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.

Art from Forever Ago

Anything goes...
I went to some San Francisco art shows before Christmas and never posted them.  Hopefully you might be curious about some great local art anyways, especially if you're like me and want to go see a bunch of shows and but never make it to most of them.  At least we can always live vicariously through the internet. Looking back, this round of art offerings seemed especially diverse, pointing to the general truth about art in today's scene:  anything goes, and it's all good...or kind of good...most of the time.  I personally find it so refreshing that I could be making so many different kinds of paintings, and no one would bat an eye.  We have come to accept anything from glitter art to gestural abstraction on a fairly level playing field, and I love it.

Joel Dean and Jason Benson, "La Folie", and Bryson Gill, "The Optimist Gene", Triple Base Gallery 

Dec. 2- Jan. 1

Well, like I said, anything is art these days.  These pieces nailed onto other pieces and sculptural paintings as paintings/as sculpture(?) by the collaborative team of Joel and Jason in the Triple Base back room seemed almost too smart to care about what they were made of.

I like that they are different, yet I feel I've seen them before.  And like I said above, it's as if there wasn't any love put into them.

Socks as painting.

Not really into the marks made.

Bryson Gill's solo show in the front room, full of rich oil paintings and sunlight, seemed the remedy to the anti-paintings in in the back.  It was obvious that Bryson painstakingly crafted each painting lovingly, as he considered the composition and color of these paintings that were part still life and part abstraction.

That red just glows.

Paul Mullins, "For Here or To Go", Marx and Zavattero

Oct. 29- Dec. 17

Paul Mullins' large scale paintings of collaged dude imagery were nice to see in person- some art just doesn't photograph the same.  His combination of light pastel colors and KISS and dogs and tattoos was well-executed but not completely my cup of tea.  They left me wanting something more, though I'm not sure I can put my finger on it.  I just wondered through the exhibition, why these particular images?  What is he trying to say?

A close-up of the tiny painted un-collage parts.

Darren Waterston, "Forest Eater", and Leslie Shows, "Split Array" Haines Gallery

Nov. 3- Dec. 24

Well, I don't know what it is, but I kind of like this Waterston sculpture.  Maybe because it's black and matte.  I would probably like anything with black and matte.

I kind of like these Waterston paintings but he had a tough crowd because....Leslie Shows' show in the next room was so AMAZING!

Leslie Shows has been culling her experimental techniques in water media and collage for years and made an unexpected but impressive shift to paint on aluminum.  It surely left the audience wondering, how the hell did she do that?  (Notice the yellow sculptures on the floor- those are molds of objects created with sulfur.  I didn't think they went well with the rest of the show).

What was most impressive to me besides their obvious beauty and my obvious obsession with beauty,  was their seeming photorealism in their depictions of glaciers and rocks. 

A close-up of many many combined mediums to create exquisite and mysterious techniques.

I was a fan before, and I'm still a fan.

December Group Show, Guerrero Gallery

 Dec. 17- Jan. 7

Guerrero Gallery hosted a group show full of a random assortment of known and unknown talent,  but most notably featured a new sculpture by Libby Black.  Her piece, a paper sculpture of a Goyard violin on top of a milk crate with coins inside, brought a sharper political edge to her normally playful pieces.

A quilt by Ben Venom, made out of metal band T shirts.   Venom was recently featured in the last Bay Area Now show at the YBCA.  I have yet to decide whether I am sold on these quilts as much more than a cute craft.   

A piece by Richard Colman, which I didn't realize until now is grip tape on something called 'bonite'.   I kind of like it more for this, but it makes it something much more high/low than a boy making a glitter painting.  I don't know what that means, really, but it's interesting.

Paul Wackers makes nice paintings.

Dude art of alien sex.  Typical.  (By David Jien)

A gold flag by Andrew Schoultz, who recently had a very good December in Miami at the fairs with similar gold prints.  Even Diddy, or whatever he's called now, wanted one.

Nice job, San Francisco.