Engineer's Daughter

earth engines

The sign on the wall at Johansson Projects told me to turn the knob, so I did, at first tentatively and then when nothing happened with a little more gusto.  Oliver DiCicco's sculpture Sirens sprang into life, and five sets of curved metal arms slowly swayed to and fro and sighed a song of longing.  Fully susceptible as I am to anything that takes its name from myth I of course found myself appropriately entranced.  The piece is part of the current two-person show at Johansson Projects entitled Earth Engines, and DiCicco also has another wonderful construction called Anemone on display, a large kinetic sea-creature that is powered in part by magnets and which is activated when you touch the ring around its center.  The watery theme (as well as a similar flair for the dramatic) continues in Barry Underwood's bewitching staged photographs in which he inserts mysterious light sources into otherwise natural settings.  Underwood was an artist-in-residence at the Headlands earlier this year, and I recognized some familiar stretches of beach and grassy hill in the images in the gallery.  In his photos a school of LED fish swim just under the surface of a lake, a fiery red fissure opens down the center of a trail, multicolored sprites infest an old parade field.  And as beautiful as Underwood's photographs look in the gallery, I would also love to see his interventions outdoors where he actually creates them.  I'm always looking for an excuse to go stumbling around the beach at night.

turns into stone

I first saw Ara Peterson's work a couple years back at Ratio 3's old space, when the gallery was still situated on the second floor of a Victorian in the Mission, in a solo show called Multidimensional Warp.  I blogged about it at the time:

The works on display first read as paintings of undulating color, but as you get closer you realize that they're actually sculptures.  I can only guess at his technique, but the resulting landscapes hanging on the walls shifted their topography for me as I looked at them from every angle possible.  I thought of the Albers color-field paintings at SFMOMA that my brother loves so much, and of Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes, and of half a dozen other artists who deal with color and texture in such a formidable way.  Multidimensional warp indeed.

In a nice bit of synchronicity Milhazes has work at Yerba Buena right now in their When Lives Become Form exhibition (more on that at a later date), while Ratio 3 is currently showing another fantastic group of Peterson's recent sculptures in their Stevenson Street gallery.  The centerpiece of the show is a large collection of the backgammon boards Peterson has been creating with his father for the last three years, their surfaces transformed into mind-bending patterns that certainly skew from the traditional layout but could totally still be used to play the game.  Peterson really just uses wood and paint to create both those boards and his other work, but he has a lot of fun using color to play tricks on your eyes.  His pieces never sit still.

moby-dick

The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts never ceases to impress me with their group exhibitions, both with their fearless curation and with the wonderful breadth of art they manage to pull in, and their latest Moby-Dick show is no exception.  I made it over there today on the show's last day, and I only regret I did not tell you about it earlier (I'm going to be better about that in the new year I swear).  Taking Herman Melville's classic American novel as its jumping-off point, the exhibition is divided into three sections that deal with the preparation for the voyage, the ocean itself, and then the encounter with the whale, each area presided over by videos of a god-like Orson Welles dramatically presenting passages from the book.  Really they had me at Welles, but then there were Richard Serra's large-scale "Ishmael" drawings, black-and-white photographs by John Gutmann of old-school sailor tattoos, and Tacita Dean's immersive Disappearance at Sea II film, a personal favorite of mine and a still from which is pictured above.  And that was just in the first gallery.  In the ocean portion of the show Hiroshi Sugimoto's luminous seascape photos glow from one wall while Susan Hiller's photographic studies of different types of waves face them on the other side of the room.  Marcel Dzama contributes two of his wonderfully twisted and dreamlike drawings, while a stack of Felix Gonzalez-Torres posters, in this case picturing the surface of a body of water, sits in the middle of the floor freely available for the taking by visitors.  Upstairs Dzama's painting of the eye of the white whale invites you into the Moby-Dick gallery, which is literally dominated by a giant sculpture of the beast and also contains scrimshaw, harpoons, a scientific film by Jean Painlevé about diatoms, and a whole wall of the incredible Rockwell Kent drawings that were used in a 1930 edition of Melville's book.  A number of the artworks on display were created specifically for the show, and they create a rich narrative through their juxtapositions with the other pieces that had been selected for how they might speak to the themes of the novel.  Shows at the Wattis always activate my curiosity in a unique way, and I love the feelings of surprise and connection I experience as I move through the galleries.  This exhibition is the second in a trilogy at the Wattis based on novels that encapsulate the American experience, and though I am still kicking myself for missing the first in the series, the Wizard of Oz show, I cannot wait to see what they will do in the fall of 2010 with Huckleberry Finn.

mares!

This is what happens when I'm feeling a little down and there are like five things I want to be out doing but instead I'm home nursing a brand-new sore throat.  In my feverish delirium I watch Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, a movie where the plot wouldn't challenge a six-year-old and the soundtrack is dangerously studded with Bryan Adams.  I have always had intense affection for horses; as a pre-teen I read every single Black Stallion book Walter Farley ever wrote and spent several Christmases actually believing I would find a pony under the tree.  And the animation is pretty and Matt Damon and James Cromwell do some of the voice acting.  Still, best to leave this one to the youngsters (and the occasional bedridden adult female) methinks. 

junebug

Robert Francis was adorable tonight at Cafe Du Nord, in between songs seeming fully the slightly nervous 22-year-old but then while he was singing just closing his eyes and giving himself completely over to the music.  His songwriting is interesting too, not easily classifiable, and as he played a mean guitar tonight as part of a four-piece he and his band referenced everything from southern blues rock to folk to straight-up Springsteen (and I do not make that last comparison lightly).  I think if he continues to experiment but still cultivates his current intimate sound he's pretty much set for life.

periphrastic

Anonymous, Theatrical Group, c.1870 (India).  I want to party with these guys.

super pop-up shop

Normally at this time of year I'd rather chew off my own arm than visit a shopping mall, but by taking over some empty store space in the Alameda Towne Centre and filling it with retail-inspired art the Super Pop-Up Shop successfully enticed me to drop in on its last day of operation last Sunday afternoon.  Situated in the Centre just past Applebee's and across the way from Color Me Mine, the Shop was divided into different sections where visitors could sit and have a cozy fireside chat about their shopping experiences, swap a dance move for a new one, grab a list for a hilarious mall scavenger hunt, or draw a picture of their encounter with the elusive mall zombie.  I had brought along some canned goods for the Alameda Food Bank that I traded for an awesome one-of-a-kind handcrafted ceramic cup and watched as young children gleefully raced some special kid-sized shopping carts around the space.  Everyone who came in seemed to be having a great time and appreciative of the opportunity to participate in something that wasn't pure consumerism.  Curators Rebeca Bollinger and Glen Helfand put the whole thing together through a class at CCA, and I'm hoping that they'll do it again this time next year.

v

I missed Taro Hattori when he was in the Headlands Project Space earlier this summer, but I was happy I made it over to Swarm Gallery yesterday on the closing day of his show V.  The title refers in part to the V-2 rocket, a replica of which Hattori has constructed out of corrugated cardboard so that it lies in pieces on the gallery floor.  On the walls hang evocative black-and-white collages mounted in lightboxes that prominently feature archival snapshots of Hattori's family taken in his native Japan in 1951.  Though the photos themselves are nothing more than perfectly innocent scenes of everyday life I instantly did the math in my head as I looked at them: six years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The whole room is bathed in a vision-altering yellow light, an effect of the film Hattori placed over the gallery's floor-to-ceiling windows, and I was reminded of the intense flash from a bomb blast when I first stepped inside the front doors (though my eyes quickly adjusted to where I didn't consciously notice the color anymore).  Perhaps the "v" of the show's title also refers to victory, but a hollow one.

punk passage

I had just barely been born when the first wave of punk really hit the West Coast, but thanks to Ruby Ray's awesome black-and-white photographs currently on display at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library I spent some good time yesterday vicariously living the SF scene from back in the day.  Fave punk venue the Mabuhay Gardens is well-represented of course, and there are also some choice images of Bruce Conner, Mark Pauline, Jello Biafra, Mark Mothersbaugh, William S. Burroughs, Darby Crash, Mick Jones, Sid Vicious, the ever-amazing Penelope Houston, and many many more.  Ray's pictures transcend mere band photography and really capture the DIY spirit of the musicians and the fans who made posters, distributed calendars and zines, and basically got the music heard.  As anyone who regularly reads this blog knows that energy is still very much alive and well in the Bay Area today; we just use the internet now (though sometimes you really can't beat fliers and word-of-mouth).  Unfortunately Ray's photos are only up at the library for one more day, but she will be publishing a book soon called Punk Passage: California First Wave and Beyond that will incorporate these images and more.  Keep your eyes peeled.

too bad we gotta live it forwards

Jill Sprecher's 2002 film Thirteen Conversations About One Thing is a poignant slice of introspection perfect for a cold winter night.  The "one thing" of the title is happiness, and as advertised the movie is indeed divided into thirteen chapters that weave together the stories of a seemingly disparate cast of characters.  Alan Arkin's insurance agent tests the unflappable optimism of one of his employees, while John Turturro and Amy Irving grow increasingly distant within their marriage.  Matthew McConaughey plays a hot-shot lawyer who is haunted by one very poor decision, and Clea DuVall a sunny-dispositioned housekeeper who remembers being rescued from drowning when she was a young girl and is convinced it gave her life purpose.  The film doesn't necessarily offer any new life philosophy, but it is beautifully shot and cleverly edited, jumping backward and forward in time in a way that gives the episodes more punch.  It's the type of smart filmmaking that I appreciate very much.