Engineer's Daughter

aboveground animation: 3d-form

Jacolby Satterwhite

This week's find from the archives is an online-only exhibition courtesy of the New Museum:

“3D-Form” is a presentation of four experimental animations selected from the archive Aboveground Animation for the New Museum’s monthly series First Look: New Art Online. Featured artists include Barry Doupé, Kathleen Daniel, Ryan Whittier Hale, and Jacolby Satterwhite. Beyond Pixar, Adult Swim, or the default avatars of video games, these works explore possibilities for 3-D human forms. Their casts of improbable people are hatched out of personal history or emotion—through a longing for intimacy or an uncertainty for the future. Experimental and short-form, all the works were made to be viewed across various screening contexts, from the cinema to the gallery to the browser, and yet their structure reflects a sophistication with a range of digital media and programs, from Maya to 3D Studio Max.

Take some time and watch all four animations, though I admit I'm particularly fond of the one by Jacolby Satterwhite.

fictional/familiar & present tense

Cybele Lyle

Leigh Merrill

Emma Spertus

Through June 9 - Fictional/Familiar at Swarm Gallery.  The first of two shows I'm highly recommending this week before they close, this exhibition features a trio of artists who play with our perception of space and place.  Cybele Lyle's photographic landscapes are interrupted by planes of color and other images, and her sculpture in the center of the gallery similarly invites the viewer into her constructed version of reality.  Leigh Merrill is more of a trickster and a brilliant one at that, deliberately tweaking her pictures of strip malls and other architecture of banality until the line between true and false is not clear at all.  Meanwhile Emma Spertus expands on that topic by creating a veritable staircase into another dimension and stacking it with seemingly common built objects that cleverly comment on perspective in art and in life.  Sadly this is Swarm's last show before they close their doors, all the more reason to visit this space that has been a venue for cutting-edge and thoughtful art in Oakland for many years.

Joshua Band

Kari Orvik

Jordan Perkins-Lewis

Kyle Austin Dunn

Liam Everett

Michael Koehle

Yulia Pinkusevich

Also through June 9 - Present Tense: Graduate Fellows Exhibition at Headlands Center for the Arts.  The other must-see this week is this culminating exhibition for the Graduate Fellows after a year of residency at Headlands.  It's always genuinely interesting to see how their work has evolved over their time in the Headlands community, and the artists this year clearly thrived.  I'm also positive this is not the last time you will be seeing any of them on my blog.  Pack a picnic lunch, and go spend a Sunday afternoon (or a weekday afternoon if you can play hooky) with art and nature.

See also:

• Swarm Gallery
• Headlands Center for the Arts

headlands center for the arts

With the annual Headlands benefit auction coming up this Wednesday (yours truly is heading up the docent team for the third year running) I'm taking this chance to listen again to when KQED's Forum featured executive director sharon maidenberg and a handful of artists on their show last year:

A writer who sets up rock concerts for gorillas. A former bicycle engineer who makes art out of scrub brushes and rope swings. A man who designs natural "lightbulbs" with roots and dirt. Those are some of the creative minds who are part of the Artists Programs at Headlands Center for the Arts, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this week. We look at the history of the center, and talk to the artists who find inspiration in the old military fort nestled in the Marin Headlands.

Headlands is hands-down my favorite local arts organization, both for its gorgeous, unique location and for the quality of its public programs where visitors often get to hobnob with the current crop of artists-in-residence.  Every time I make a trip out there I find new inspiration.

See also:

• Headlands Center for the Arts Turns 30 on Forum
• Headlands Center for the Arts

goodbye for now, sfmoma

Being a short photo essay about a few things I will desperately miss about SFMOMA's building while they close it for several years.  Yes yes the museum will be doing many partner exhibitions with other major institutions around the Bay Area during the closure blah blah.  It's just not the same.  I'm letting my membership lapse for the first time in 16 years unless they surprise me and do some forward-thinking projects with local independent galleries and curators. 

Goodbye, revolving glass door.

Goodbye, stylish and friendly ticket-rippers.

Goodbye, all my favorite artworks.

Goodbye, Blue Bottle Cafe and your multitudinous delicious and artistic desserts.

Goodbye, sunny and peaceful rooftop sculpture garden.

Goodbye, playful and revelatory gallery installations.

Goodbye, serendipitous glimpses of art on the move.

Goodbye, fifth floor bridge of terror.

Goodbye, smooth and rough marble staircase.

Goodbye, restorative interior vistas.

jeremy mende

The fabulous Kalup Linzy interviewed fellow artist Jeremy Mende about his artwork "Narcissus" after their time at Headlands coincided last year, and I remember that piece Mende created in the Headlands Project Space (pictured above) quite well myself.  Visitors were invited to don a sensor that tracked their heartbeat and then stand before a long tray filled with petroleum as animated words triggered by said heartbeat appeared on the surface.  Mende explains further:

The reflective nature of the petroleum makes the animations appear to swim across the black surface. The oil is a significant part of the installation because it is both a critical factor in our globalized economy as well as a natural byproduct of carbon-based life. Petroleum is concentrated carbon, the resting state of living organisms that died a million years ago. When the viewer sees their metaphoric reflection in the pool, they are essentially looking back in time, seeing themselves within the larger contradictions of life/death, organic/toxic, purity/contamination.

Read the whole interview here and visit Mende's website here.

the week that was

re(collection)

From a very moving group show last fall at Intersection for the Arts that included artists' responses to the above photos:

After the 2011 Tohoku earthquake hit, a massive tsunami swept away houses, and everything that was inside them. As the search for survivors ended and attention turned to the clean up mission, Self-Defense forces, firemen, and policemen who were in Tohoku to help survivors began to pick up photos they found in the mud, and to store them in an elementary school gymnasium. Two months after the earthquake hit, a group called the “Memory Salvage Project” began to sort out the more than 750,000 photos and prepare them for return to their owners.  The images were cleaned and digitized by volunteers who came from Tokyo and other parts of Japan. The photographs you see here are part of photos recovered from the city of Yamomoto.

ravens and ruins

Darren Waterston

Darren Waterston

Darren Waterston

Through May 18 - Darren Waterston: Ravens and Ruins at Haines Gallery.  I had recently seen Waterston's evocative silhouettes for the first time at Paulson Bott Press in Berkeley when they published the folio he created with poet Mark Doty, A Swarm, A Flock A Host: A Compendium of Creatures.  It was therefore a delight to encounter his bestiaries yet again at Haines, especially because I enjoy the way his animals twist across the page in sinuous and vaguely grotesque forms governed by their own internal logic.  His large-scale paintings are also compelling as they depict post-apocalyptic landscapes and references to human architecture that one can imagine being retaken by nature itself.  Red in tooth and claw indeed.

See also:

• Haines Gallery
• Darren Waterston

take me to the apple breeder

Jessica Rath

Jessica Rath

Jessica Rath

All images from Jessica Rath's solo show take me to the apple breeder at Jack Hanley Gallery in NYC last fall.  From the press release:

Resulting from visits to Cornell University’s agricultural research stations, the show reflects both the desire of Cornell’s apple curator Philip Forsline who has traveled the world to rescue fast- disappearing varieties, and the work of Dr. Susan Brown, one of only three apple breeders in the country inventing new apples for mass production.

Rath’s porcelain sculptures allude to the odd forms and luminescent hues of little-known and endangered varieties, while large-scale photographic portraits document newly manufactured hybrid trees. These artifacts are designed to investigate diversity at a molecular level and human intervention in the natural world. 

See also:

• Jack Hanley Gallery
• Jessica Rath

a moment lasts forever until it's gone

Erik Scollon

Erik Scollon

Erik Scollon

Through May 11 - Erik Scollon: A Moment Lasts Forever Until It's Gone at Romer Young Gallery.  Scollon has quite a way with stoneware and porcelain, and here he uses his materials to investigate the fragility of life itself.  He freezes objects and moments in sculptural forms, fully aware that one wrong move could shatter them.  This is the work of an individual poignantly taking stock of time past and anticipating whatever stretch of time is yet to come.  The sentiment is further captured in a beautiful quote by Felix Gonzalez-Torres:

This present, so fleeting and elusive, this present and this place, like no other place, impossible to be like any other place... We should remember how, once, we were in the present of this wonderful place. To more intensively lived present, to an overwhelming place.

See also:

• Romer Young Gallery
• Erik Scollon