Engineer's Daughter

apocalypse and utopia

Gene Youngblood

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of attending a lecture by renowned media and art theorist Gene Youngblood at SFAI, the first in the Institute's spring Radical Directing series and co-presented by SF Cinemateque.  Although Youngblood didn't speak at length about directing as such he did have a lot to say about living outside the broadcast, finding media that is speaking truth and not just repackaging counterculture as consumer culture.  Thanks to the internet truthful news sources are definitely out there, and it is up to us to construct a media diet that encourages conversation in a way that refers to the Latin origin of the word, a turning around together.  Because we need to get radical, get back to the root, if there is any chance of turning around the apocalypse we seem intent on creating for ourselves.  Just today Art Practical published a profile of Youngblood that opened with a wonderfully prescient quote of his from 1993:

I make a rather modest proposal that world peace, human liberty, and a healthy environment can only be achieved through a communications revolution.

His idea of utopia revolves around what is not permitted, "leaving the culture without leaving the country."  And he calls upon artists and writers to be disciplined dreamers, to lead social modernization with the artistic.  This was really only the first half of the lecture too, with the second part "The Challenge To Create On the Same Scale As We Can Destroy" delivered at Yerba Buena tomorrow night.  Go get some tools for the revolution.

See also:

• San Francisco Art Institute
• SF Cinemateque
• Gene Youngblood's Expanded Cinema
• Profile in Art Practical

illegitimate business

Chris Johanson

Closing February 26 - Illegitimate Business at Will Brown.  Organized by local artists Zachary Royer Scholz and Brion Nuda Rosch, this show features some seriously big names: Martin Kippenberger, Chuck Close, and Sol LeWitt, amongst others.  It gets even better when you learn that each piece was acquired outside of the usual art market channels, whether that involved digging through a dumpster or even sneakier means.  None of the "collectors" are named but each contributes the story of the provenance of their artwork, and those tales are the best part yet.  It's all on display in the underground space at the former Triple Base gallery in the Mission, now renamed Will Brown and run by one of my fave artists Lindsey White and two compatriots.  This is their first show, and they also have a robust schedule of events in the coming month including a performance with Paul Clipson and Marielle Jakobsons, a comedy/drawing night organized by George Chen and hosted by Utrillo Kushner, and a launch party for new arts magazine Partisan.  Run, don't walk.

See also:

• Will Brown

de-mobbing

Robin Adsit

Ulrika Andersson

Mark Baugh-Sasaki

Barry Beach

Gina Borg

Jessica Cadkin

Kirk Crippens

Gail Dawson

Jordan Essoe

Alison OK Frost

Dana Harel

Cameron Hockenson

Whitney Hubbs

Whitney Lynn

Christina McPhee

Sandra Ono

Connie Samaras

Betsy Lin Seder

Gabrielle Teschner

Patrick D. Wilson

Closing March 4 - DE-MOBBING: Landscape, Structure, Bioform.  The Headlands' annual pre-residency group show is always chock full of excellent local artists, some familiar and some completely new to me, and this year the selection is particularly strong.  Spend an afternoon out there, fill your head with art.

See also:

• Headlands Center for the Arts

fagin

Auguste Rodin, The Kiss, 1889, photographed in the Rodin Museum, photographer unknown

show 228

playlist

fold. color. limn.

Prajakti Jayavant

Prajakti Jayavant

Prajakti Jayavant

Already closed - Fold. Color. Limn. by Prajakti Jayavant at Meridian Gallery.  Jayavant's work straddles the line between painting and sculpture as she is not content to merely apply pigment to paper but then prods and shapes her materials in such a way that her pieces become their own discrete objects.  She describes her process best herself:

With the utmost intention, I refine the shaggy circumferences of smudges, cut precisely, crease and tuck. Determined curves, strategic color and encrypted folds combine to create ideological dimension. Each piece is a chosen accumulation of imprinted actions over time.

See also:

• Meridian Gallery
• Prajakti Jayavant

corporeal

Sarah Player Morrison

Darrin Martin

Elizabeth Bernstein

Closing January 29 - Corporeal at Martina }{ Johnston.  The body has so long been a subject in art that it's rare to see truly fresh takes on the subject, but Indira Martina Morre and Farley Gwazda have very thoughtfully assembled a group of artists in their home gallery who grapple with our too solid flesh in all its complexity.  Sarah Player Morrison's large-scale nude paintings carry the weight of those by Lucian Freud, but they come from a distinctly female perspective that is still no less unflinching in its gaze.  Darrin Martin dresses up his bone-anchored hearing aid in handmade prosthetics and then stitches together sequences of self-portraits, and just as arresting is his video Navel Mining with its themes of alien abduction and biological invasion set to an otherworldly soundtrack of noises generated by the artist himself.  Keith Lea and Alan Resnick present a sort of infomercial offering imperfectly rendered 3D avatars of sleeping friends, while in the gallery's beautiful new screening room Curtis Tamm takes you on a magical and vastly uncomfortable journey into inner space, edited together from found medical instruction videos.  Finally I defy you not to be stopped in your tracks by Elizabeth Bernstein's honest, erotic, devastating photographs.  That image above of the topography of her mom's knees crushed my heart.

See also:

• Martina }{ Johnston
• Sarah Player Morrison
• Darrin Martin
• Keith Lea and Alan Resnick
• Curtis Tamm
• Elizabeth Bernstein

paladin

OYSTER

Bandage your hand
against the bladed shell
work the knife well into the slot
(imagine a paint scraper at rusted rim)
and prise the lid off,
keeping the juices in.

Raise carefully to the chin
then bite the tongue out by the root;
suck it from its mouth of pearl
and chew, never swallow.
This is not sex, remember;
you are eating the sea.

--Robin Robertson

close to what's real

Anneke Eussen

Anneke Eussen

Anneke Eussen

Closing January 29 - Anneke Eussen: Close to What's Real at Highlight Gallery.  Christy Chan in The Bold Italic recently wrote a piece about the awesome alternative art spaces Bay Area residents have created within their own homes to show art, among them 667 Shotwell, Unspeakable Projects, and Highlight Gallery.  I had just had Highlight strongly recommended to me by an acquaintance as well, so I made the pilgrimage out to Pacific Heights during the gallery's open hours last Saturday.  Owners and curators Amir and Emmanuelle Mortazavi were literally running out the door to attend Art Los Angeles Contemporary when I arrived, but they paused to welcome me and show me a few of Anneke Eussen's pieces in their downstairs exhibition space.  Highlight is concentrating on artists from Belgium in its first year (future countries will also get a year each), and Eussen joins an exhibition roster that has included Filip Dujardin, Christophe Coppens, and Renato Nicolodi so far.  Eussen herself is not constrained by any one genre, displaying oversized colored pencil drawings tinged with shadows and unexpected textures in one room and an installation of a linked chain net draped over a floating metal pipe in another.  Her Guests photographs, documenting sculptures composed of hotel room contents and of the hotel guests themselves, play with vision and perception.  She has mounted the photos as transparencies on mirrors so that the people within the images seem to float, slightly displaced.  Her work is like that: it attracts you, draws you closer, and then cleverly tweaks the plot.

See also:

• Highlight Gallery
• Anneke Eussen

the best of annecy

 

Osman Cerfon

 

Juan Pablo Zaramella

 

Grant Orchard

I love me some cutting-edge animation, and thanks to the SF Film Society for providing with the program The Best of Annecy which screened last weekend at the SFFS Cinema in Japantown.  I liked each of the nine shorts, selected from the 2011 edition of the annual French animation festival, but the clips above represent my absolute favorites.  Please enjoy Osman Cerfon's Sticky Ends in all of its hilariously twisted glory, and take a peek at the Buenos Aires stop-motion fantasia Luminaris by Juan Pablo Zaramella and Grant Orchard's clever A Morning Stroll (based loosely on a Paul Auster story).  I searched long and hard for complete versions of those last two online, but the trailers will have to suffice.

See also:

• SF Film Society Cinema
• Annecy International Animated Film Festival
• Osman Cerfon
• Juan Pablo Zaramella
• Grant Orchard