A decade and a half can seem like eons in contemporary art years, but freshness and foresight mark this exhibition’s slice of recent San Francisco art history. It surveys and pays tribute to the brief but influential existence of Kiki, a petite Mission District storefront gallery that lasted just eighteen months spanning 1993–95. Rick Jacobsen, who died of AIDS-related lymphoma in 1997, ran the space as a locus of art making that engaged with queer and alternative viewpoints. Provocative thematic shows included the inaugural “Caca at Kiki” and “Sick Joke,” which mined a troubling vein of AIDS humor. The fifty-four pieces assembled here by artist Colter Jacobsen (no relation to Rick) and writer Kevin Killian seem proof that Kiki operated ahead of the art-market curve, promoting many artists who went on to enjoy much larger careers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two works from Catherine Opie’s 1993 portrait series, which depict members of the queer underground community (in this case performer Justin Bond and artist Jerome Caja) that formed the base of Kiki’s demographic: A copy of the 1994 consignment form for Opie’s portrait of Caja values the photograph at a mere $850.

A sense of success pervades the show—Kiki appeared at a market-savvy moment when advertisers began to target gay consumers, art fairs were nascent, and SF MoMA had yet to open its new building—but ambivalent attitudes toward those forces infuse the survey as well. All the works, save for two anachronistic 2008 portraits of the late Jacobsen by Kota Ezawa and Keith Mayerson, are vintage pieces with staying power. An enlarged photograph of a dimpled butt (a work by Lutz Bacher included in Kiki’s Yoko Ono tribute show) lords over the space with an abject wit, while a selection of the late Caja’s small nail-polish-on-mixed-media paintings of clowns, saints, and stylized penises hangs on a wall nearby. Of particular interest is a vitrine displaying the Fluxus-style Kikibox, 1994, and its contents: small, editioned works by gallery-affiliated artists. In a sense, this piece encapsulates the exhibition as a whole, forming a treasure box of memories for those who were there and discoveries for those who were not.

— Glen Helfand

The cosmos has always held a privileged place in aesthetics. Whether as a boundless store of transcendent metaphors or the site of astrophysical abstractions, space has served as a singularly inhuman screen for the projection of human desires and fears. Trevor Paglen’s most recent project, “The Other Night Sky,” reveals some fine cracks in a seemingly pristine mirror. The diagonal lines that cut across the surfaces of these C-prints are not the trailing tails of otherworldly comets, but rather the recorded trajectories—faint but unwavering—of one of 189 satellites operated by the US military. Across the gallery, a photograph of a desert sky promises a reprieve from such ominous revelations, its nocturnal calm recalling the sublime silence of Ansel Adams’s legendary Moonrise, Hernandez, Mexico, 1941. But the wall label reveals its subject, instead, as Four Geostationary Satellites Above the Sierra Nevada.

In darkened room adjoining the gallery of photographs, a large globe hangs from the ceiling. As it spins on axis, projectors cast onto it numerous simultaneous pulses of light from four angles. While these pulses appear to evoke the fugitive twinkle of stars, they actually represent the intermittent activity of satellites within Earth’s immediate orbit. Accompanying this installation is a sound recording that ricochets through various scales and registers, from high-pitched whistles to low cooing to competing whirls. What seems like the sound track to some familiar sci-fi film is, in fact, a composite of recordings “culled from intercepted reconnaissance satellite transmissions.” Like the flecks of light that flare up and fade, their apparent abstraction belies an insidious network of coded meanings.

In the wake of Paglen’s work, the surveillance narratives that have long titillated and terrorized readers and moviegoers no longer conjure up the specter of space invaders or alien others. The intelligent life that monitors these apparatuses lives much closer to home. Even the devices involved in capturing these images—“Optical imaging reconnaissance satellite,” “Military meteorological satellite”—bespeak a different, particularly elusive subject. Paglen, who just completed his doctorate in geography, has obviously spent much time studying the covert technologies of military surveillance. The resulting images present a play of interstellar gazes on a cosmological scale. Do we take heart in the fact that Paglen has turned the tables on practices of surveillance? Or do we reckon, more cynically, that the artist’s uninvited watching is surely being monitored in turn? That Paglen’s images are lovely to look at is perhaps cold comfort for the hidden systems they reveal.

— Ara H. Merjian

One wouldn’t expect an exhibition titled “Ladylike” to present a view of feminism that narrowly focuses on female-identified women artists and thus excludes feminist-inclined men and transgender, transsexual, and intersex persons. Despite this limited scope, artworks that explore feminist identities via Second Life avatars, 1950s-era gender norms, and old-world folklore stand out.

In her short video I Am a Fashionista (IRL, I Wear the Same Pants Everyday), 2006, Stacia Yeapanis explores virtual bodies, dressing her Sim avatar in fifty of fifteen hundred downloaded outfits, chronicling her online life and in the process updating for the twenty-first century the explorations of the media landscape by ’70s feminist artists. But in Yeapanis’s work, as is typical of our Internet-saturated world, there is an added layer of disconnect from the physical self. Jessica Hannah’s performance Showroom No. 6 (Robot Lady Talking on Phone), 2008, presents a fictitious company whose aesthetic is straight out of the ’50s; it creates robotic female companions. On opening night, Hannah and five other women were dressed in matching white, sleeveless, knee-length dresses, perfectly coiffed wigs, and clunky vintage necklaces. As viewers curiously lifted the receivers of pastel-colored phones with the human dolls’ names on them, they were confronted with a real-life robot woman’s blank, slowly tilting face. While listening to one of six eerily intoxicating dialogues describing how the doll could be “your perfect companion,” the robot performers’ vacant gazes aroused discomfort mixed with intrigue and eroticism, suggesting the performative aspect of every sexual encounter. In three quaint embroideries from her 2006 series “Lessons from My Mother,” Transylvanian-born artist Andrea Dezsö continues discussions of gender and sexuality in the old country’s “folk wisdom.” Inserting small, finely stitched images of a nearly dead, yellow-colored woman, a green bowl of goop, and tiny silverware between the lines MY MOTHER CLAIMED THAT HEPATITIS IS A LIVER DISEASE YOU GET FROM EATING FOOD YOU FIND DISGUSTING, Dezsö comments on these pervasive notions about sexuality. This conceptually loose exhibition would have been more memorable with a little focus, but it does manage to engage myriad aspects of contemporary feminism.

— Alicia Eler

Mie Olise Kjærgaard is interested in utopian structures long since undermined by the problems that beset all visionary endeavors. Her paintings and installations are not, however, full of apocalyptic doom and gloom, but rather are hopeful; they are filled with visual ruminations that possess a unique beauty. Kjærgaard’s source material for this exhibition, titled “Penetrating Pores of Construction,” is based on a trek she made to the North Pole to research the abandoned Soviet-era coal-mining town nicknamed the Pyramid. This architectural relic has proven to be an aesthetic and conceptual inspiration. Kjærgaard loosely interprets the town in her paintings, as befits her technique; the idea seems to be to capture the structures and layout of the place in her mind and then extrapolate a parallel universe in the gallery.

The paintings are large and handled with confidence. Her use of paint reminds one of David Park in that she has the rare ability to evoke a multitude of surfaces, all contrasted with a harsh light, with a few well-placed, luscious strokes. Some of the paintings depict the dilapidated structures reconfigured on stilts to create a sense of vertigo. Others offer ships looming in the sky as if on some forgotten fantastic voyage of yesteryear. Her installation Penetrating Inbetween, 2008, is a life-size ensemble of found wooden planks that form what might be interpreted as a makeshift coal mine. As in the paintings, there is a longing tone in the work that inspires a humanistic appreciation of otherwise abandoned environments.

— Garland Fielder

Delving deeply into the mystical roots of the Americas, “NeoHooDoo” uncovers an African soul in the hybrid lineage of various remarkable cultures. The exhibition contextualizes some of the Menil Collection’s Conceptual-art masterworks with strong African-American, Hispanic-American, and Central and South American sculpture and video made in recent years. Visitors to the exhibition are greeted at once by the giant metal edifice of Nari Ward’s LiquorsouL, 2007, in which repurposed corner-store neon signage, decorated with plastic flowers woven with sneaker tips, heralds rebirth from urban neglect. The benedictory introduction continues nearby with Marepe’s Auréolas (Halo), 2004, a ring of neon auras that grants the entrance hall a soulful blue glow. This graceful sentiment is echoed in James Lee Byars’s enormous brass ring, The Halo, 1985. The exhibition’s titular reference is to poet Ishmael Reed, who is a hallmark for curator Franklin Sirmans. Reed bridges ’70s-era radicalism and our new century, and included work by Michael Tracy, Adrian Piper, and Felix Gonzales-Torres provides a similar context of pushing for social change that a younger generation has embraced wholeheartedly.

From the piano-key tempest of Radcliffe Bailey’s Storm at Sea, 2007, to the chained wooden boats bearing liquor bottles and rusted shackles in José Bedia’s Las Cosas que me Arrastran (The Things That Drag Me), 2008, Sirmans has assembled an incisive survey of the relationship between mysticism and social consciousness in recent art. Exceptional in this regard is Peruvian artist William Cordova, who has sublimated aspects of parallel political struggles into the house that frank lloyd wright built for atahualpa, 2008, which is made of excavated scrap timber from Houston’s Third Ward, West Monroe Street in Chicago, and the Sangarará neighborhood of Cuzco, Peru. The artist has constructed a diminutive home and adorned the rough wood with thrift-store gold chains; the corner of the structure is tagged with amateur graffiti in miniature. “NeoHooDoo” seeks to promote new, socially conscious rituals steeped in traditions unjustly forgotten and worth rediscovering.

— Sean Carroll

In this exhibition, curator Srdjan Loncar subtly fills the gallery with flags, but not exactly the types readily imagined. Human figures serve as emblems of, simultaneously, existence and ideologies. Deploying simple transformations—reduction, concealment, exposure—artists Rajko Radovanovic, Yevgeniy Ampleyev, Mayumi Hamanaka, and Taro Hottori traverse the loaded territories of human rights, power, propaganda, and perversion.

New Altars of the Temple of Happiness #57, 2008, by Radovanovic, a Croatian artist, dominates the gallery. The left-hand rectangular panel of the looming triptych presents an enlarged black-and-white photograph of the Yugoslav People’s Army, its members’ faces masked out with red paint and black crosses. On the right, the sentence A PRECONDITION TO DOING VIOLENCE TO ANY GROUP OF PEOPLE IS TO MAKE THEM LESS THAN HUMAN sits boldly against a backdrop of propagandistic newspaper columns. In this context, the concealed faces leave the figures both individuated and iconic. An all-black panel serves as the restless void between these two highly provocative images.

Issues of power and racial stereotypes are likewise explored by the collaborative duo Hamanaka and Hottori, who present eight life-size prints of nude Japanese men from their series “Japanese Male Surrender,” 2003–. The figures, printed on white backgrounds that are hung like flags in a near circle in the gallery, submit in their stance and nudity yet retain one element of control through their confrontational stares. Ukranian artist Ampleyev also sardonically plays up notions of gender while exploring the mutability and perversion of the human form in the cartoonish style of Jim Nutt. The artists in “The Great White” play with notions of perception, transforming many of the exhibited works into ensigns of our humanity—and the forces that challenge that ideal.

— Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart

Fashion, fame, and photography, the main intrigues of Elizabeth Peyton’s paintings, oddly reconvene in this exhibition of the artist’s photographs. Although these portraits, modestly sized and framed in wood, retain the intimacy of Peyton’s canvases, most of them lack the glamour of those gem-colored creations. Hung in loose chronological order and shot between 1994 and 2008, the pictures catch her (mostly young) friends in the center of the frame. The minimal compositions and blurriness seem borrowed from recent fashion spreads and compliment her self-aware subjects, with their stylish signifiers and their attention focused away from the camera. Is this gesture feigned? Several of the exhibited works appear in the background of other images, perhaps a reminder that we are never truly candid for the camera.

Some of these pictures are so banal they recall the amateur snapshots we used to develop before working digitally allowed us to erase them. They are perhaps treasured for what Peyton associates with them rather than for style; one early four-by-six-inch print is stained with paint, intimating that the memento spent time with the artist in her studio. Peyton’s switch from analog to digital seems ambivalent here. Although the later photographs are almost exclusively digital, many retain (or assume) analog’s unedited rawness. Save for the fact that these can perhaps be seen as source material for the paintings, there is only a tenuous conceptual link between these photographs and Peyton’s works on canvas: the prospect of imminent change. Even if viewers are unaffected by the Peyton’s seeming devotion to fleeting modern trends, the melancholy of analog’s obsolescence will not escape them.

— Jess Wilcox

Beginning with the Second World War’s end, “The Immediate Touch” sets out to challenge national boundaries by posing a tenuous linguistic unification of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. But the distinctly different realities of the war and its aftermath led to divergent visual expression. Though attempting to balance the precedence given to German postwar art production, the exhibition works against itself by largely arranging artists by national origin and therefore misses the opportunity to create dialogues through unexpected juxtapositions.

The show’s strongest moments are still German. In the chalked scrawls of Urbis II, 1972, one feels the immediacy of a Joseph Beuys lecture-performance delivered before a retro-style blackboard that documents his own brand of sociopolitical activism. The materiality of Anselm Kiefer’s The Voyage of the Niebelungen to Etzel, 1980–81, represents drawing in its more expanded realm, where, in several spreads, photographs of the artist’s studio form the background for layers of graphite and paint to suggest the epic’s watery Danube setting. Despite the weight of history, lighter moments also surface. In 1986, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen mocked Kiefer’s superstar status in It Isn’t Your Fault, a book containing oatmeal-flaked pages, some coated in salmon-colored paint, and a single snapshot of a prefame Kiefer. Sigmar Polke’s “ . . . . . Higher Beings Ordain” series, 1968, satirizes a '60s German middle-class penchant for palm-tree decor in black-and-white photographs of everyday objects, such as buttons, arranged in the shape of a tree. Clean-lined sketches on notebook paper suggest clear thinking behind Polke’s operations and are among the more successful instances of insight into an artist’s practice through drawing, as they seem to deepen the experience of the work’s final manifestation.

— Margaret Ewing

Silicon Valley may be the locus of technological innovation, but its role in the arts has a spottier reputation. 01SJ, a biennial event of live and gallery activity in San Jose, is an attempt to foster some critical reflection in this valley of digital mavericks. The live events have passed, but “Superlight,” the event’s main exhibition component, is on view through the summer. Organized by Steve Dietz, the exhibition finds inspiration in a moment when “digital art” is not easily confined to computer monitors and electronic sound tracks. The are some engaging holdovers of a more traditional tech aesthetic among the nearly two dozen artists and collaborative teams whose work is on view here, including Adam Nash’s Ways to Wave, 2008, a “3D multi-user environment” involving animated renderings and a parallel project in Second Life, and Taiwanese artist Shih Chieh Huang’s perversely adorable robotic creatures made from plastic bags, water bottles, and electric fans. But more often, the included artists address the atmosphere of uncertainty and free-floating analog anxiety in a technologized global culture. The show includes commissioned and existing works that don’t always reveal their digital roots as they question whether today’s technology will really solve ills caused by previous technological developments. Daniel Faust’s series of elegant and slightly wistful color photographs imparts a sense of Silicon Valley’s history, be it in the form of corporate architecture or outmoded data archives, which are both depicted as oddly human. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Global Mind Radar/Reader (An Emotional Barometer), 2008, literally takes a cultural pulse by using live blog input, while projects by the collectives Free Soil and Red 76 tap into a pervasive yearning for utopian endeavors, in both real and Second life. (It should be said, though, that the chartlike presentation of these projects doesn’t quite convey the vitality of the off-site, community-based activities that really form the pieces.) More insistent is documentation of projects by HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen), a pair of Paris-based designers who harness information about carbon-filled industrial pollution, secondhand smoke, and various light sources and inventively visualize it in order to urge us to look at the world with an uneasy sense of wonder. From a literal standpoint, their work fits this exhibition’s premise best—their use of light in Nuage Vert (Green Cloud), 2008, is a tech-enhanced, inspiring way to signal troubles in the atmosphere.

— Glen Helfand

It’s difficult to imagine a better exhibition than this one to enter after the blazing summertime heat of Washington, DC’s mall. Nineteen large-scale chromogenic prints of swimmers and sunbathers in Hawaii immerse viewers in crystalline turquoise water and twilight rippling over horizonless seas. Richard Misrach seems at first to provide six-foot-wide windows from the heavens into the vacation sublime below. Yet this laconic exhibition underscores the artist’s long preoccupation with Edenic landscapes: beautiful but ripe with premonition of the fall. (In this sense, Misrach’s September 11 reference in the wall text is less heavy-handed, although the eerie calm preceding a tsunami feels like a more fitting comparison.) Further compounding the exhibition’s apocalyptic whispers is its title, “On the Beach,” after Nevil Shute’s 1957 nuclear-holocaust novel of the same name, in which the world’s last survivors wait on a beach for the end or take poison with loved ones to hurry it along. Such a reference forces us to reconsider the photographs’ figures. A man dishragging in the shore break could be a bloated, washed-up body; a couple napping back-to-back on the beach with covered heads might never wake up. Most works have only one or a few vacationers overcome in scale by so much sand or sea; water takes over entirely in three photographs hung together in their own gallery. These near monochromes relate to Misrach’s sky studies, and attention to water’s texture and prismatic form conjure projects by Vija Celmins, Roni Horn, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Like vacation snapshots, Misrach’s grand views deliver only part of the story. And like the figures floating through them, these photographs are suspended in a state where reality is muffled and momentarily far away.

The exhibition, inaugurated last fall at the Art Institute of Chicago, will travel to the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle (October 11, 2008–January 18, 2009), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (May 23–August 16, 2009).

— Prudence Peiffer

With last year’s launch of Lapham's Quarterly, pedagogical trendsetter Lewis Lapham endeavored to read the present through the lens of the past. Helena Reckitt, senior curator at the gallery, goes further, conflating past and present in a smart survey of reconstructed objects and events.

New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson’s The Fountain of Prosperity, 2006, re-creates Keynesian economist Bill Phillips’s MONIAC, a machine developed in 1949 that used dyed liquid to demonstrate the flow of capital. Stevenson’s rusted rendition—redolent of Wim Delvoye’s notorious 2002 Cloaca (or “shit machine”), which appeared at the gallery in 2004—drips bloody liquid, evoking capitalism’s failures. Elsewhere, Dario Robleto’s I Miss Everyone Who Has Ever Gone Away, 2008, a copy of an airplane mobile he made in 1991 but later lost, uses the same materials that composed the original: Felix Gonzalez-Torres candy wrappers, which, according to the exhibition catalogue, makes good on the late artist’s “ambition to become ‘endless copies.’” In one intelligent pairing, Sharon Hayes’s In the Near Future, 2005, a series of slides of the artist holding protest placards, is projected across from Mary Kelly’s light-box work Flashing Nipple Remix, #1, 2005, illuminating Hayes’s debt to the feminist installation pioneer.

Walid Raad’s photographs of Israeli soldiers occupying East Beirut, taken when the artist was fourteen, have a contradictory yet spellbinding intimacy. In Gerard Byrne’s humorous 1984 and Beyond, 2005–2007, the Irish artist films Dutch and Irish actors reenacting interviews with Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. Transitioning into darker territory, Swedish artist Felix Gmelin’s “Tools and Grammar,” 2007, presents photos and a film from 1928 of blind children’s clay reconstructions of graves in Germany, presaging a time not long after when the disabled would become targets of the National Socialists’ genocidal agenda. These varying takes on history demonstrate that while the past can be a joy or a burden, it is certainly never boring.

— Janine Armin

Samuel Roy-Bois’s new sculptural installation provokes laughter. I stumbled across it—literally: I tripped on the raised, carpeted floor he had installed for the work, which presents itself as a second skin, as it were, for the gallery space. One follows the institutional gray carpeting into a small room, roughed in with framing and cutaway drywall. Inside is a pointy cardboard construction, its seams highlighted by black duct tape, connected to the ceiling with string. The many planes of the cardboard construction are numbered, in thick marker, as if the rough interior of this provisional room might map onto the rough exterior of the sculpture. On one side, you can peer into construction; nested there like a jewel of meaning is a Plexiglas diamond approximately two feet across—the Hope Diamond on steroids. The work is one part Thomas Hirschhorn, another part Jessica Stockholder (albeit without her colorful oomph). The meaning of this post-DIY work is nothing; or, rather, it’s the way we navigate this antithesis of both the white cube and the black box, ducking our heads, tripping over matter.

— Clint Burnham

“Idyll” is a loose, hippieish grab bag of historical art, archival supplements, and some very cool contemporary work. Commemorating—or mourning—May 1968, the presentation centers on phosphorescent art from the ’60s by Audrey Capel Doray, a geodesic dome–cum–video installation by Noam Gonick and Luis Jacob, and a video-projection environment by Holly Ward. The most thought-provoking work, Ward’s Radical Rupture, 2005–2008, is also the most sensuous. Beanbag chairs, arranged on a shag carpet, invite the gallerygoer to sit down and relax, while a large screen shows a video projection of a night sky, in which the stars flicker. The sound track is a recorded lecture by Herbert Marcuse that allows us to revisit flower power and the dialectics of socialism, a call to action that demands we get out of the very beanbags we’re now melting into (Plato’s allegory of the cave is clearly referenced, both by Marcuse and by Ward). And yet, the blinking stars put any project for human progress into macrocosmic perspective. Think Olafur Eliasson, but with bite. Doray’s silk screens and interactive art, meanwhile, contain the most beautiful images in the show: groovy psychedelia that suggests Peter Max and comix artist Jeff Smith (creator of Bone). Doray’s work reassures us that the utopian premise of the ’60s need not be mocked or forgotten. Gonick and Jacob’s Wildflowers of Manitoba, 2007, a geodesic dome in which a lithe, long-haired youth lounges while bucolic videos are projected onto the structure, is less successful: Bucky Fuller for potheads.

— Clint Burnham