Engineer's Daughter

the lost paintings

[2nd floor projects] is an excellent artist-run space in the Mission, open only on Sunday afternoons so perfect for a post-Papalote-brunch visit.  Their current show is Bruno Fazzolari's The Lost Paintings, subtitled as explanation, "Fifteen small untitled paintings made sometime between 2001 and 2004—boxed, set aside undocumented, and inadvertently forgotten."  They are abstract works with a primary color palette of matte brown and grey; the bright yellow of the piece pictured here is an unexpected punctuation mark, as is the pink in another painting.  I briefly scanned Kevin Killian's lovely accompanying chapbook while I was in the gallery, and I think this is the very painting that reminded him of T.S. Eliot: "Some say the world will end in fire..."  Fazzolari's paintings are joined by three of his sculptures that meld hyper-realism with the surreal.  In one what looks like raw meat pours through a crack in a free-standing wall, while in another an electrical outlet that is just a little bit larger than it should be plays serious tricks on the eye.  I didn't even see it at first, and then I did, a similar experience I had to the evocative forms in his paintings that shifted in and out of my perception as I concentrated on them.  Subtle and brilliant.

See also:

• [2nd floor projects]
• Bruno Fazzolari

new work

Josh Podoll only has four of his recent paintings on display at Ping Pong Gallery right now, but there is so much going on in each one they expand to fill the space.  Invigorating and alive with vibrant colors and patterns, the paintings demonstrate Podoll's technical abilities as well as the visual influence of software like Photoshop.  While I was in the gallery last weekend Ping Pong co-director Joey Piziali pointed out to me how Podoll gives the illusion of layering in many places where in actuality the canvas remains smooth, a flattening effect we are now accustomed to seeing when editing digital images.  The artist also seamlessly incorporates pixilation and sharp edges amongst his more fluid shapes, and the resulting juxtapositions seem intentional rather than random.  Podoll also connects his work to his practice of meditation, which he experiences as "floating in abstraction," and his paintings in turn encourage the viewer into quiet, intense attention.

See also:

• Ping Pong Gallery
• Josh Podoll

custos morum

Four to the bar: Arnold Schoenberg (second left) having a drink with friends, including Oskar Kokoschka (far right), photographer and date unknown

See also:

• Mitsuko Uchida plays an excerpt of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto op. 42 
• Kokoschka's portraits of Alma Mahler

panoramic glass and mirror

Date: Friday, September 24, 2010
Venue: East Nile, Oakland
Music:

• Death Sentence: PANDA! - Have you picked up a copy of their awesome Spectral Arms LP yet?  No?  Then go here.
• John Wiese - Up from LA, John has an extensive resume of noise and experimental sound including his project Sissy Spacek plus his work with everyone from Merzbow to Wolf Eyes to Sunn O))).  At East Nile he created an immersive audio environment from behind his laptop full of skittering creatures, mysterious hums, the occasional screech and snarl.  Music fit to sink into. 
• Jealousy - A one-man act of pulsing reverb rock, dark and hypnotic.  His strobe lights nearly killed me though.

See also:

transplanted

There has been much discussion online and elsewhere lately about why artists choose to leave the Bay Area, but the fact is artists choose to move here too.  The SF Arts Commission asked three regional artists who are relative newcomers to produce pieces that illustrate how the Bay Area has affected their work, and the results are currently on display in the SFAC main and Grove Street galleries.  Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe makes the transplant's feeling of dislocation tangible in his Forward-Looking installation viewable 24/7 in the windows of the Grove Street gallery.  The piece consists of several window frames layered on top of each other in such a way that the viewer can peer through them without actually seeing anything beyond them, playing with the idea of limited perspective at the same time that the artwork activates the viewer's curiosity.  Meanwhile back in the main SFAC gallery Richard T. Walker's investigations into the natural environment seem a perfect fit for the Bay Area.  You can't see it but in the lightbox piece pictured here there is actually a small circle roughly cut out of the sky, an act of removal that is echoed in another artwork in the show in which a mountaintop is excerpted from the page of a book then blown up large onto the wall of the gallery and accented with neon.  In a multimedia piece Walker directly addresses the landscape as if it could answer back, describing his desire "to take some pictures," and though it was hard to hear when I was there for the opening Friday night I want to go back to experience his full dialogue.  I also want to be cheering from the shore when artist Pawel Kruk performs his piece Winning the Water for the show, in which he will swim from Alcatraz to Aquatic Park on a Saturday morning in October.  The band Coconut will play live music from a rowboat alongside, and the whole event will be extensively documented.  The swim addresses Kruk's ongoing interest in themes of athleticism and celebrity, but there is an added poetry in the site-specificity of a route that has over the years been used by triathletes and escaping criminals both.  Only in the Bay Area.

See also:

• SFAC Gallery
• Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe
• Richard T. Walker
• Pawel Kruk in front of his window installation at 826 Valencia
• My friend Tammy's comic about her own Alcatraz swim

show 170

playlist

public service announcement

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, September 26
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

tangled lines

Date: Thursday, September 23, 2010
Venue: First Church of the Buzzard, Oakland
Music:

• Tropospheres - A team-up of L'ektrik Man and Loachfillet, the latter of whom I had seen perform as Malditos just a few weeks back.  Super-dark feedback-heavy electronica, and loud too.  Just the way I like it.
• Marco Eneidi Quartet - Mr. Eneidi on sax, Ava Mendoza on guitar and effects pedals, Lisa Mezzacappa on upright bass, Vijay Anderson on drums.  Free-wheeling and sublime.  For more Marco see the video below, or check out Final Disconnect Notice on his own Botticelli label.
• Sean Smith + Spencer Owen - Mesmerizing steel-string guitar from local virtuoso Sean Smith, accompanied by Spencer Owen on drums.
• bran(...)pos - Solo noise performance art by Jake Rodriguez involving live projections and tons of visual and audio distortion.

See also:

open space

I have been an avid reader of SFMOMA's blog Open Space since its April 2008 debut, watching (and occasionally participating) as Suzanne Stein has evolved it into a lively online forum for discussions about Bay Area art and culture.  Last night Suzanne and fellow SFMOMAite Dominic Willsdon brought the conversation off of the blog and into real life in the first installment of what are being called "Open Space Thursdays."  On occasional Thursday evenings throughout the fall a diverse roster of hosts and their guests are inviting the public to come to the museum to chat, ask questions, and in one case create a giant octopus.  The topic last night was art writing, and Suzanne and Dominic's guests were Art Practical editor Patricia Maloney, UC Davis's Nelson Gallery director Renny Pritikin, SF Arts Commission Gallery director Meg Shiffler, poet and translator Brandon Brown, and SFMOMA associate curator of photography Erin O'Toole.  We talked about how columnists are given unedited free rein on Open Space, the difficulties inherent in crafting useful museum wall text, how writers use words to translate the visual into language and to expand the audience for art, the desire to keep critical writing rigorous and also to keep personal relationships out of it.  The small crowd who had gathered was clearly engaged with the topic, and it was a marvelously thought-provoking way to kick off the series especially for someone like me who thinks about art-writing oh just a wee bit.  Even if I didn't speak up during the discussion proper I sure had a lot to chew on.

See also:

• Open Space
• Art Practical
• Richard L. Nelson Gallery & Fine Art Collection, UC Davis
• San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
• Brandon Brown

vs. children

Date: Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Venue: Bar 355, Oakland
Music:

• Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - So Bar 355 isn't really set up for live music (rumor had it this was their first show that wasn't a DJ set), and I found the experience of being elbowed aside by a martini-swilling hipster while trying to get any sightline whatsoever on the distant stage annoying at best.  So I spent the majority of my evening on the curb outside the front door.  However!  Owen still sounded amazing out there, and I happily bobbed along to his bittersweet indie electronica in the chilly Oakland air.  He is officially retiring his CFTPA persona after he finishes this current tour and will never perform these songs live again, injecting added poignancy into what was already a heart-tugger of a set.  If you've never heard him before I highly recommend hunting down a copy of his album Pocket Symphonies for Lonely Subway Cars and savoring the lo-fi goodness.
• Otouto - This Melbourne outfit actually served as Owen's backing band after they finished their opening set, and their own music was poppy and cute, a pleasant enough warm-up.

See also: