Engineer's Daughter

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

podworka, no

Sharon Lockhart

Sharon Lockhart

Just two images from Sharon Lockhart's 2009 video Podworka, vignettes of children at play in the urban landscape of Lodz, Poland, and her 2003 film No, a single 34-minute shot of two farmers in rural Japan spreading hay over a field.  I watched both at SFMOMA last week while I was there saying goodbye to Lockhart's Lunch Break installation before it closed, and the moment No appeared on screen I suffered a severe shock of recognition: I had seen it at the Camden Arts Centre in London in 2005 as part of an amazing group show curated by Tacita Dean, An Aside.  Dean had described Lockhart's film as "an autumn elegy about time, perspective and labour in a landscape that is changing colour."  I was just as hypnotized seeing it now as I had been by it in London, and the work of the farmer couple was a beautiful contrast to the play of the children in Podworka too.

See also:

• SFMOMA
• Sharon Lockhart
• An Aside

par avion

Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro

Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro

Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro

Closing January 28: Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro's Par Avion at Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.  This is an installation that, although impressive all on its own, becomes even more interesting with a little bit of background.  The pieces laid out on the floor in the shape of a plane are exactly that, a small fighter that the Berlin-based Healy and Cordeiro acquired in their home country of Australia and then summarily dismantled.  Each section was sent to Frey Norris par avion (natch), propelling the Cessna through the air in a completely different way than it had traveled before when it was still all in one piece.  I only wondered if the whole plane is accounted for, or if anything had been lost in transit.

See also:

• Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern
• Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro

expanded field

Emma Spertus

Sarah Hotchkiss

Christine M. Peterson

Recently closed: the group show Expanded Field at MacArthur B Arthur, curated by Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour.  Crack local curatorial team Im and Harbour put together five fantastic Bay Area artists, told them to play with the space of the gallery in some way, and then set them loose in MacArthur B Arthur's converted storefront.  Amy M. Ho chose to construct an eyebending white curve in one corner that actually eliminated the corner entirely, while Torreya Cummings installed a piece in which you peered through wood slats to glimpse mirrors and a disco ball, her cheeky take on the promise of SF gay culture.  Christine M. Peterson used black plexiglass to cleverly highlight the inside of a doorway and create the mirror image of two windows high on one gallery wall, while her slide projection piece utilizing found professional vacation photographs shot diffuse colors right out the window and onto the street outside (or onto whoever happened to be walking by).  For Emma Spertus's trio of sculptures she took black-and-white images of Rococo and Baroque architecture and fit them precisely to corners of the gallery walls and also wrapped them around the interior and exterior of a hexagonal shape, and then Sarah Hotchkiss launched the exhibition theme quite literally into the ether by asking attendees to fill out a questionnaire in which they imagined a meeting space for her Young Astronaut Club.  The compiled results will be forthcoming.

See also:

• MacArthur B Arthur
• Amy M. Ho
• Torreya Cummings
• Emma Spertus
• Christine M. Peterson
• Sarah Hotchkiss

stochastic

The First Gift, for kindergarten play, devised by Friedrich Froebel, Germany, 1898

topple the table of correspondences

Elijah Burgher

Elijah Burgher

Elijah Burgher

Already closed: Elijah Burgher's Toppling the Table of Correspondences at [ 2nd floor projects ] with an accompanying limited edition broadside by Scott Treleaven.  I visit Margaret Tedesco's [ 2nd floor projects ] far too infrequently, but when I do a number of things are guaranteed.  First of all the art on display will be thoughtfully curated and presented.  Secondly, somehow some of the nicest and most interesting people in the city will happen to be there at the same time as I am.  And last but definitely not least, I will walk away with a beautiful edition produced specifically for that show featuring some top-notch writing.  This time Scott Treleaven, himself a noted artist and filmmaker, elucidates Elijah Burgher's fascinating colored pencil drawings:

Burgher's work embodies all kinds of paradox.  In one respect his drawings are unapologetically formal, sober and controlled, built with an almost architectural consciousness.  His "sigil" drawings, especially, suggest a Hans Hofmann painting set upon by cookie-cutters and then reassembled with a modernist hand that allows the pictures to be appreciated on a purely structural level.  On the other hand, his images are also deeply sensual, obscure, subterranean; his flirtatiously scholarly and guttural titles, the scattering of glyphs and intuitive symbology embedded in the work, its unapologetic celebration of gay sexuality, its lusty Fauvist colors.

Personally I also see Maholy-Nagy and the Russian constructivists in Burgher's sigil drawings, and his more representational works span the very breadth of art history, sometimes even quoting from it specifically as when he reproduces a Caravaggio or an ancient sculpture.  Margaret also had a copy of AA Bronson's remarkable book Queer Spirits on hand, a tome that loosely documents (including through drawings by Burgher) secret group rituals Bronson conducted in locations like Fire Island, New Orleans, and Winnipeg.  Eye-opening to say the least, and often funny too.  Even though the Burgher show is now down he is always posting new work on his blog, and then the next show at [ 2nd floor projects ] featuring paintings by Amanda Kirkhuff and an edition written by Amy Scholder also looks bona fide amazing.  Tell Margaret I sent ya.

See also:

• [ 2nd floor projects ]
• Elijah Burgher
• Scott Treleaven
• Queer Spirits