Engineer's Daughter

ketchup

Through June 2 - The Office at the San Jose ICA

Through July 8 - Renegade Humor at the San Jose Museum of Art

Recently closed - Jonathan Runcio: Blue Turns to Grey at Ratio 3

Through tonight - C.R.E.A.M. at Art Micro Patronage

Jeremy Novak at Headlands Center for the Arts

Private Collections tour of the Niles/Pereira Collection

Bitter Seeds at the SF International Film Festival

Recently closed - Rapture Ready: Space Planning and Aesthetics at The Popular Workshop

The Secret Life of Mushrooms at Southern Exposure

Recently closed - Leigh Wells: Remains at Gregory Lind Gallery

Recently closed - Robert Arneson: Self-Portraits in Bronze at Brian Gross Fine Art

Through June 24 - Super 8 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Digital Inquiry: Forms of Knowledge in the Age of New Media presented by the Berkeley Center for New Media

I did just move to Oakland, but as you can see I've been up to a few other things besides.  I finally have internet in my new apartment and look forward to getting back to something resembling a reliable blogging pattern.  Here's to fresh starts and clean slates.

clearing the cache

Recently closed - Jet Lag, New Works by Luis Urculo at Popular Workshop

Recently closed - At War at SOMArts, curated by and featuring art by Peter Max Lawrence and Truong Tran

Recently closed - Space, Time and Architecture at Royal Nonesuch Gallery featuring work by Luca Antonucci and Cybele Lyle

Recently closed - Josh Short: Bomb Shelter Radio and Tenderloin Self-Defense Club at Ever Gold Gallery

Recently closed - Hybrid Narrative: Video Mediations of the Self and Imagined Self at MacArthur B Arthur

Through March 31 - John Cage at Crown Point Press

Through June 17 - State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 at the Berkeley Art Museum

Terry Zwigoff at SFAI

Through July 8 - Question Bridge: Black Males at the Oakland Museum, created by Chris Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas in collaboration with Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair

Moyra Davey and Catherine Lord at Cal

Through March 11 - Spaces of Life: The Art of Sonya Rapoport at the Mills College Art Museum

Through March 17 - Anna Sew Hoy: Tissues and Trench Coats at Romer Young Gallery

Through March 17 - Selected Shipwrecks by Jimbo Blachly and Lytle Shaw, Behind the High Grass by Soft Turns, Condensation Range by Aaron Maietta, all at Southern Exposure

I've been busy!  Normally scheduled programming will resume here soon, but first I need to take a quick jaunt to Seattle.

jennifer steinkamp

Jennifer Steinkamp

Jennifer Steinkamp

Jennifer Steinkamp

I'm woefully behind in my blogging thanks to some other sizeable projects and a day job that has been eating my brain, but I'm determined to get some things written up even if the shows have already closed.  Stay tuned for those posts.  And while you're waiting please visit Jennifer Steinkamp's site and ogle her gorgeous projection installations.  I got to hear her speak at Mills last week and was delighted to learn she is the artist behind the light show that takes place above Fremont Street in Las Vegas that has blown the minds of more friends than I can count on two hands.  I also love her undulating fields of flowers and dancing trees, all painstakingly crafted in Maya 3D software.  Technology is rarely put to such divine use.

• Jennifer Steinkamp
• Mills College Art Museum

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

words/action/architecture

I went to hear Vito Acconci lecture at Mills last night with one primary question in my head: How exactly did a performance artist probably best known for 1972's Seedbed, the piece in which he publicly masturbated under the floor of one of his gallery shows, decide to found a visionary architecture firm, Acconci Studio, which is still very much active today?  But Acconci laid it out quite clearly over the course of his inspiring two-hour talk how he has always been interested in movement, whether the flow of words on the page in his early poetry or the motion of people in a room or building, and that it was Seedbed that even gave him his first thoughts about architecture.  His performance art emphasized his interest in site-specificity and his belief that there are no universals in art, ideas that he continued to expand upon in his installations in the '70s in which he attempted to construct "people-space".  So from there it was really no great cognitive leap to architecture and the formation of Acconci Studio in the late '80s.  Acconci quickly ran us through the many ways the firm grapples with ideas of motion and change, from their design for a new World Trade Center pierced by holes to an enclosed street in Indianapolis that at night illuminates passers-through with their own personalized swarm of LED lights.  He wryly noted that in architecture and design theories about space can be more important than actual space when many projects do not get built, but happily the Studio's realized designs include the gorgeous wave-like elevated subway station at Coney Island and also the artificial island in Graz pictured here.  I was struck when Acconci pointed out that architecture is one of the only art forms that recognizes time and assumes eventual revision, that we haven't found the materials yet that won't degrade or need to be replaced, which is something I think about a lot as a preservationist who also adores bleeding-edge design.  I did feel a little sad when they ripped down the old de Young, but I also get a physical thrill every time I walk into the new Herzog and de Meuron building.  It just makes me happy they have room to display that massive Gerhard Richter in the atrium now.

goodbye, snowball

Lynne Ramsey's 1999 amazing debut film Ratcatcher is not always easy to watch.  Tragedy occurs within the first few moments of the film while the viewer is still trying to establish where they are in place and time, abruptly swinging the focus directly on to the character of young James, as played by William Eadie.  He and his family live on the razor's edge of poverty in 1970s Glasgow, and he dreams of escaping from the vermin and murky canals that define the borders of his life to the new houses being built outside the city limits.  Eadie is a revelation in what has been his only film role so far, and Ramsey as a director has a very sharp eye for light and color during grim and humorous moments alike.  The images she creates onscreen can appear almost dreamlike in their fragile beauty, at the same that they become completely unforgettable.  I saw Ratcatcher last night, and I've been still turning some moments from the film over and over in my head all day today.

Speaking of movies, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis will be speaking at the SF Art Institute tomorrow night about how roles for women in Hollywood productions have been increasingly marginalized over the last two decades.  I am reminded of Shirley MacLaine's famous quote: "I am an expert in hookers. I'm an expert in doormats. I'm an expert in victims. They were the best parts."

eyewitness

_MG_2295
Originally uploaded by peaching

A most tantalizing image: a shot of Leonard Cohen's mic before his show at the Paramount Monday night. I was not able to attend, but at least I have everyone else raving endlessly about how amazing this tour of his has been. For more of my recent favorites on Flickr please click here.

Also, the SF Art Institute's awesome lecture program of visiting artists and scholars this spring continues tonight with a talk by Turner-Prize-nominated artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien.  Much of his work grapples with issues of race and sexuality, and with his subjects ranging from Langston Hughes to Frantz Fanon it promises to be a fascinating evening.

klang

It's my birthday today, and in typical Engineer's Daughter fashion I got the party started last night already at my first trip to the California Academy of Sciences.  A huge gaggle of friends came out to their NightLife event to celebrate the inclusion of Tammy's gorgeous jewelry in the museum gift shop, and I was so blown away by the new Academy itself that I basically wandered around the whole time in stunned wonder with my mouth agape.  Then a few of us headed over to 330 Ritch for Popscene, where the Rakes proceeded to deliver a killer live performance.

Tonight I'm going to the Jeremy Jay/Maus Haus/Mantles show at Cafe Du Nord, but if you're looking for alternate forms of entertainment there is a ton of stuff going on:

• A lecture and film presentation at the Art Institute by musician Tony Conrad, to kick off tomorrow's Activating the Medium sound art festival
• Oakland Art Murmur, including the opening of the group show Heroes and Villains at Rock Paper Scisssors featuring work by Alika Cooper and Deth P. Sun
• A book release party for Jerry Stahl's new novel Pain Killers at Amnesia hosted by Stephen Elliott and Peter Maravelis and featuring readings by Stahl and Bucky Sinister

Spring has officially sprung, y'all.

front + center

The Headlands Center for the Arts is one of my favorite spaces in the entire Bay Area, as it's hard to beat a location like a refitted army barracks set against the dramatic backdrop of the Marin Headlands.  I'm eternally jealous of the artists who are chosen to do residencies out there, but I'm also content to settle for a visit every now again.  This afternoon Sasha and I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge during a break in the rain to see the Center's current Front + Center exhibition, a group show curated by Kimberly Johansson of Oakland's fine Johansson Projects and consisting of work by artists who applied for the residency program but were not accepted.  The strength of the art on display bears witness to the collective talent of all the applicants, and I also trust Johansson's eye implicitly.  Francesca Pastine's sculpted Artforum magazines are good colorful fun, and it was great to see a couple pieces by Paul Urich after having admired his renderings of vintage photographs so recently at Fecal Face Dot Gallery.  I was also drawn to Mayumi Hamanaka's large-scale paper-and-push-pin topographical map, as well as Ajit Chauhan's obsessively intricate abstract drawings.  And when you're done looking at art you can climb up the hill past the old Nike Missile site to the abandoned military bunkers that provide glorious views down to the Pacific.  We did some clambering around up there too. 

Interested parties should also note that Lawrence Weschler, he of the excellent Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, is speaking at the Art Institute tomorrow evening.  I can guarantee that it will not be boring.

the december dilemma

Yes I am such a nerd that sandwiched in between a lovely Christmas lunch with my family and the traditional holiday activities at Aimee's I dragged my brother to the JCCSF for a lecture.  Rutgers Jewish Studies professor Jeffrey Shandler was there to good-humoredly dissect the so-called "December Dilemma" in American television and film, and he screened clips from the likes of The O.C., Saturday Night Live and South Park to illustrate how the media has tried to address the tension between Hanukkah and Christmas.  There was even a break for a huge veggie Chinese buffet in the middle, and I can now safely say that I don't need to eat again until well into next year.