Engineer's Daughter

santos y otros creatures

In the latest group exhibition at the Creativity Explored gallery, Santos y Otros Creatures, curator and CE art instructor Victor Cartagena has assembled work that features saints, demons, and a variety of other figures that fall somewhere in between the holy and the diabolical.  Gordon Shepard's St. Genesius is a looser, more personal take on Renaissance icon paintings, while Rose Gordon's striking monoprint triptych of dancing devils would make Bosch proud.  Many of the artworks in the show are indeed prints thanks to the relatively new printmaking program at Creativity Explored Cartagena introduced a year ago, and I adored the deceptive simplicity of the black-and-white images such as Quintin Rodriguez's Raptagon in which the lines of his fanged beast appear etched in dark marble.  Bertha Otoya is another standout artist (one half of her Serpente diptych is pictured here) as she juxtaposes her critters against backgrounds of her tightly-written script in prints and in one case on a long scroll that unspooled itself from a gilt box across the ceiling of the gallery.  Not only do I always appreciate the work Creativity Explored is doing with developmentally disabled artists but the art they produce is consistently fabulous as well.

frontier

The inner Richmond's Park Life is currently displaying work by Mary Iverson, a Seattle artist who taps into my fascination with the shipping containers and cranes I see all the time living so close to an active port.  Their instantly recognizable forms inhabit her landscapes, along with grids of delicate lines that intersect and imply systems of movement.  The backgrounds are nature scenes taken from environmental magazines with the occasional large-scale oil painting as well, open space made claustrophobic with Iverson's overlaid elements.  Her message about the impact of industry on the natural world is not exactly subtle, but I am also interested in the contrast between (for instance) the undulating curves of Death Valley's sand dunes and the geometric rigidity of the shipping containers, simplified by the artist into blocks of bright color.  The dunes are shaped the way they are due to the forces of nature, while the containers were designed to maximize cost-effective transport of goods from one end of the earth to the other.  It's the standardized and banal superimposed on the unpredictability of nature.

hulot

Leave it to 21 Grand and Club Sandwich to host an absolutely killer show on a Tuesday night.  David Harms aka Mincemeat or Tenspeed is in town this week from Philadelphia doing his beat-propelled pedals-and-mixer thing that I first fell in love with when my brother and I saw him at the Mopery in Chicago last fall, and besides encouraging you to see him live I also highly recommend picking up his recent album Strange Gods.  Snag Hawnay Troof's Daggers At the Moon too, the latest from Vice Cooler (formerly of Oakland, now of LA).  The man was in fine frenetic form tonight and also getting full audience participation.  And I always enjoy wigging out to Nero's Day at Disneyland as Brock and Shon create unrelenting rhythms with synths and live drums.  Most compelling, all of that noise.

oligopoly

Possessed by the music: Iwan Puni's The Musician, Berlin, 1921.  I like a man who carries his music with him, both literally and figuratively.

one day history will have its say

Anyone who has read King Leopold's Ghost needs to see Raoul Peck's 2000 film Lumumba, which dramatizes the life and horrifying death of the first prime minister of Congo after that country gained independence from Belgium in 1960.  Peck does not glamorize Patrice Lumumba, and the brilliant French actor Eriq Ebouaney instead plays him as a complex leader who was a powerful orator but also a perfectionist whose stubbornness proved a liability to his country in the volatile period following independence.  Lumumba lasted mere months in office before he was assassinated, and Peck leaps backwards and forwards in time to illustrate Lumumba's meteoric rise and fall at a dizzying pace that takes the viewer along for the ride, mirroring too the extreme instability in Congo's government that is the country's legacy to this day.  Lumumba is the rare biopic that trusts the intelligence of its audience, and I appreciated that Peck's intention was to capture something of the personality of his main character and not to simply spoon out dry historical facts.  However, the movie sure did inspire me to run to Wikipedia afterward to do some further reading.

within arm's reach

I am completely obsessed with photographer Ari Marcopoulos right now, whose mid-career retrospective currently up at the Berkeley Art Museum is pure exhilaration.  Dutch by birth, Marcopoulos moved to New York in the late '70s and assisted the likes of Andy Warhol and Irving Penn at the same time that he began doing his own street photography, approaching his subjects with an emotional honesty that rivals Robert Frank.  He also became absorbed in the NYC art and music scenes, photographing everyone from John Cage to Public Enemy to Robert Mapplethorpe, and not long after started capturing skaters and other adrenaline junkies (and their resulting injuries).  Marcopoulos is also an accomplished videographer, and I dare you not to get a contact high from his piece Claremont during which Noah Sakamoto and Patrick Rizzo bomb on skateboards down a twisty road in the Berkeley hills, passing a camera back and forth between them.  These days Marcopoulos lives in Sonoma with his wife and two sons Cairo and Ethan, and many of his recent images such as the one of Cairo pictured here document his home life.  Marcopoulos is the master of a variety of film techniques, but his Xerox prints are the ones that totally destroy me; something about the graininess of the texture makes them especially poignant in their beauty and ephemerality.  He also loves a lot of the same music I do.  When I was in Spain I picked up a copy of apartamento magazine just for his photos of Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore at home in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the BAM exhibition features his video of an extended noise jam between the couple captured during that same visit (and I totally spotted him a couple weeks ago at SY's Fillmore show).  Marcopoulos was also recently selected for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and as cranky as I am at how NYC-centric the list is this go-round I am very happy he is one of the few California artists (and the lone Bay Area representative) who will be shown.

art at the dump

Yesterday after work I drove down to the San Francisco dump to see the work produced by artists Christina Mazza and Erik Otto during their recent residency there.  Both Mazza and Otto seem a natural fit for the dump's Artist in Residency program, Mazza with her precise drawings of banal objects (that's her wall mural of shredded packing paper in progress there to the right) and Otto with his work on salvaged materials.  Besides his paintings on scraps of discarded wood Otto has also put together a wonderful sculpture of wee houses spiraling upward through the air that occupies the center of the gallery, while a heap of old analog television sets in one corner are rigged to broadcast both art and static.  Mazza similarly used the objects and scraps she found on her scavenges to inspire her work both in its subject matter and in the materials used.  San Francisco has recently rebranded its waste disposal as "Recology" and is working hard to reduce the amount of trash that goes to the landfill through active composting and recycling initiatives, and the Artist in Residence program has always been a awesome way to increase visibility about the city's waste streams.  And I always leap at a chance to visit the dump.

weather streams

It was impossible not to muse on the appropriateness of the title of this year's Front + Center show out at the Headlands, Weather Streams, as I drove through one of the many storms battering the Bay Area this week to attend the show opening on Sunday afternoon.  Curated by Ping Pong Gallery co-directors Vanessa Blaikie and Joey Piziali as well as independent curator Jessica Brier, Weather Streams takes its title from the idea of synesthesia (in which the experiences of the senses blend and flow together) and features work from many excellent local artists, some of whom created art on-site.  Jennifer Kaufman used black tape to create abstract patterns directly on the wall of one gallery, while nearby an open-sided wood pyramid by Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe beckons visitors to stand beneath its apex and look up.  In the gallery across the hall I enjoyed trying to decode Jordan Essoe's system of images, one of which is pictured here, as well as Luke Butler's lovingly rendered Star Trek paintings.  Joshua Keller's installation of stacked boxes wrapped with printed craft paper is slowly giving in to entropy and tumbling to the floor in the center of that same room, while Daniel Horchy's interactive feedback box creates a beautifully unholy racket for those brave enough to play with it.  My favorite pieces, however, were a series of John Chiara's one-of-a-kind photographs of San Francisco captured using a large hand-built camera.  I love the imperfections his images show and their irreproducibility, how they seal a very precise moment in time.  Chiara offers a new way of looking at familiar and otherwise mundane landscapes, and the other artists in the show are doing something similar through each one's highly personal lens.

obscurantism

Taking the great Parade home: sheet music by Erik Satie, Paris, c.1918.  They just don't make sheet music like they used to.

the illustrated book of invisible stories

I missed Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton's The Illustrated Book of Invisible Stories back when it sold out at Yerba Buena last spring, so I felt lucky to get to see it this weekend when it returned to the Center for the Arts.  The piece features a continuum of linked vignettes performed by six dancers, three men and three women, who are set against and interact with a living backdrop of 18 women, a literal "movement choir."  Music director Jonathan Russell of heavy metal bass clarinet quartet Edmund Welles composed some of the music and performed live with a group of seven other musicians, and Odessa Chen also contributed her gorgeous voice, beautiful guitar, and heartbreaking lyrics.  Seriously, if you want to see me turn to jelly in 30 seconds flat just play me a bit of Chen's "The Ballad of Paper Ships," which featured prominently in The Illustrated Book.  The dancing was highly evocative too and had many clever and passionate moments, though with Nol Simonse as one of the male dancers it was sometimes hard to concentrate on anything or anyone else.  It's not for nothing the SF Bay Guardian picked that man for a Goldie (Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery) award last fall.