More January Openings

As an ever intrepid art explorer, I felt it was my duty as artist, CCA alum, and blogger to see the following San Francisco Art Openings.  Most of my evening out was a CCA-a-thon, where faculty, alumni, and current students all had work displayed for us to pretend to see but where we mostly chatted it up with the rest of our CCA community.  In addition to the shows at Patricia Sweetow, Haines, and Altman Siegel, I had the opportunity to see an SFAI affiliate (gasp!) and total art hero, Josephine Taylor, at Catherine Clark with my friend Libby and my little buddy Jasper.

David Huffman "Floating World", Patricia Sweetow Gallery 

(January 5 through February 11)

My former professor, David Huffman, recently made a pretty significant shift with these mostly abstract paintings of color and glitter with appearances by one of his familiar representational narrative elements, the basketball.  Huffman has included the deep space of water media and cloud-like formations in his previous, more politically explicit work for some time, and it looks like the space has taken over the narrative in a sort of tongue-in-cheek approach to abstraction.  While the basketballs reference African American stereotypes, I missed more of the action and story-telling of his former work.  With the repetition of this series, I didn't learn or think about anything past the first painting onto the next.  They are pretty, though.

Sweetow's space is a sort of in-between level in 77 Geary, with cement floors and lots of pillars.

The paintings appeared in different color schemes, like pastel and below, blacks and browns.

You know I like glitter and washes.

Kota Ezawa, "The Curse of Dimensionality" and Taha Belal, "The Atmosphere from Before the Step Down Returns to the Square" Haines Gallery

(January 5 through February 18)

I thought this show from CCA Faculty Kota Ezawa was pretty great, but it was also so crowded that I didn't get a good look at the massive amounts of work shown inside the gallery.  Kota's signature flattened cartoonish imagery was shown as animation, light screens, paintings, view boxes, and sculpture.  It almost seemed like a retrospective with the inclusion of his work from as far back as the SECA show OJ Simpson series in 2005, but I found it really inspiring that he has been able to use so many different mediums to communicate a similar theme.  

Taha Belal is a CCA MFA Alum from 2008 and a native of Egypt.  I remember his work from a few years ago of meticulously cut out newspapers, and it looks like he still uses the same techniques, but has also applied stylized patterns that the cut outs create, reminiscent of Arabian designs.  Right?  I don't really know what I am talking about.  The title of his show in the back room suggests a pretty clear message about Egypt and its political turmoil.  Belal has been staying in his country of origin, but that's really all I know.  I didn't do my homework very well and couldn't look closely at the images.

This turd with the top-not behind the counter ignored me all three times I went to get a water.    Get a grip, gallery intern, and get a new hairstyle too.

Some paintings by Ezawa, my favorite of all the mediums.

Some light boxes on the wall and the floor.

Belal's cut outs.

Group Show with Jessica Dickinson, Liam Everett, Alex Olson, Josh Smith, and Garth Weiser
 Altman Siegel

(January 5 through February 25)

I am getting to the point where I don't care who reads what I say.  The people at Altman Siegel seem really stuck up.  There, I said it.   I hate going in there- they never look up and say hello, they serve beer at their openings, and then there was the incident last summer where the asinine artist Chris Johanson asked my friends and I to leave his show because we were talking amongst ourselves during his bad-on-purpose band performance to go with his bad-on-purpose art.  All that being said, I do really like CCA grad student, Liam Everett's, artwork so I went to the stuck up palace anyway.

The same crowd moving with me from gallery to gallery.

I kind of liked this piece by Alex Olson.

Goopy.

Something weird was taking place over and over again in front of this beautiful piece by Liam made with acrylic,  salt, and alcohol.  It made a great backdrop for people to take pictures of themselves, so people kept posing in front of it, instead of taking pictures of the piece itself.  I have never seen this phenomenon with an emerging artist's painting, and I thought it was really disrespectful.

So, of course, my buddies David and Chrissie, and I had to mock what everyone else was doing.

Josephine Taylor, Catherine Clark Gallery

(January 7 through February 11)

As I mentioned, I am a big fan of Josephine Taylor's work, and have been following her beautiful large-scale ink drawings since I saw her at both the 2005 SECA show at the SF MoMA and the Bay Area Now show at the YBCA the same year.  Not many people, at least whom I have come across, make large, airy, realistic, psychological work on big expanses of white paper.  What can I say, she had me at "white paper".  In juxtaposition with her detailed and soft technique is the heavy imagery of very disturbing things.  It's amazing to have met her and know she's a very well-adjusted and lovely person, who must get a lot of things out through her art.  One more thing to like about art- it makes for great therapy.

Her pieces were mostly very large images with figures battling each other.

I really liked her choices of filling in some colors and not all.  It gave those areas more importance, and gave visual punctuations to the grotesque stories- like the balls and toenail.

The fight scene really made scary by the body language of the feet.

Adventures in Art: Six Weeks of Openings and Shows (Part I)

I admit it: I failed at keeping up my blog for the last few months.  It was partly due to my recent introduction to the full-time working week, and also due to my second job teaching art.  It's been exhausting just to get up, let alone make a blog.   Does anyone read it?  I dunno.  I make it because I like pretending I have an audience as enthusiastic about art, travel, and beauty as I am, yet just as caustic and been-there, done-that as I feel most of the time.  That's just the way it goes living in the Bay Area's art-filled city.  Even if you wanted to be optimistic and appreciative of the sheer amount of art that is out there, it's overwhelming in scope and mostly underwhelming in quality.  Maybe that's the school mid-semester blues talking, though... ugh, I digress.

Anyway, I have been taking a lot of pictures out in the world while I am looking at art and forming my  opinions of it.  I figured I might as well share all of it here after I have been out in the field taking it in.  I do also have to mention that I have been rather lazy about holding the iphone straight or waiting for the focus to kick in, so my quality of images leaves much to be desired.  I promise if you stick with me, I'll make a better effort towards better documentation.

Here's what I have seen, whirlwind style, over the past six or seven weeks.

My good friend, Courtney Johnson, bless her heart, volunteered this summer at Southern Exposure for their Mission Voices kids' art program.  They had a culminating art reception featuring work like this cardboard geodesic dome, and the night was capped with a flash mob dance scene that I wanted to hate but totally loved.

CCA had a number of summer art classes for middle school kids  including a class on building dioramas.  Their classroom was a disaster zone that I was glad to not be responsible for, but their reception for the work had amazing little pieces of art I ended up preferring to a lot of the adult work I've seen in these past weeks.

I didn't get a shot of the actual show in the adjoining room, but here's the scene at Andrew Schoultz's private reception for his new exhibition at the SF MoMA featuring his work in conversation with the MoMA's collection of Paul Klee prints and paintings.  The show will be up til January.  It's the biggest thing I've seen from someone I know!

"Jesus, take the wheel!" is all I can say in response to this show I saw at The Lab last month centered around performance.  I hate performance, and when you throw in Bay Area concepts, it almost always turns into a personal/political mess of exhibitionists and an uncomfortable audience who just holds their breath out of politeness until the thing is over.  This piece involves a bunch of dancers and a bunch of chairs, and some super creepy porno music with a voice-over recording telling the dancers what to do next.

I went to Unspeakable Projects for a show about pop culture which featured a ton of people from CCA so the reception doubled as a reunion of sorts for all of us recent grads.  I had never been to this space, which is the bottom floor of a home which is located in an alley.  While it feels strange trying to get there, once inside I thought it was curated and hung nicely and I generally was pretty impressed.  

I took this picture with the intention of writing a quip about how the world of art is so "arty" that even this is a piece to be considered, and sold.  Then I found out it was by my friend, Mark Benson, who also arranged the stantion installation above.  Well, what can I say?  I get it.  Objects can be reappropriated to mean something else, and I value that.  But still, Duchamp-ian art can look pretty funny and/or indicative of the pretentiousness of the art world.

Later that same crazy opening night I was driven over to the tenderloin to check out Jonathan Wallraven's solo show at Kokoro.  While an art space can do very little about the conditions of the neighborhood outside, the simple choice of a space's location can have a big impact on the view inside the gallery.  It took so long to find parking on the streets shared by sleazy clubs and sidewalks crowded with crackheads, that by the time we entered the calm respite of the gallery, my agitation was irreversible.  Jonathan's strange semi-3D cubes of stretched out drawings were interesting but not quite enough for me.

I went to what is now called "Eli Ridgway Gallery" instead of Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, to see their first big opening of the season, a solo show by Brion Nuda Rosch.  The large, two-level space was filled with really similar pieces.  Photocopies of nature with plops of paint on them seemed to say very little, and the same brown, black, and white palette repeated throughout was boring.  There were two-sided pieces on pedestals, but I was distracted by the little white brackets holding them in place, which appeared unconsidered.

Outside of Eli Ridgway and Catherine Clark

This is a terrible image, but you get the idea.  Julie Heffernan's solo exhibition at Catherine Clark was full of saccharine, pastel palettes and rendered figures which offered nothing other than her love for beauty and the old masters.  The whole show was sort of eh, despite the craftsmanship which went into the pieces.

Matt Borruso at Steven Wolf Fine Arts was thoughtful, consistent, and detailed.  The show was made up of three parts; a nicely hung group of weird, tripped-out dude collages, his signature, well-executed pencil drawings made up of collaged creepy heads, and a venture into film, (a split screen showing a sci-fi movie on the left and the movie about Helen Keller on the right, where cosmically the two meet up and show the same scenario of a person "seeing" for the first time).  I loved the hilarity of the movies side by side, but if I did not already like Matt as a person and an artist, I probably wouldn't have invested enough time in the film to get to the punch line.  Of course, since I make detailed pencil drawings too, I favor his drawings over the collages, but all in all, I was impressed by his carefully considered show.

The inside of Steven Wolf

Stoner gore drawing by Matt Borruso

Across the street from Steven Wolf is Guerrero Gallery, where Alex Lucas was exhibiting a large solo exhibition in Guerrero's beautiful space.  The show was full of related works which at first are photo realistic watercolors, but up close are screen prints of cityscapes which have been worked into with paint.  Does that matter?  No, I guess not- I would assume the artist still spends a long time with each one, adding layers of detail, which in itself doesn't matter either, but labor is almost always impressive.  What left me with more eh feeling was the simplicity of the message in the work.  The cityscapes, which have been left to rot or drown in water say to me, "Man has done bad things to the earth.  Let's all imagine an apocalypse that man deserves".  Yawn.  That skater mentality of FTW isn't anything other than played out this far into the post punk years.  I hope we find new messages to be edgy these days.


  Part II coming soon!

Life on a Budget: Art shows, berry foraging, and taking in the view

Long-lost Blog,
I'm back from Eastern Europe and I have plenty to show and tell you!  While I have many pics to post of my Bosnian adventure, sandwiching my travels were weeks of stagnant unemployment that I would like to post, too.  The good news is that I secured a job at CCA starting last week, but the months of zero income over the summer have made for lazy but creative attempts at a culture-filled existence.

Recently I made several discoveries about what truly makes me American.  Some of the most obvious of my inherited philosophies were my prescribed entitlement and my constant, unnecessary purchasing.  Hitting the brakes on my student loans, I truly had never thought much about my spending habits.  Money is the last thing you want to be worried about while you are trying to gain ultimate mastery of your art practice.  However, that way of thinking, I discovered, (or, rather, came to terms with), is problematic in itself, and quite pretentious.  Graduate school is two years of being selfishly unaware of the problems lying just outside in the real world.  I was purposely ignorant of how my artist's lifestyle had to change in order to eat.

To trim the fat, I discovered that there are several things to do with one's time that require little-to-no money.  First up: gallery openings!  Free admission and the added bonus of refreshments make this a no-brainer, and also an important part of my artist's "job".  How else to quell boredom?  Exploring my habitat on foot for free or taking drives for a little gas money are pretty good options, too.  Thirdly, socializing often comes with spending money, but "just looking" shopping is one sad option, and kind friends' pity coffees, beers, and hamburgers are another.

Here are a bunch of ways I managed to overcome my insatiable American habits and still entertain myself.

Before I left for Bosnia, I spent a completely lovely and totally free day looking at galleries.  I saw Stephanie Syjuco's solo show, "Raiders", at Catherine Clark, which consisted of digitally downloaded and printed facades of priceless Asian  art from the entire collection of an unnamed Asian art museum.  The result was beautiful, jarring, and hilarious.

Also at Catherine Clark were some industrially fabricated street signs with antagonistic slogans by Anthony Discenza.

Next door I checked out the show by Castaneda/Reiman at Baer Ridgway, whose installations were part construction, part landscape, and possibly too conceptual for me to willingly understand.

I also discovered a sweet bonus of my recent graduation:  my student ID card still granted me free access to the SF MoMA, where I perused the roof-top sculpture garden and paid for my Blue Bottle coffee with coins in my pocket from my change jar.

On another day I took a trip up to Oakland's Tilden Park, where I enjoyed another perk of recent graduation: everyone else was still at work or school while I explored Lake Anza and some trails I had never been on.

One day my friend, Natasha, and I took our restless legs up to Stinson Beach, where the sun was promising but the wind was like being inside some sort of sand tunnel.  We had fun anyway, but our snacks were pretty gritty.  Later we stopped in Sausalito where local artisan ceramics are beautifully crafted and sold at Heath Ceramics.

On another art adventure, some friends and I went to Ratio 3 to catch Mission School artist, Margaret Kilgallen's, posthumous exhibition, "Summer/Selections."  It should have been titled,  "They Raided My Sketchbooks and Remnants."  While her linework is superior and I love to see any female artist in a predominantly male circle like the SF Mission School, the work was hung badly with visible screws and cheap frames, and altogether not flattering to the artist's memory.

Work by Margaret Kilgallen

I stopped by the vintage store, La Rosa, on Haight Street with a friend who is a regular there.  The store was quite entertaining to peruse, but the prices are insanely expensive.  While I found some great treasures like a woven karate robe and several Nudie-esque western jackets, the triple digit price tags coupled with the pain of walking down super-gross Haight Street made it a once-a-year sort of place for me.

Lucky for me, many of my friends are also neighbors, and we had a relaxing summer BBQ  potluck, providing a long-needed CCA reunion as well as good food for cheap $.  Imagine the luck of me bringing a peach and apple crisp and Julie bringing homemade brown sugar ice cream!

My friend, Rachel, and I explored our Oakland neighborhood as two poor ladies on the prowl for blackberry bushes in the nearby rose garden.

I tried one more trip to Stinson Beach solo, where the weather said 75 and it was more like 60.  Still, the sound of waves crashing and the soft sand beneath your feet are a necessity for the occasional regrouping.

I made it to the opening of Marx and Zavattero's current 10th anniversary show, "Sea Change Part II", the day after I came back from Europe.  Several favorite artists were on view from their roster, including Libby Black and Taravat Talepasand.

A little painting by Libby Black in the back room

A Taravat Talepasand drawing with some unexpected color

A very clean Patrick Wilson painting

In the back room- Libby Black, her partner Jen, and their son, Jasper, who took me out for burgers afterwards.  Yes!

What else is free?  Oh yeah, making art, as long as I have supplies already.  Duh!