—the voyeuristic divide—is widened. Moreover, this process

#32.700542, Dallas, TX 2009, 2010; archival pigment print; 16 x 25 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco.

drastically degrades the already low-resolution digital image. Identities hastily blurred by Google are now veritable silhouettes. In #120.074209, Fresno, CA 2009 (2010), a man sits in a wheelchair in front of his house, a pickup truck parked behind him on the dusty lot. He directly addresses the camera, yet his face has been blotted out and his body is relatively formless. Without facial features, it is impossible to discern his emotions. It appears he has lost a leg, the reason for the wheelchair, but it is difficult to be certain since his limbs are poorly defined.

Even though this perceived distance permits viewers to enter the work, there is also a vertiginous, surreal, haunting feeling. The final printed photographs are hyper-exposed, with melting pools of vivid color. Standing in front of them in the gallery, it is striking how deserted the scenes feel. People are isolated and frozen in time like the victims of Pompeii, resulting in photographs with a post-apocalyptic quality that alerts viewers to their own demise.

A New American Picture is on view at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, in San Francisco, through June 11, 2011.

Melony Bravmann is a visual artist and art writer based in the Bay Area. The goal of her commentary and analysis is to inform viewers and instill a passion for contemporary art. She holds a BFA and an MFA from CCA.

It’s hard not to feel like an overzealous dermatologist examining the subjects of Richard Learoyd’s exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery. His large-scale direct-positive images reveal a degree of epidermal detail one usually only gets to see while making out under an interrogation lamp. The shallow depth of field that marks Learoyd’s portraits and that shows imperfections with pitiless clarity—a rough patch here, an incipient pimple there, weirdly dilated pupils—somewhat mitigates the monumental quality lent them by the size of the images and the solid, sometimes brilliant hues he clothes his models in (when he clothes them).

Humanizing them further are the ambivalent expressions they assume, or rather, seem to be caught in. Unsmiling and makeup-less, their faces are not merely neutral, as for a formal portrait. The effect, and it is unsettling, is that of catching them lost in thoughts one was not invited to observe and perhaps should be embarrassed to witness. Learoyd’s portraits reveal how much can be evoked by so little: in Rachel (2009), the hint of a furrow tensing the brow over staring eyes and the dejected droop of the lips, seen at this scale and in such detail, might make one think twice about sitting next to this woman on the bus. The subject in Tatiana in Red (2010) slouches in a chair, her right arm wrapped against her torso and gripping her left elbow in that instinctive gesture of self-protection. Her gaze is fixed on the floor. She is a study in sadness, achingly lovely, and shares with the other subjects here the apparent presumption of privacy. Of course this is an illusion, as these are laboriously staged portraits: Learoyd uses a nineteenth-century technique in which the subject occupies a room with a powerful light source, connected by a lens to the camera obscura adjacent, wherein the image is projected directly onto the photographic paper.

While Learoyd's images evoke Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (1662-63) in their quality of overcast light

Nancy Nude in White Chair, 2010; unique camera obscura Ilfochrome photograph; 58 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

and the privileged glimpse they seem to impart into the quiet, ordinary, secret lives of women, the private moments he depicts are entirely interior, and thus more voyeuristic. The very ambiguity of the private thoughts exposed to this trespass allow one to project one’s own secrets, one’s own sadnesses, onto the subjects and to imagine oneself, utterly vulnerable in those moments of naked introspection, being scrutinized by strangers who sip wine and remark on one’s pimples before hopping on to the next gallery.

Presences is on view at Fraenkel Gallery, in San Francisco, through June 25, 2011. 

Larissa Archer is a writer, an actor, and a theatre director living in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in The Times, New York Moves, Sublime, TheGloss.com, and others. 

It is the process of formation that underpins the dialogue between the works of Volker Eichelmann and Florian Schmidt in Haute, the current exhibition at Silverman Gallery. These two meticulous European artists thoughtfully play with the abstract notions of utopic construction and presentation in two separate but compatible modus operandi.

In his Proposals for Sculptures and Buildings (2010), a grid of fifteen postcard-size collages, Volker Eichelmann invites one to closely examine each of these fantastical compositions of tacit projects. His proposals are unlike the oft-exhibited architectural plans or similar projects from artists like Vito Acconci, whose unrealized public-art proposals attend to location-centric detail and accompany written statements relaying the relevance of each proposal’s general urban contribution. It is not evident that Eichelmann attributes such axiomatic germaneness or researched models of scale to his consciously utopian images floating in the middle of their black backgrounds, devoid of place. Instead, he has excavated the ideological construction of a proposal to its core components of imagination and potential, articulated through his deliberate process of formation. Each tiny black rectangle is a provocation to imagine a plausible setting for the potential actualization of these fantastical, urbane constructions.

Devoid of figures and text, Florian Schmidt’s wooden sculptures structurally intervene in the gallery space. Mimicking the shape of Silverman’s projected polygonal windows and held in by only one screw, Schmidt’s open, light sculptures meld into the extant gallery space and almost invite one to carefully step through them, though such action does not seem prudent, just as one would hesitate to knowingly enter a stranger’s backyard even though the gate were unlocked.

Like his sculptures, Schmidt’s two-dimensional works are coherent, industrious constructions of discarded remnants from other works. Colorful and simple, their series titles—like Community (2011)—speak to the quiet processes by which seemingly disparate individual components can be organized based on some abstract notion of similarity; in this case, painted pieces of wood and canvas share their would-

Volker Eichelmann. Der Mensch ist kein Baum (Proposals for Sculptures and Buildings), 2010; collage on card; 9.5 × 13 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

be-discarded-scrap status, to create a cohesive representation of interaction.

Whether their results are utopic urban constructions or conceptual formations, both Eichelmann and Schmidt are creating work in a refreshingly formalistic aesthetic that elicits layers of dialogue relating to ideals of our contemporary polis.

Haute is on view at Silverman Gallery, in San Francisco, through June 4, 2011. 

Kara Q. Smith is an independent writer, curator, and urban researcher living in San Francisco.

Situated between documentary and appropriation, tableau and archive, Deana Lawson’s West Coast debut of eight large-scale works (re)inserts black subjectivity into the public imagination. She works collaboratively with each subject, offering them agency to determine the mise-en-scène and sometimes the final image. For example, Barbara, 1980s (2009), an acquired portrait, shows a beautiful young woman in the company of two handsome men. Barbara preferred her personal photo to Lawson’s photos of her as an aging entertainer. The still-beautiful Barbara felt the new photographs showed “all the things [she] had gone through” since her heyday—baggage she did not want on exhibit. This exchange hints at Lawson’s desire to empower her subjects to define their beauty and how they share it with the world. In The Beginning (2008), the female subject chose the exact moment she gives birth, while in Daughter (2007), a mother chose the lighter skin tones of her two biracial daughters, one standing nude except for a body stocking.

Lawson also tacitly reflects on the coercive power of black female stereotypes, such as in Roxie and Raquel (2010), a photo of twin sisters whose contrasting attire and expressions reveal their different personalities as well as how they may have internalized these stereotypes. One, dressed in lamé and stilettos, looks at the camera seductively; the other, dressed more modestly, looks at the camera subtly annoyed. Black feminists might characterize them as the hypersexual Jezebel and the aggressive Sapphire. Yet herein lies the image’s sublimity; Roxie and Raquel, in their twin-ness, not only confirm the non-specificity of racial/gender stereotypes, but also illustrate the power of owning them.

Roxie and Raquel, 2010; C-print. Courtesy of the Artist and Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco.

Assemblage (2010), the show’s most provocative work, is a meticulous gathering of four-by-six-inch glossy photographs pulled from a variety of sources. The diminutive pictures force the viewer to step closer to identify the content. In doing so, the viewer will find everything from a young Eddie Murphy to a freezer full of decapitated heads of black men, from daguerreotypes to a mug shot of Divine Brown. This vast array of subject matter simultaneously suggests a disturbing obsession and the frightening possibility that the disturbed mind discovered something profound: a map tracing the visual discourse of perennially dysfunctional interracial and intraracial relations. Beyond this, it suggests a need for Lawson to dissect the visual archive and its cultural impact against which she is working, not just in this piece, but in her entire body of work.

Deana Lawson is on view at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, in San Francisco, through May 28, 2011.

crystal am nelson is an artist, writer, and designer based in San Francisco. She has contributed to identitytheory.com and the African American National Biography, a joint project of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Oxford University Press, which was published in 2008. 

Educated in the United States and Mexico, Luis Gutierrez is touted as a Mexican-American artist. Nevertheless, his art is not hindered by the hyphenated tribalism of identity politics of the past few decades. His work includes no Virgins of Guadalupe, no bleeding hearts or other Mexican symbols; instead, it is dominated by abstraction and assemblage. According to the artist, he looks toward New York as a model of artistic value, but the high-quality expression of his art just might make Gutierrez an overlooked Bay Area treasure.

Despite the title of this exhibition, his earliest piece in the show is from 1967, a thickly impastoed, brilliantly colored work of oil on board titled Red Abstraction. (Disclaimer: I am a sucker for impasto.) Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell, he constructs his assemblage pieces from small objects collected over a lifetime. The resulting compilations of Americana are an anthropologist’s dream. Of particular note is Panic Button (1985–2010). Begun in 1985 and only completed last year after Gutierrez cleaned out his studio, it is an intricate, untiring, and nostalgic work filled with, among other things, hardwood and plastic rulers; toys; colored pencils; seed packets and advertisements; and images of the artist, a dough-boy, Mickey Mouse, and an Aborigine.

His more recent assemblages are much simpler, but no less powerful. Where is My America? (2010) hints at the political passion underlying some of Gutierrez’ other artworks. It is a wooden box, attached to a twenty-by-twenty-four-inch board,

Panic Button, 1985-2010; assemblage, 30 x 36 in. Courtesy of Togonon Gallery, San Francisco.

covered by hard plastic and stuffed with an American flag. Over the flag, a large red weathervane arrow points down, surely a comment on America’s moral, political, and financial decline.

Gutierrez often works in series, and one of the most poignant of them in this exhibition includes his works on Hurricane Katrina. All acrylic on heavy paperboard, the series seems to start with New Orleans #1 (2007), an ordered abstraction done in colors repeated throughout: light gray, black, orange, turquoise, and dark greens, blues, and yellows. A stand-out, Katrina #1 (2007) is a cracked, light gray whirlpool of chaos over a predominately black background, suggesting the ordered city of New Orleans descending into the catastrophe of Katrina. 

Conviction and Emotion: The Art of Luis Gutierrez from the 1970s to Now is on view at Togonon Gallery, in San Francisco, through June 11, 2011.

Allegra Fortunati holds graduate degrees in Political Science and Art History. She lives and works in San Francisco as a freelance writer for several publications, both local and national.

In 2008, Reed Danziger debuted an ambitious, otherworldly group of watercolors on paper at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco. Her elegant, gravity-defying flotsams: razor-thin, finger-like branches, cells, inky feathers, and muted necklaces of energy suggested an epic, metaphysical realm somewhere between The Dark Crystal and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The suite of transporting, mysterious works—most of which were fourteen feet across—demonstrated a fresh, and earned, vision.

It’s a surprise and a small disappointment, then, to experience this new show, which is also at Hosfelt, but consists of all 2011 work—dense, small-scale oil, graphite, and silkscreen paintings that satisfy, but do not immerse. Brutal, beautiful, runaway cosmic events feel forced and rushed, not intuited.

Take The Refraction Angle. Here, Danziger telegraphs Kandinsky’s closed worlds and deftly sculpts with what look like Yoon Lee’s angry ribbons of electrical energy, but the result feels more borrowed than influenced. (Lee and Danziger also share an interest in the speed and collateral damage of digital information.) A supernova explosion bursts full freight in the diptych The Incompressibility of Mass and Spring, a standout: the vertical multicolor band paintings of geometric abstractionist Gene Davis are merged with the thrust of Jules de Balincourt.

Destruction appears to be on Danziger’s mind, and it’s a colorful, fast end. One wonders, throughout, if last year’s BP Deepwater Horizon disaster or the San Bruno fireball was on her mind. The Angular Dependence of Light, an exhilarating work incorporating the muted greys, biscuits, and camouflage greens of her 2008 palette with supernova blues, pinks, and reds, features a spectrum of gestures (particles, bursts, rings)

The Angular Dependence of Light, 2011; oil, graphite, and silkscreen on paper on panel; 40 x 40 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.

and geometries (bars, slashes, dots), suggesting nature against man-made theories and technologies. A jet-black center, like a hard-edged heart, anchors a splintering collision of disparate, uncontrollable energies, diagrams, and formulas.

Danziger trained in printmaking and has been noted for previous paintings in which she overlaid ornamental patterns; layering remains a key strategy. She initially makes under-drawings, then seals the image and uses oil paint to start a “building” process, incorporating features from the natural world, as well as math and science. This organic process has yielded seductive results for Danziger in the past; seduction is her strength, and she will continue to do so in the future. 

Quantum Jitters is on view at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco through May 14, 2011.

Brent Foster Jones lives in New York and previously taught at California College of the Arts.

The two concurrent solo shows at Ampersand International Arts, with works by Tara Foley and Alex Clausen, at first exude a hard separation between one another; however, upon closer inspection, a complementary interplay emerges from the contours of the artists’ pieces.

Foley’s The Dripstone Sings to the Choir consists of debut works from a larger series entitled Pairings, which is “a collaborative project exploring the relationship between humans and their natural, social and built environments.”¹ In Tenticular Metroland, Salvation for the Laborer (2011), a system of chutes, ladders, and tubes connect floating platforms from which protrusions of gestural hands and ornate gothic cathedrals sit above or hang below. The precise lines and minimal use of color also help to conjure an architectural blueprint that demonstrates points of intersection between symbolic and man-made “support” systems. Foley renders traditional building materials like metal and wood into fibrous strands of hair; shingled roofs and flying buttresses morph into arthropodal wings; and mountains ridges and cascades take on an intestinal quality. In effect, the transformative environments depicted in her drawings can be perceived as visual anagrams of human innovation and natural evolution. In all of Foley’s pieces, the tropes of navigational aids and topological restraints suggest that through these portals and terrains, a sense of chaotic order presides over human life.

In Alex Clausen’s site-specific installation Flood, he is also interested in how the natural realm interrupts and informs architectural constructs. Taking inspiration from the patterns

Alex Clausen. Flood, 2011; wood with stretch fabric. Courtesy of the Artist.

of sunlight on the gallery floor, Clausen has created a three-dimensional translation of these plotted points, which provides a passageway for light to pour into and travel throughout the space. The shadows cast by the sun penetrate the almost fluorescent, transparent blue fabric that stretches over the sculpture’s wooden framework; the added layers of unassuming dimensionality reverberate Foley’s fusion of naturally occurring and man-made geometrical forms. The inevitable wane of sunlight each evening and, consequently, the sculpture’s continuously changing aesthetic, is an integral variable that highlights the ephemeral components at work in Clausen’s installation. Moreover, the sculpture itself invokes a sense of irony in terms of sunlight’s physicality; the title, Flood, and the installation’s blue fabric challenge conventional associations with water, allowing the sun to appropriate an aquatic sense of movement and power, forcing the wooden supports to defy their static nature in order to mimic the curvature of its contents.

The Dripstone Sings to the Choir and Flood are on view at Ampersand International Arts, in San Francisco, through May 13, 2011.

Sheila Jackson is a freelance writer and recent graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied English and French Literature. She currently works for an educational non-profit in San Francisco.

________

NOTES:
1. Tara Foley, Pairings.

The title Line of Sight implies more direction than is readily available in the current Marco Breuer exhibit, part of the de Young’s Collections Connection program that opens up the museum’s permanent collection to the interpretations of contemporary artists. Breuer takes a Modernist approach to photography in his adherence to the materiality of his medium. Rather than simply document, Breuer provokes pure expressive whirls of color and patterns into existence through his treatment of photo paper. This elaboration of photography is further explored through Breuer’s incorporation of collection pieces that range from fine and decorative arts to weapons and fashion, which he treats as record keepers akin to photographs. Most of the pieces featured were pulled from the conservation department; they are items ripe with their own history, and therefore emblematic of the moment they represent.

The relationship between the two bodies of work is one of destruction and construction—both in the mark-making that measures time in Breuer’s work and in the attempts of conservation to counter the effects of time upon a collection. Lines of sight might better describe the cross directional feeling on hand, as each object seems to point out from itself into a greater pantheon of visions. A portrait of a woman in its current state of restoration blocks the sitter’s eyes and face almost entirely with tissue paper, her blocked view replicated in the room’s overall patchwork composition. Mirrors, also bandaged in tissue, are hung out of viewing height, and left to project some image unavailable to visitors. 

The gallery wall, scrolled with a conservator’s vocabulary of condition and the Max Frisch quote, “What is important is what cannot be said, the white space between the words,” implores viewers to consider the nature of exhibition practice, and all that is left out when an object is on display.

Untitled (Study of Tremors), 2000; silver gelatin paper, burned; 18 x 14 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and de Young Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco.

His selection of only eighteenth- and nineteenth-century objects points to the origins of the encyclopedic museum’s use of object and display to reflect a totality and superiority of universal understanding. Circles drilled into the wall quite literally poke holes in this approach to museum practice. Taken out of context and dropped into Breuer’s regimentally incoherent space, the artwork appears to be at odds with the order and purity it once represented, and furthers Breuer’s redistribution of standard art world practice.

Line of Sight is on view at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, through October 2, 2011.

Kathryn McKinney has recently completed a B.A. in art history at San Francisco State University, and currently lives and works as a gallery professional in San Francisco.