Engineer's Daughter

no right angles

My notes from the UC Berkeley MFA show No Right Angles currently at the Berkeley Art Museum:

• aZin seraj (her studio pictured here) - Quietly moving videos that capture moments of day-to-day life in Iran.  A stranger looks into seraj's camera, a cat scurries across a night-time patio, far-off mountains beckon.  Beautifully transcends the banal.
• Aliza Rand - Giant-scale cyanotype photographs that resemble huge solargrams.  Taken on the street in the Mission, the images capture mysterious confluences of light and shadow and are not readily identifiable.  Probably my favorite things in the show.
• Miguel Arazbe - Video, photography, and sculpture that deals with how we perceive space, especially when the built environment interacts with nature.  A piece that sits low to the floor in the gallery is constructed out of concrete and has moss growing out of a large crack down its center.
• Becky Suss - Landscape paintings that are the artist's attempt to capture places from her memory, with the acknowledgment that memories change as soon as we recall them.  I was most interested in how she incorporates abstracted patterns into her representational art.
• Matthew Mullins - Epic soft-toned watercolor paintings that depict archives and special collections of things like cacti and bugs.  Meta and as an obsessive list-maker myself I totally grok his work.
• Amanda Eicher - Interdisciplinary art informed by activism, stemming from time Eicher spent in El Salvador.  She has inscribed brightly-painted doors with bilingual poetry derived from conversations Richmond high school students had with Salvadoran pen pals, and the doors will travel by container ship to El Salvador to a town that needs them to keep the residents safe from gang activity.  More information on Eicher's project here.
• Bonnie Begusch - Animations derived from technological artifacts like cursors and computer-screen text, shapes instantly recognizable to any geek.  Simple but hypnotic.

later operator

The SF Popfest rolled through town this weekend, and I made sure I was at the Rickshaw Stop Saturday night for a rare appearance from Portland's All Girl Summer Fun Band featuring the always-awesome Kathy Foster of the Thermals as well as Jen Sbragia of the Softies and Kim Baxter (Ari Douangpanya left the band shortly after they released their fantastic second album).  The trio lived up to their name at the Rickshaw no problem, delivering a bouncy set of twee-tinged indie pop as they shared the vocals amongst the three of them.  The only thing that detracted from my evening was an unfortunate encounter with an incredibly rude fellow audience member, but that is a story best saved for another time.

business time

Friday night I kicked off Memorial Day weekend off right (and how) when I joined several thousand of my closest friends at the Greek Theatre to see Flight of the Conchords.  It was a gorgeous almost-full-moon night, the weather cleared up for what felt like the first time in weeks, and Bret and Jemaine were funny as hell.  Even when they're telling a joke I've heard from them before I laugh like it's the first time, and I'm always impressed at how they can turn a simple eye-roll or grimace into something side-splittingly hilarious.  Most of all I admire their musical prowess, as they range through a dozen genres without even breaking a sweat.  And when they ripped off their clothes to reveal skin-tight glitter for a Zep-worthy performance of "Demon Woman" near the end of the show, I swooned right on cue.

new work

I've been casually following Jim Campbell's multimedia art for several years now, thanks in large part to the many times I've encountered his work at Hosfelt Gallery.  I used to find his use of LED technology to create moving figures merely amusing, but then I went to see the Home Movies exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum two years ago in which he installed a huge grid of LEDs to project evocative black-and-white images onto the gallery wall.  Suddenly he had my full attention.  Campbell's current show at Hosfelt has one of those LED arrays as well as a whole host of other technology-based pieces.  Though some of his seascapes that marry still photographs to an illusion of rolling waves edge dangerously close to cheesy pizza-parlor-beer-ad territory, as a whole the work exhibits a mechanical virtuosity that is totally mind-blowing.  Campbell is concerned with time and recollection itself, and when he shows shadowy, abstracted travelers scurrying across the floor of Grand Central it is as if he has plucked a memory right out of his own brain and made it visible.  The most astonishing piece in the show incorporates a new innovation where the artist has "exploded" the LEDs out of a flat plane and into three-dimensional space, and as you stand in front of his suspended lights you can just make out the movements of birds taking flight from a roof.  Apparently this is the same technology Campbell will use to create a large-scale work for the SFMOMA atrium next year, and to say that I can't wait to see what he will do in that space does not even begin to cover my excitement.

hole in the middle

I have always been extremely susceptible to the Sunday night blues, but nothing beats 'em like cozying up to a Red Stripe at Cafe Du Nord and listening to the beauty that is local singer/songwriter Emily Jane White like I did this past weekend.  Last time I saw her was several years back at Mama Buzz right after her extraordinary debut Dark Undercoat had come out, and like that album her performance was gorgeously stripped-down, little more than her guitar, her piano, and her amazing voice.  The Sunday Du Nord show was the record release party for her excellent new Victorian America, and she brought along all the musicians who helped flesh out the sound on this new one, including a three-piece string section.  Her music is pretty, yes, but there is a real fire underneath.  And while she sang my cares went far far away.

virginia is for lovers

I never knew Virginia Kleker (Ginny to her friends), but a piece of hers I saw in a group exhibition at Southern Exposure years ago has always stayed with me.  Called Luggage, in it Kleker stole a suitcase off the carousel of the Oakland airport, took it home, went through it, and then cataloged what she found inside before surreptitiously returning the suitcase to the airport mere hours later.  She left an official-looking note inside for its owner: “You can be angry, upset or confused without feeling guilt.  Maybe you will tell this story to another and be closer to them for the confusion.”

That interest in human connection (and that wicked sense of humor) characterizes much of Kleker's video and performance art, making it all the more tragic that she took her own life in October 2008 at the beginning of what was certain to be a fantastic career.  Her friend Lori Gordon has organized a show just ending its run at Kevin P. Clarke's cool MacArthur b arthur space in Oakland that includes art and photographs by many who loved Ginny as well as Kleker's own work.  Clarke turned a disc of her videos on for me when I dropped by the gallery on Sunday, and I literally didn't move for an hour as I watched this beautiful, vibrant woman bare her soul in myriad ways on camera.  I saw her duct tape a heart to her chest, smash a dozen eggs on her face, grapple with a stripper pole, stand in an hour-long hug with Gordon in the middle of a busy BART passageway, mimic the musicians she observed at a laughably bad concert at Yoshi's.  The very last piece on the disc is called Suicide Note, and Clarke explained that a couple years before Kleker succeeded in ending her life she'd had an initial attempt.  In the video Kleker says she was cleaning up her room and found the note, and she wanted to read it to camera to help her remember what was in it.  After she finishes reading she continues talking for a bit, speaking about how she isn't even sure she believes in depression but that she does believe in being deeply, truly sad.  It is genuinely heart-rending that the sadness finally won.

bagman

Visual music: Liubov Popova's Painterly Architectonic (Still Life: Instruments), Russia, 1916.  Popova is one of my heroines.

where ever the fuck arnold

It was crazy cold in Oakland Saturday night and not much warmer inside of Heco's Palace, but the sheer amount of bodies crammed in there helped raise the ambient temperature a bit.  Psychic Reality (aka local songstress Leyna Noel) got things started with some awesome witchy freaked-out electronica, then VNC were a little shoegazey, then Robedoor were all gorgeously doomy and droney, then Foot Village freakin' blew the roof off with their whole drum-and-scream shtick.  Just as good (and cathartic) as I remembered them from the Upset the Rhythm showcase at the Lab lo those many moons ago, the last time I'd seen them live.  Robin Williams On Fire were supposed to play yet too in what was reportedly their last show ever, but it was late and I had to go home and pass out.  I am so not punk rock.

o sleep

After bumping around in a few temporary spaces over the last several years, in 2009 Southern Exposure finally settled into its handsome new Potrero digs at the corner of 20th Street and Alabama, and I got a chance to visit Saturday night to see a performance of Theresa Wong and Ellen Fullman's opera O Sleep.  Developed from work the women did while they were residents at the Headlands Center last year, O Sleep is less a focused narrative than a sequence of linked music-driven vignettes as open to interpretation as its subject matter, sleep and dreams.  The musicians/performers were separated from the audience by a thin scrim upon which snippets of text and portraits of brain wave patterns were projected, obscuring but not completely blocking out the action behind the curtain.  The music, a mix of composition and improvisation, moved from representing the frenetic activity of a wakeful mind to the more meditative states of deep sleep, and it was particularly interesting to watch Fullman play her Long String Instrument as it stretched the entire length of the gallery.  To generate sound on it she slowly walked backward along its length, dragging her fingers on its strings and creating some amazingly deep, resonant tones.  Though O Sleep was at the gallery for one weekend only, it was only the first in SoEx's new Extended Play series which features weekly live performances and workshops through the end of June from the likes of Nate Boyce, Suzy Poling, Lucky Dragons, and 0th.  I can't wait to see and hear more in the weeks to come.

too much time

Every once in a while I like taking a drive down the coast to see a show in Santa Cruz, visit my old stomping grounds and note that the college kids seem to be getting younger with each passing year.  Friday night John Vanderslice and Horse Feathers played at the Crepe Place, and it was an incredible treat to see both of them within the restaurant's intimate environs.  Portland's Horse Feathers are simply gorgeous live, all strings and harmonies, and they included a cover of Gillian Welch's "Orphan Girl" in their set that took my breath away (I wonder if they know that Welch was a Porter girl too).  When it was John Vanderslice's turn to play his genuinely warm nature came shining through both in how appreciative he was to be in Santa Cruz after not performing for a few months and in his songs themselves.  He played solo, just him and his Harmony acoustic guitar, and when he sang "Trance Manual" near the end of the evening I confess my heart might have stopped for a moment.  That song gets me every damn time.