interviews April 27, 2018

Alice Shaw

With wry wit and deceptive literalness, Alice Shaw has been making work for over twenty-five years that cleverly focuses on a few core issues: doubles, photography, and the hegemonic history of landscape photography in her native Golden State. Her current exhibition at Gallery 16 in San Francisco, “Cloned,” is on view through May 26, 2018. Here, among other things, she reveals some reasons for her current focus on sheep.

IMAGERY OF FARM ANIMALS seems somewhat unpopular these days. I was watching some Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films a while back and noticed how much animals used to play

picks April 10, 2018

Matthew Angelo Harrison

The twelve works in Matthew Angelo Harrison’s 2018 series “Dark Silhouettes” are a handsome provocation. Traditional wooden African sculptures, many sourced online, are encased in smoky resin and placed upon pedestals of the artist’s design, echoing Minimalist furniture from the 1970s. It is intriguing to know that Harrison, who is based in Detroit, worked in prototyping for Ford Motors, as some of the resin has been carved into with a CNC router, creating topographical rivulets in these industrial arrangements. Some of the blocks have holes drilled as if to offer oxygen to a captured deity;

diary December 24, 2014

Dancing in the Moonlight

THE BERKELEY ART MUSEUM BUILDING, a bold but seismically iffy piece of Brutalist architecture, has been on borrowed time for a while now. Bracing was added more than a decade ago, but it still rates poor on the safety scale. A new, more stable, and conveniently located building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro is nearing completion, and so the museum threw itself a daylong celebration of its soon to be former home on the shortest day of the year.

Architect Mario Ciampi’s edifice, which opened to the public in 1970, is all about exposed concrete, verticality, and buttress landings overlooking

picks July 18, 2013

“An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle”

The artist Jess and the poet Robert Duncan exchanged romantic vows in 1951, more than sixty years before the Supreme Court weighed in on marriage equality. Posthumously, the couple still inspires much of San Francisco’s creative community. Titled after a Duncan collection published in 1960, this exhibition reveals a group of creative individuals who lived and worked in the Bay Area during a romantically bohemian era of alternative lifestyles and artistic as well as social experimentation. The Jess-Duncan crowd may have crossed paths with the Beats, but their scene was more intimate, and too

picks May 10, 2013

Alan Rath

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 distance away. Working with robotic forms since the 1980s, Rath has always captured a dynamic confusion between electronics and human intimacy, utilizing standard tech-art hardware—video monitors, audio equipment—as stand-ins for the human body. At Hosfelt he doesn’t hide the tripods and consoles, but the addition of an organic material is a breakthrough,

diary March 15, 2013

City Lights

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 Bridge. When I arrived, the affable artist himself was just inside the hotel, greeting guests with a degree of comfort that belied the idea that his eight-million-dollar project might be doused during its Grand Lighting.

Villareal’s work is dubbed the world’s largest LED light sculpture. It spans nearly two miles and straddles communities with investments in art,

diary August 29, 2012

Street Smarts

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 of Barry McGee’s rollicking home-turf midcareer survey at the BAM. McGee and his street-inflected artwork have always had an ambivalent relationship with authority, and it was a fitting and yet somehow awkward merging of events. The university is a zone of both youthful energy and bureaucratic entanglements: During the opening, there were reports of campus

diary July 19, 2012

Coast to Coast

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 prosthetics pictures at the long-defunct Friends of Photography—but whole series passed by a city where costume play and identity shifts are colorfully visible, and where photographers have long found institutional haven. So the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art might be making up for lost time in picking up a leg of Sherman’s MoMA-organized career survey. Street-pole

picks May 14, 2012

Bessma Khalaf

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 mostly monochromatic photographs, videos, and sculptures in her latest exhibition, “Re-Enchanter.” The show reveals an intoxicating mix of tonal ingredients, not the least of which is a base of witty theatricality. Take the self-descriptive, elegantly composed black-and-white photograph Still Life with Le Creuset (all works 2012), which repurposes a pricey Dutch

picks April 25, 2012

Luke Butler

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 mediated mortality and masculinity. In previous works, he’s depicted male crew members from the original Star Trek series in painted film-still moments of struggle and vulnerability—when characters have been felled by nearly lethal rays. In this exhibition, these characters, sharply painted in acrylic, tangle against flat gray backgrounds or, in the case of Landing

picks April 13, 2012

“State of Mind”

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) so appealing. “State of Mind” is the only exhibition of the Getty-sponsored, Los Angeles-centric “Pacific Standard Time” lot to migrate north, and it serves the vital function of expanding the program’s geographic purview to include NorCal artists. Perhaps even more important is that it demonstrates (as the title asserts) that there is indeed a broader

picks December 06, 2011

Leslie Shows

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 qualities that dazzle deceptively in the ground. As a doppelgänger for a fourteen-carat commodity, it calls worth into question. A series of faceted paintings on shiny aluminum panels, some more than six feet tall, are based on scans of pyrite and are rendered in a polymorphous array of elements––Plexiglas, Mylar, crushed glass, metal dust, mica, acrylic paint.

picks November 09, 2011

“September 11”

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 lens through which to consider collective trauma––even though the majority of pieces here were made before 2001. Although the show opened on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, its poetic, melancholic demeanor is less concerned with memorializing than with presenting an introspective and political acknowledgment of the ambivalence that surrounds that fateful

picks August 17, 2011

“Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories”

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 to walk on solid, ego-bolstered ground, and the fittingly literate “Five Stories” takes a faceted approach to illuminating, and to a degree problematizing, her activities as a writer, art collector, networker, public intellectual, and queer trailblazer. It does so through a collection of artifacts, digital slide shows, and vintage and recent artworks (by Deborah

picks July 06, 2011

Chris Johanson

As a barometer of culture (or perhaps of the artist’s psyche), Chris Johanson’s current show reports clear skies. A small, washy acrylic on paper is emblazoned with the word SUN, which is inscribed repeatedly in yellowish hues. Like a mantra from a Mel Bochner painting, the term starts to become abstract, though only just—on the opposite side of the gallery is another, similarly scaled piece that offers the term EASY LISTENING, floating among jagged blue forms, affirming an easy vibe. Johanson, who has deep roots in San Francisco (though he currently splits his time between Portland and Los

picks May 23, 2011

Ryan Thayer

The glow of our cell phones and laptops attracts us like moths to a flame––or, in cable TV vampire parlance, we are glamoured by their engineered luminosity. There’s something of that almost supernatural power depicted in Ryan Thayer’s monochromatic photograms of sundry personal electronic devices, objects that emit light but are also capable of making photographs themselves. These items are sleek and of the moment, but technological upgrades will soon render them antiquated. The cameraless impressions that Thayer sears into sheets of lightsensitive paper, however, are fixed, pointing to a

picks April 18, 2011

Will Yackulic

Aesthetic time frames are elusive in Will Yackulic’s work. Some of this is due to his subject matter: basic geometric forms like tiny pixellike cubes and floating geodesic spheres. Earlier works, mostly on paper, seemed to describe ancient landscapes and allude to meditative tantric drawings. His latest show is touted as a return to oil painting, a medium he has rarely exhibited in. Perhaps he was simply keeping that portion of his practice on the back burner long enough to find a fresh challenge in it.

Titled “Precision & Precarity,” the exhibition comprises thirteen paintings, all similar in

print March 2011

Bull.Miletic

For the past decade, Oslo-based artists Synne Bull (Norwegian) and Dragan Miletic (Yugoslavian) have been working together as Bull.Miletic, producing film- and video-based installations that link the mediating effect of cinema with urban spaces. At Paule Anglim, the former San Francisco residents placed the Eiffel Tower and its Parisian environs at the center of their exhibition, “Mise en abyme.” Visible from the gallery entrance, the iconic French landmark seduces, cast as the protagonist of Par Hasard, 2009, a single-channel video depicting the turn-of-the century marvel in all its evening

picks February 09, 2011

Ingrid Calame

Contours of stains, splotches, and cracks lifted from concrete floor and asphalt pavement form a consistent foundation of Ingrid Calame’s work; its success is also rooted in the links it creates between one unlikely site and another. Perry Street Projects Wading Pool, Buffalo, New York #2, 2010, the grand, understated wall drawing at the heart of this exhibition, is a vast transcription of the cracks in an arid swimming pool at an ill-fated Buffalo housing project. As always, Calame tilts her horizontal subject matter upward to reorient its meaning. Here, by applying blue and red powdered pigments

picks January 21, 2011

Geoffrey Chadsey

In the startling series of watercolor pencil drawings exhibited in this show, Geoffrey Chadsey depicts characters that embody an uncanny, unbalanced mishmash of malleable flesh and warped psyche. These are figures with questionable fashion sensibilities and rock-star ambitions, who shift between genders, time frames, and, in some instances, species. Made using a rendering technique that echoes the dense curving and parallel lines used in engraved likenesses of presidents on paper money––or, more broadly, a plastic surgeon’s felt-tipped notations on bare pre-op skin––the nearly life-size figures

Glen Helfand