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.