Engineer's Daughter

when lives become form

Anyone attempting to distill all of contemporary Brazilian art into one group show has their work cut out for them, and the current exhibition When Lives Become Form up at Yerba Buena sometimes feels more like a snapshot than a complete survey.  Still, it's a fascinating snapshot.  Starting with the '60s Tropicália movement and tracing its influence through to the present day, the show also focuses on the artistic contributions of Brazil's significant Japanese population (appropriate for an exhibition that originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo).  The always-fabulous Beatriz Milhazes has covered one entire wall of Yerba Buena's glass entrance lobby with her explosions of colors and shapes, and the work inside the galleries maintains a similar energy.  A few artists encourage participation, such as in Lygia Pape's Roda dos Prazeres (Wheel of Delights) where visitors are invited to taste the colors of flavored water poured into a circle of shallow bowls.  A recreation of Hélio Oiticica's immersive Cosmococa CC1 Trashscapes environment comments on the prevalence of cocaine in Brazil, while assume vivid astro focus (avaf) has strewn beanbags on the floor of their installation and filled it top to bottom with playful psychedelic wall art and videos.  Architecture is represented in the work of Lina Bo Bardi, whose breathtaking Museo de Arte de São Paulo I hope to see in person someday, and in pictures of Ruy Ohtake's project to transform São Paulo's Heliópolis favela with color.  Add in a couple awesome paintings by street art twins osgemeos, quirky sculptures by Marepe, Mira Schendel's beautifully minimalist abstract drawings, video of Jum Nakao's final runway show, Lygia Clark's interactive metal "animals", and a pendulous Ernesto Neto sculpture that hangs above it all, and I felt like making like the young Caetano Veloso in the above photo and shouting with delight.

henry lewis & mike davis

Fellow tattoo artists Mike Davis and Henry Lewis are well paired in the current show at Fecal Face Dot Gallery as both SF residents share a penchant for the fantastical.  Davis (pictured here) uses rich colors to depict his Boschian creatures and foregrounds them against bleak landscapes that evoke war or other tragedy.  In fact his figures, which tend to feature the parts of several different species, could be seen as lonely survivors of nuclear disaster, their genetics shifted by radiation.  His images do contain a few whimsical touches as well, such as a shiny red ladybug carrying a parasol as it rides on the back of an altered beast.  Lewis, by contrast, works here in an exclusively black-and-white palette, creating highly detailed tableaux that reminded me equally of ancient Greek art or the fabulous airbrushed vans of the '70s.  Warriors battle and spurt blood, birds of prey open their beaks in silent cries, a pale woman weeps mascara tears.  As in Davis's work Lewis plays with the idea of transformation, and his meticulously rendered subjects sometimes blend into one another or sprout strange excess parts.  A darkly surreal show perfect for the drab days of January.

show 148

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the mansion of happiness

I am deeply embarrassed to admit that in the five years Mrs. Dalloway's has been a purveyor of "literary and garden arts" on College near Ashby I had never set foot inside until tonight, but now I am very happy to have made the shop's acquaintance.  I was there for a poetry reading by Cheryl Dumesnil and Robin Ekiss, both of whom have recently published their debut collections.  Dumesnil moved me to the edge of tears several times with poems from her book In Praise of Falling that capture not only the beauty of nature, of love, and of words themselves but also the exquisite pain that can lie just below the surface.  Ekiss then took the podium and explained that the title of her recent book The Mansion of Happiness comes from a 19th-century board game that was a forerunner to The Game of Life, and I love how her fascination with all things past (from old mechanical toys and amusements to her own history growing up in a home filled with the her miniaturist mother's dollhouses) infuses every corner of her poetry with magical realism and surreal imagery.  The Mansion of Happiness also contains poems referencing historical figures like Thomas Edison and Harry Houdini, and Ekiss actually ended the reading tonight with a new Edison-themed poem paying tribute to his wonderful 1895 motion picture of two men dancing, the earliest film to marry picture to sound.  She said she was purposefully sharing it at this moment when the trial of the lawsuit challenging Prop 8 is underway in San Francisco, and she told how the name of the film was changed from the simply descriptive "Two Men Dancing" to the more clinical "Dickson Experimental Sound Film" when the first title was deemed too offensive to delicate sensibilities.  It's depressing to know half of the California population is probably still stuck in that mindset.

precatory

Over-prepared piano: Klavier Integral, Nam June Paik, USA, 1958-63.  Raise your hand if you would have been better at practicing your piano as a kid if you had been able to do it on Paik's contraption.

gravity always wins

The Lab is currently showing excellent individual artwork by a trio of artists that includes Christine Webster's Transitions, her in-depth multimedia investigation into online teenage culture, and Tyrone Davies's single-channel video work that held me transfixed with (among other things) an excerpt from his seemingly infinite Billy Joel mash-up Jelly Boil.  Claire Jackel's Gravity Always Wins also stopped me in my tracks, specifically her large paper sculpture of a skyscraper-filled city that is turned upside-down and sideways as it literally cascades down the wall of the front gallery.  The delicacy of her material speaks directly to both the fragility of human life and the supposed strength of the steel-reinforced buildings of our metropolises that we never expect to fall down.  The sculpture is joined by a series of Jackel's black-and-white photos along one wall, capturing her models in the midst of structural loss due to what looks like a flood.  Again, the reference to real-life tragedy gives her work a heightened sense of poignancy, but with no actual humans harmed in the making of her art we are also free to admire its ghostly beauty.

superstar

If I love good noisy feedbacky rock so much today it's because of Sonic Youth.  Goo crashed into my world at just the moment my young brain was ready for it, and it's been a love affair ever since.  One of the singular experiences of my life was seeing them headline Lollapalooza back in 1995, the year everyone left after Hole and my brother and I scrambled over the barrier at Irvine Meadows and down into the vacant seats to be closer to the band.  That was the night I heard "The Diamond Sea" for the first time, and I distinctly remember feeling something in my head shift as they fractured the song into a million pieces and then pulled it back together again.  That was in fact the last time I heard them live until tonight's spectacular show at the Fillmore, and fifteen years later they're still capable of completely blowing my mind.  Kim was in full-on bad-ass rock goddess mode, all spangly leopard-print dress and dark eyeliner and Built By Wendy guitar strap and trademark growls at the mic, while I was close enough to Thurston to see his toes flex in his sneakers before he stomped on a pedal.  They played a ton of songs off The Eternal and saved most of the older material for their two encores, ending on a version of "Death Valley '69" so incendiary that Lee broke two strings.  Factor in the killer opening set from Sic Alps, one of my favorite local bands, and it's no wonder I'm still vibrating.

if you're hoping for the perfect family don't hold your breath

Hollywood pumps out chick flicks faster than you can name the four protagonists of Sex and the City, but it's the rare film that actually captures women in all of their complexity.  Nicole Holofcener's 2001 film Lovely & Amazing is exactly that elusive beast.  Diving deep into the female psyche, Holofcener focuses on three sisters played by Catherine Keener, Emily Mortimer, and Raven Goodwin and their varying relationships with each other and with their mother (the always-sublime Brenda Blethyn).  They are a close-knit family but each character struggles with a set of neuroses that include anger and crippling insecurity, issues that are not unfamiliar to myself and many other women I know.  Holofcener is a keen observer with a great ear for dialogue, and as an added bonus the film features a young Jake Gyllenhaal as Keener's photomat boss.  We're talking Donnie Darko-era Jake Gyllenhaal here, people.

one day

It was 2007 when artists Taraneh Hemami and Ghazaleh Hedayat began putting together the group show that would become One Day: A Collective Narrative of Tehran, currently on display at Intersection for the Arts.  Based in San Francisco and Iran respectively, Hemami and Hedayat's original intent was to show work by Iranian artists that conveyed aspects of daily life in Tehran, such as Mehran Mohajer's exquisite pinhole camera photographs of the city's streets (one of which is pictured here).  Hedayat's own contribution to the show is a piece called Taxiography, a series of abstract ink drawings on notebook paper that were created by letting the bumps in Tehran roads push her pen across the paper during taxi rides there.  And then last summer happened, and suddenly the context of the show changed.  Saba Alizadeh dealt directly with the violence enacted against the Iranian protestors by drilling holes into a wooden column, one for each person who was killed, from which you can hear the sound of labored breathing.  The color green became associated with the protests as well, and Hemami uses it both in her neon sculpture Yekrooz (Persian for "one day") that opens the exhibition and in her piece Turning Green, a section of wool carpet she laser cut into a street map of Tehran that lies in the center of the gallery floor.  Even where the work on display turns political it is still intensely personal and relatable, and the show serves as a strong reminder that everyday urban life in all of its mundanity continues even in the midst of these newly uncertain times.