Fagdom’s Betsy Ross, Gilbert Baker, a “self-described ‘flaming queen’ by age three,” designed the rainbow flag in 1978, but due to technical problems (an initial eight-color design could not be commercially fabricated because hot pink was at that time unavailable for mass production) it wasn’t unfurled until a year later, in honor of Harvey Milk and in peaceful protest of the light sentencing of his assassin, Twinkie-eater Dan White. I usually retch whenever I see a rainbow anything, but Dean Sameshima’s use of rainbow pride here triggered glee: Tearing at the semes of Baker’s handmade prototype,

David Hockney’s colorful persona has long served as a foil for the quiet understatement of his pictorial output. Throughout the 1960s, these two elements—the artist and his oeuvre—were consistently misaligned. On his emergence, Hockney the artist embodied the optimism that gripped the United Kingdom in the postwar years as rationing gave way to what Lawrence Alloway called an “aesthetics of plenty.” Registered in every detail of his carefully plotted social pose was a kind of content that forcefully mitigated the glacial ennui that permeated so many of his paintings, especially those he would

Jared Pankin’s practice combines sculptural precedents ranging from Baroque tableaux to post-Minimalist scatter with skills more commonly associated with set decorators, diorama builders, taxidermists, and Martha Stewart devotees. The results are quasi-narrative objects and installations fusing naturalism and realism (in scales shifting from the Lilliputian to the life-size) with romanticism, humor, and the decorative. This exhibition, Pankin’s first solo outing in seven years and his one-man debut at Carl Berg Gallery, included seven objects that draw one in with the intimate scale of their