Engineer's Daughter

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I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, December 19
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

mirror 5

Hot on the heels of his fantastic show at [2nd floor projects] earlier this fall Bruno Fazzolari is currently displaying four similarly excellent paintings and a bottle of eau de toilette at Jancar Jones Gallery.  The paintings are abstractions and all utilize a shared visual vocabulary: perforated blue lines around their borders, thick yellow streaks on the interior with other colors scribbled and dabbed on top, plenty of canvas left empty.  As in the best abstract works everything comes together to form a coherent whole with color here balanced against negative space and held in by those blue boundary lines.  As for the eau de toilette, a classic musky cologne that would work well on either a man or a woman, the visitor is welcome to apply it at will and in that way carry a physical remnant of the exhibition out of the gallery with them.  I appreciated the witty reference to the impressions we take away with us after we look at art, and how a person's individual chemistry (or temperament) can trigger completely different reactions.

See also:

• Jancar Jones Gallery
• Bruno Fazzolari

mise en abyme

It doesn't take much to activate my travel bug, so no surprise that after about five seconds of standing in front of Bull.Miletic's video Par Hasard and its shots of the Eiffel Tower (in their current show at Gallery Paule Anglim) I was ready to jump on a plane to Paris.  The pair otherwise known as Synne Bull and Dragan Miletic have long had an interest in using their art to explore physical space, often incorporating film and video to illuminate otherwise invisible moments, and at Paule Anglim they take on the City of Light itself.  Par Hasard is an evocative tribute to the iconic presence of the Eiffel Tower in the center of Paris, while the clever Révolution Périphérique is a two-channel video installation juxtaposing seemingly endless clockwise and counter-clockwise revolutions around Paris's famous ring road, its soundtrack provided by a record eternally stuck in a single groove.  Bull.Miletic take that most banal of experiences, driving on a highway, and turn it into a mesmerizing encounter with the perimeter of the city.  I felt like I was fixed in one place and moving, completely bored and filled with anticipation, all at the same time. 

See also:

• Gallery Paule Anglim
• Bull.Miletic

ventifact

Synaesthesia in the concert hall: Die Farblichtmusik by Alexander Laszlo, Leipzig, 1925

See also:

• The Dream of Color Music, and the Machines That Made It Possible
• Early color organs

lights on market street

As long as I've lived in the Bay Area the stretch of San Francisco's Market Street from the UN Plaza to 6th Street has been a particularly sketchy one, a place where a friend's car once gotten broken into in broad daylight and where I walk very quickly and purposefully if I find myself in the area after dark.  But where some people saw only crack dealers the local arts community saw opportunity for uplift, and last Thursday night I joined the SF Arts Commission and an enthusiastic crowd for the unveiling of three new public projects specifically designed to be seen at night.  Jim Campbell's Urban Reflections is the bona fide stunner of the trio, a piece that uses thousands of LED lights to create scenes of everyday city life in two empty shop windows.  Up close the lights flicker and shift, and as you back away the shapes resolve into images of pedestrians and buses passing by the windows.  A longtime fave artist of mine, that man continues to be a mad genius.  Directly across the street from Campbell's piece and just to one side of the UN Plaza Paul Notzold has installed Storylines, a huge comic-book-like slideshow that incorporates text by poems about the city from local WritersCorps Apprentices.  And then just a little further down Market, near Showdogs, the public is invited to interact with Theodore Watson's Faces (pictured here), a storefront camera that captures your photo and then immediately projects it on a building high across the street.  As part of the ARTery Project, the artworks join historic theaters, a cluster of forward-thinking galleries, and local cultural institutions that are slowly but surely making that section of the city a destination rather than a place to avoid.  The installations are only up until June of next year, so get on down there.

See also:

• The ARTery Project
• Jim Campbell
• Paul Notzold's TXT Assault Rifle
• Theodore Watson

show 179

playlist

public service announcement

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, December 12
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

Oldies, Bowie covers, Sasha Grey's band, more...

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When I dropped by Silverman Gallery this week most of the Shannon Finley show had been taken down (I suspect due to Miami art fair shiznit), but happily three of his perfect paintings remained on one wall.  I see a lot of artists working in geometrical abstractions these days, and it can get tiresome to say the least.  However Finley brings a refreshing immediacy to his work in his use of layered shapes as well as colors not known to occur in nature.  The visual references to De Stijl, Suprematism, and Cubism are all there too, but filtered through a contemporary lens that owes a lot to computer graphics and digital manipulation.  Though born in Ontario, Canada, Finley now lives and works in Berlin, just adding to my determination to go spend some quality time in that city much sooner rather than later.  The art and music coming out of there right now is just rad.

See also:

• Silverman Gallery
• Shannon Finley

everything in between

No Age

Currently native to: Los Angeles, CA

Recent Bay Area appearance: The New Parish, Oakland; Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Next gig: Brookdale Lodge, Brookdale, CA; Thursday, December 9, 2010

Notes: One of my fave bands to come out of the DIY scene at The Smell down in LA, No Age have never been anything but self-assured whether they're playing a warehouse gallery in Oakland or bringing Bob Mould onstage to cover Hüsker Dü at Noise Pop.  I still wish I'd made it down to the Hollywood Bowl earlier this fall to see them open for Pavement and Sonic Youth, but Randy was doing a great job of channeling his inner Thurston Moore last night (I could literally smell the electricity rising off his pedals) and Dean was in awesome form too.  They've been tossing around the idea of opening their own all-ages space in LA, and I would so send money to that Kickstarter project.  Really really hope they do it.

Buy: Everything in Between (Sub Pop) and Nouns (Sub Pop)

See also:

foci

My brain has been running on overdrive this week, so it was a good exercise to quiet things down a bit by standing in front of Nicole Phungrasamee Fein's sublime watercolors and India ink drawings in her Foci show currently on display at Hosfelt Gallery.  Her paintings are deceptive in their simplicity, overlapping brushstrokes of grays and taupes that form themselves into grids and bands, until you realize how much of her concentration it must take to keep the lines so precise.  While the watercolors hang on the gallery walls the three India ink pieces in the show lie flat in vitrines, each of them consisting of a dozen or so layers of translucent polyester onto which Fein has applied red dots that seem to vibrate and swirl down into the depths of the paper.  I could have looked at those for hours.  Foci indeed.

See also:

• Hosfelt Gallery
• Nicole Phungrasamee Fein