2008 seca art award

A few weeks ago now I was able to attend the opening for SFMOMA's 2008 SECA Art Award show (thank you, Suzanne!), and though I was too shy to talk to any of the artists that night I did enjoy getting a first glimpse of the exhibition.  SECA stands for the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, and every two years they pick four local artists and give them a cash prize and a show at the museum.  I went back today to get a closer look at everyone's work without the throngs that were present on opening night.  It will surprise exactly no one that my hands-down favorite among this year's winning quartet is experimental geographer Trevor Paglen, with his gorgeous large-scale photographs of surveillance satellites as they streak across starscapes and his collection of patches produced for secret military operations, also featured in his book I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me.  He's just published a new tome called Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World, and to say that I am excited to read it would be a vast understatement.  I have also long been interested in Tauba Auerbach's work, and where in the past she has played primarily with words and letters I like her recent photographs of television static like the one pictured here, images of supposed randomness that turn out to contain clear patterns.  Desirée Holman's videos and drawings are probably the most mystifying to the casual museum-goer, her hollow-eyed, masked cast of characters (drawn from Roseanne and The Cosby Show) dancing and silently acting out scenes, but as someone who grew up with sitcom TV families I see her trying to peel away the layers of what is real and what is constructed.  Finally, Jordan Kantor is the one artist whose work was completely new to me, but one look at his paintings of camera lens flares and his own rendering of an X-ray of Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and I understood instantly why his work has been compared to Gerhard Richter's.  Exhibition curators Apsara DiQuinzio and Alison Gass made very smart decisions for the award this time with these artists who all seem to be thinking hard about representation and what art can still reveal in an age of mass reproduction and Photoshop.  You can hear DiQuinzio and Gass discuss their process and their decisions at an upcoming free Tuesday program next month, but before that DiQuinzio will be discussing Paglen's patches in depth at a Thursday night One on One talk at the end of March.  I'm going to try to make it to that one for sure.