Glen Helfand

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  picks December 16, 2010

  Sara VanDerBeek

  In an installation that recalls an elliptical rebus, the fourteen photographs in Sara VanDerBeek’s first West Coast solo show are infused with dusky, steely blue color schemes and simple geometric forms that suggest vast artistic and celestial arenas—modernist sculpture, American poetry, the cosmos. Recurrent images of arrowlike angles (a blue neon sign in Gwangju [all works 2010]; a Walker Evans–ish print of a pitched-roof building turned on its side in Druid Hill) gently direct the viewer’s gaze and attention from one work to the next, compounding poetic juxtapositions that are at once absorbing

• print December 2010

  Mel Bochner

  Challenging the claim that “photography cannot record abstract ideas,” Mel Bochner used the medium to do just that. In this career-spanning exhibition, ten photo-based works documented the Conceptualist’s efforts to upend photographic convention. (The show also included paintings and a wall drawing.) Serving as the exhibition’s poster image was the iconic Surface Dis/Tension, 1968. Here, the artist photographed a grid receding into space so that, distilled as an image, it appeared perspectivally distorted. Taking this photo as a base object, Bochner soaked the print in water, allowing the emulsion

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  picks November 11, 2010

  “Huckleberry Finn”

  The third and final installment in the Wattis’s trilogy of exhibitions inspired by iconic American novels (preceded by “The Wizard of Oz” in 2008 and “Moby Dick” in 2009), “Huckleberry Finn” is as engaging and controversial as its source material. No curator is noted in the gallery’s wall text, yet the project bears the unmistakable imprint of Wattis director Jens Hoffmann, who trumps Mark Twain as the impresario behind the curtain. The show offers American-style portions of material, a sort of all-you-can-eat buffet where viewers can piece together a narrative from Hoffmann’s characteristically

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  picks October 24, 2010

  Koki Tanaka

  Both physical comedy and the parti-colored stock of ninety-nine-cent stores can be found nearly anywhere in the world, and both, in a sense, transcend language barriers, wordlessly communicating their appeal. By combining the two elements, Japanese artist Koki Tanaka manages to allude to art history and the physical and emotional architecture of households. “Nothing related, but something could be associated,” his first US solo exhibition of witty, offhand sculpture, video, and drawing, finds him making varied use of cheap plastic commodities and putting them through paces, creating temporary

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  print October 2010

  Chadwick Rantanen

  As America slogs through its new recession-era corporate landscape, Chadwick Rantanen’s installation of sculpture and photographs perhaps most obviously evoked the semicustomized, sturdy-for-the-price furnishings of modest industrial-park start-up offices. With this show, the artist mined the aesthetics of efficiency—and perhaps therapy—using such mundane light-corporate materials as sandblasted glass in soothing hues, burnished metal, and abstract images that speak of low-risk investment in the future. In effect, the work communicated a catalogue of postmeltdown minimalist tropes, with an

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  picks September 28, 2010

  Elisheva Biernoff

  A seemingly empty storefront with fall leaves strewn on the floor is not such an anomaly these economically parched days, but in Elisheva Biernoff’s trompe l’oeil installation, which mulls over perpetually troublesome nature versus culture tensions, they’re props, a paper confetti of handcrafted debris. The dead plants, along with crumpled gum wrappers, cigarette butts, religious brochures, and pinecones, are all attentively remade with authentic artificiality. Indeed, the artist’s painted plaster stones are so intricately detailed that they invoke Vija Celmins’s rock replicas in To Fix the

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  print September 2010

  Lucas Michael

  Sexual compulsion is a primary subject of Lucas Michael’s solo exhibition at Silverman Gallery, but the most graphic elements on view are literally numerals. Specifically, starkly presented combinations of “3688” and “321”—which, if you’re in the know (or just ask the gallery sitter) are identifiable as street addresses for the Slammer, a gay sex club with locations in Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. These stark, sans-serif typeface numbers signify the availability of anonymous sex. Michael renders 3688, for example, as soft, though not droopy, black cotton sculptures, with a layer of