Alan Rath

Hosfelt Gallery

May 2013

There’s a serious flirtation factor to Alan Rath’s recent mechanized sculptures. Composed of metal armatures and computer hardware that seemingly animate feathers, the works literally tickle the viewer who stands even a socially acceptable… READ ON

PICKS

City Lights

The inauguration of The Bay Lights

March 2013 SAN FRANCISCO

STORM CLOUDS gathered last Tuesday, March 5, at the same time as a formally attired crowd convened at the Hotel Vitale lobby to fete artist Leo Villareal and inaugurate The Bay Lights, a massive public work covering the San Francisco Bay … READ ON

DIARY

Street Smarts

Barry McGee at the Berkeley Art Museum

August 2012 SAN FRANCISCO

THE SIDEWALKS surrounding the Berkeley Art Museum last Thursday were filled with dazed and eager newbie scholars who brazenly streamed through crosswalks, taunting drivers on the first day of classes at Cal. It also happened to be the opening… READ ON

DIARY

Coast to Coast

Cindy Sherman at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

July 2012 SAN FRANCISCO

HOW IS IT that Cindy Sherman’s had such a paltry exhibition record in San Francisco? Back in the 1990s there were a couple small solo shows—a Berkeley Art Museum Matrix presentation of her history works, an exhibition of her thorny … READ ON

DIARY

Bessma Khalaf

Steven Wolf Fine Arts

May 2012

Those who give credence to the Mayan eschatological prophecy that the world will end this year can shop nearly until Christmas to prepare for the apocalypse. This sort of humorous and mundane magick is the sly subject of Bessma Khalaf’s … READ ON

PICKS

Luke Butler

Silverman Gallery

April 2012

Now more than ever, it can seem that media is eternal: Most any film or classic television series will stream dead shows, live, at our summoning, from vast digital archives. Luke Butler’s work is an emphatically analog illustration of … READ ON

PICKS

“State of Mind”

University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA)

April 2012

There are perpetual rumblings about ballot initiatives to split California in half, somewhere in the middle of this vast landmass. It’s exactly the kind of crackpot idea or pipe-dream hyperbole that makes the Golden State (and its residents)… READ ON

PICKS

Leslie Shows

December 2011

Leslie Shows’s new body of work was inspired by two small chunks of pyrite, aka fool’s gold. In a sense, the material is richer in metaphor than actual value; neither precious nor revered, it has modest industrial utility and reflective… READ ON

PICKS

“September 11”

November 2011

For the past ten years, the meaning of September 11 has been elastic, its tension easing and straining to encompass mournful impulse and a desire to forget. Peter Eleey’s unhurried exhibition of works by forty-one artists treats 9/11 as a… READ ON

PICKS

“Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories”

August 2011

To live up to the appellation “grande dame of transatlantic modernism,” the honorific bestowed on Gertrude Stein by one of the curators of this substantial exhibition devoted to her mediated life, is no small task. Stein always appeared… READ ON

PICKS