print December 1999

Marco Maggi

Like a lot of good art, part of the reason Marco Maggi’s work is engaging is that it brings so many other things to mind. His inventions and ideas evoke a range of allusions—to the complexity of Mayan codices or the horror vacui of some outsider art; to the refinement of line in a Hans Bellmer drawing or the dreamy, visceral oddness of one of Matta’s floating abstractions—but such multiple references don’t make his work seem any less original. About half of the pieces in this show are pencil drawings on clay-coated board. Exquisite accumulations of faint, needle-thin lines form complicated yet

print February 1999

Fletcher + Rubin

For the past five years, Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin have been making installations that bring new meaning to the term “site specific.” For each project they undertake, these two young artists research a particular locale for several weeks to several months, with the intent of eventually creating a body of work that reflects the particularity of the place and the people who live there. Since whatever they come up with is usually exhibited within the community that inspired it, their subjects are also their audience.

“Wanderings and Observations in Walnut Creek,” the somewhat picaresque title

print September 1998

Catherine McCarthy

Over the last decade or so, the term appropriation has become a degraded catchall for the use of any kind of borrowed imagery. Catherine McCarthy’s paintings return the word to its truer meaning: to claim something as one’s own as though by exclusive right. When McCarthy incorporates fragments of old master paintings into compositions suggesting palimpsests, these bits of the past are subsumed into the present, functioning as part of the pieced-together fabric of the artist’s inner life. Drawn and painted layers of image and text include not only turbulent seascapes and Northern Renaissance

print March 1998

Rudolf Steiner

When Rudolf Steiner—prolific author in twelve fields, charismatic teacher, and founder of the turn-of-the-century mystical movement he called anthroposophy—accompanied his influential lectures with blackboard drawings, he never meant the vividly scrawled amalgamations of image and text he produced to be considered works of art independent of their purpose in elucidating his ideas. For the first twenty-five years of the century, Steiner traveled throughout Europe giving some five thousand talks on a variety of subjects. In 1919, one of his colleagues began placing pieces of black paper over

print November 1997

Polly Apfelbaum

Polly Apfelbaum’s arrangements of pieces of stained crushed velvet defy easy categorization or description. For her show at the school’s McBean Gallery, she used this modest material to create a piece of cinematic proportions called The Night, 1996–97—a title, appropriately enough, borrowed from an early Antonioni film. Thousands of stains measuring an inch or two in either dimension had been neatly cut out of cream-colored fabric, singly or in small chained clusters, and arranged on the floor of the gallery—a peculiar, irregularly shaped room dominated at one end by a large concrete staircase.

print September 1997

Brett Reichman

A recurring leitmotif of much recent art is a vision of childhood as paradise lost, in which toys, stuffed animals, and even children themselves seem to have run amok. Often the impetus for this kind of work appears to be a kind of mourning for a collective loss of innocence: a longing for something irretrievably destroyed, presumably by “modern life.” Yet this kind of work is sometimes generated by much more complicated and interesting emotions and ideas. Brett Reichman’s paintings of elfin characters, for instance, may exude a palpable melancholy, but a closer examination of these profoundly

print May 1997

Margaret Kilgallen

At once sweet and dry, nostalgic and ironic, Margaret Kilgallen’s installations of images and text are like some kind of magic elixir swigged from a bottle passed around a hobo’s campfire. Painted directly on the gallery walls or on recycled bits of this and that—wood, cardboard, rusty metal type trays—her pieces often have an appealingly weathered quality. This aura of age is reinforced by her use of elaborately decorative typefaces popular a century ago. Evoking the accidental poetry of roadside signs, words—such as “salt,” “bail,” or “liquors”—appear either alone or in salon-style clusters

print February 1997

Chester Arnold

Whether seen from a bird’s-eye view or scrutinized at close range, the world described by Chester Arnold’s landscapes is a beautiful but ominous place. On remote-looking granite peaks or in bleak strip mines, next to a busy anthill or in the burnt remains of a forest, fascinating disasters both natural and entirely man-made regularly threaten to unfold.

The dark narratives hinted at in these expansive canvases (most measure six feet along at least one dimension) have been pieced together from a number of sources, not the least of which is Arnold’s particularly poetic imagination. As in Arnold’s

print Summer 1996

Jack Ox

For over twenty years, Jack Ox has devoted herself to giving visual form to music. Using a system as fascinating as it is Byzantine, Ox has worked her way through painted performances of music as diverse as Gregorian chant, Bach, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Bruckner. Her latest performance was based on Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, or “sonata of primal sounds.” In Ox’s version of Schwitters’ noise poem, each utterance (or, for that matter, the silences between them) had been meticulously interpreted in her paintings as a combination of dissected, reassembled images and solid bands of brilliant cadmium

print May 1996

Karim Hamid

At first glance, both the titles and the compositions of the paintings in this show suggest that these works are meant to be seen as portraits. Each of six large canvases depicts a full figure, either seated or standing; four smaller ones show close-ups of single faces. In none is there more than a hint offered of the space the figure occupies—never more, say, than a patterned floor meeting a featureless wall.

On closer examination, however, these paintings begin to foil the expectations we have of portraiture. Photography may have radically changed our assumptions about art’s job (to represent

print April 1996

Charles Goldman

Whether pleasant or suffocating, compelling memories of home and childhood can be triggered by almost anything—a notion demonstrated by the effect on Proust of the taste of madeleines soaked in a spoonful of lime-flower tea. For Charles Goldman, the recollection of the very shape of his parents’ house has become the core of a profound meditation on identity: more specifically, on agoraphobia, defined as a fear of the loss of the self through the transition from private to public space. In the four elements of this installation, Goldman set about the interesting task of re-creating the experience

print February 1996

Paul Kos

Through a variety of strange and often very funny works made over the past two decades, sculptor Paul Kos has clearly staked his claim to a position in the Surrealist line of descent. Certain elements common to much of his sculpture—an air of mystery, a deft appropriation of found objects, and that weird kind of Jerry Lewis humor the French go in for—all evoke this familial relationship. Among the enchanting pieces included in “Sculpture Furnished,” there are even fairly direct homages to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, the Dada daddies of them all. In Emboss I, II, and III, 1995, three life-sized

Maria Porges