Engineer's Daughter

truth be told

Southern Exposure is filled with awesome art right now, with three solo exhibitions on display by Ginger Wolfe-Suarez, Kenneth Lo, and Jaime Cortez.  It was Cortez who drew me to the gallery Saturday night for an evening of poetry and performances in conjunction with his Michael-Jackson-themed show Universal Remote.  Now before we go any further I will be the first to admit I've never been much of an MJ fan, but to my surprise Cortez himself was also quick to confess his own ambivalence at the beginning of the program.  He went on to say it was his realization that Jackson had still managed to touch every decade of his life that led him to create the art in his show, which ranges from his own fairy tale about the origin of Jackson's voice to publicity posters that have been cut apart and woven back together again.  That art was a perfect backdrop to the evening's presentations, including everything from the poem Marvin White wrote for his sister after MJ's death to half-sung/half-read poetry by Cedric Brown augmented by some killer dance moves from his nephew (decked out in full-on Thriller-era garb, no less).  Ignacio Valero introduced an excerpt of a scholarly essay he is working on that explores the cultural implications of Jackson's death, while Tisa Bryant read a devastating prose piece about growing up in love with Michael.  Last but definitely not least Cortez himself narrated a clip from The Fifth Element in his inimitable neo-benshi style, brilliantly reinterpreting Leeloo's reincarnation scene as if Jackson himself was being reborn as a very disoriented Milla Jovovich.  You should have been there.

See also:

• Southern Exposure
• Jaime Cortez
• Marvin White
• Cedric Brown
• Ignacio Valero
• Tisa Bryant

materials and methods

Daniel McCormick is the ultimate earth artist.  He sculpts beautiful forms out of natural, degradable materials like coconut husks and willow switches and then installs them in landscapes where they perform real work: anchoring soil, slowing water flow, preventing erosion.  Eventually the pieces become part of the landscape, leaving little or no trace.  McCormick's solo show currently up at the David Brower Center gives you some hint of his processes and techniques, with his often-monumental constructions transferred from their usual outdoor context to a gallery setting and displayed next to project plans and drawings.  At the exhibition opening Thursday night the artist spoke with Headlands Program Director Brian Karl about the influence of artists like James Turrell and Robert Smithson on his earthworks, but for me McCormick goes one step further than those greats thanks to his focus on effecting positive environmental change through his art.  He also pays close attention to ecological systems and seeks to mediate the damage of human impact, whether he is working in a hike-in public watershed or in a park on the edge of suburbia.  Art as restoration, simultaneously humble and hopeful.

See also:

• The David Brower Center
• Daniel McCormick

show 185

playlist

That was really fun.

la destitution de la jeune fille

I am kicking myself hard for having missed Katya Bonnenfant's recent installation at Yerba Buena, especially after having seen her current show at Haines Gallery this week.  At Yerba Buena she took over the Viewing Corridor on the second floor, filling the entire wall with a dense tapestry of warring figures, wooden sculptures, and animations.  The complementary exhibition at Haines is composed of small individual gouache studies for the Yerba Buena show containing just a few figures each, but the pieces have still been arranged on the walls in a loose narrative, the masked multi-cultural warriors raping and pillaging as they go.  Meanwhile the colorful sculptures from the Yerba Buena wall have been spilled across two plinths in the center of the Haines floor, while a small camera projects the animation abstraction belong to all of us with its ceaselessly morphing logos directly onto one of Bonnenfant's paintings.  Bonnenfant works under the name the old boys' club, and with her references to pop culture and corporate signifiers she does seem to be questioning our contemporary obsessions with escapist entertainment and mass consumption.  However with no clear lines drawn in her battle and no obvious distinction between the good guys and the bad she keeps the issues refreshingly complex, and among some of the more disturbing scenes there are laugh-out-loud moments too.  Bonnenfant's art is a vibrant encapsulation of our current consciousness.

See also:

• Haines Gallery
• Katya Bonnenfant

public service announcement

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, January 30
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

It's my best of 2010 show too so you know you want to tune in.  I'll be playing nothing but my personal favorites from the last year.  Stream it from the link above if you aren't within signal range.

agenda 01.26.2011

Michael Jackson performance art, international hits, a YouTube Happening, loud music, quiet music, intimate venues...

Thursday, January 27:

• "Life in a Day" World Premiere - Live from Sundance on YouTube
• International Hits!!! (the Revenge!) at the Knockout

Friday, January 28:

• SpaceBurn, A Magic Whistle, Group Rhoda at the Silver Tiger

Saturday, January 29:

• Truth Be Told, A Night of Performance Curated by Jaime Cortez at Southern Exposure
• Tears Club, Chen Santa Maria & DubKnowDub at Sight School
• Nick Waterhouse, Allah-Las & Primo at the Crescent Hotel's Burritt Room

captious

Kurt Schwitters: traces of a work in progress; facsimile of the Hjertoya Merz Barn, created 1936-39

See also:

• The Merz Barn Project
• Schwittershytta

breaking ranks

  
Technically the Headlands Center for the Arts is in its "dark days" right now before the first wave of 2011 artists-in-residence arrive, but every year they get things warmed up a little early with a show of Bay Area art.  This year the theme is Breaking Ranks: Human/Nature, which basically boils down to artists who find unique ways to explore the sometimes arbitrary divisions between civilization and the wild.  There is some fantastic individual work included too, like Dena Al-Adeeb and Sama Alshaibi's videos (stills above) that poetically depict the struggles of Persian women.  Other standouts: Andy Vogt's gravity-defying wood constructions, Ben Venom's fabric pieces of sewn-together vintage heavy metal tees, paintings of collection cabinets and other storage systems by Matthew T. Mullins, large-scale photographs of California wildfires and their aftermath by Youngsuk Suh, Jenna North's gray-scale paintings of waves and frequencies, Jesse Schlesinger's stump sculptures that extend out the window of the gallery and down into the meadow below.  Take a quiet afternoon and drive out to see the show, or join me on Sunday, February 13, when a slew of writers and artists will be leading a very special guided tour around the Headlands involving readings, performances, and parsley treats.

See also:

• Headlands Center for the Arts
• Dena Al-Adeeb & Sama Alshaibi
• Andy Vogt
• Ben Venom
• Matthew T. Mullins
• Youngsuk Suh
• Jenna North
• Jesse Schlesinger

enter slowly

Anyone (like me) who still laments last year's closure of David Cunningham Projects needs to hightail it over to The Lab to see the group show there right now curated by Mr. Cunningham himself.  The title of the exhibition is Enter Slowly, and those two words serve as both instruction and as a reference to the way many of the participating artists involve architecture in their work.  The first thing you encounter when you pass through the gallery doors is Maud Cotter's sculpture More Than Anything cascading down the front stairs, consisting of individual birch panels joined together into a structure that is able to be tweaked to fit the space.  That piece leads you almost directly to another large sculpture, Cath Campbell's 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, which the artist has created out of cut corrugated cardboard.  It is a structure both imposing and delicate, and those elements are also present in her architectural renderings in paper and steel.  That push/pull between the permanent and the changeable is echoed again in Anna Barham's beautifully-constructed anagrams and her fiberboard sculpture (Tangram) Posture that dominates the center of the gallery.  Tangrams and the way they fit together are also a theme in Linda Quinlan's geometrically-abstracted drawings and video Side Step, while Laura Gannon explores modernist motifs both in her video A House in Cap-Martin and in her series of glass plates painted with child-like renderings of high-design furniture.  Some of those images look as if they could have been clipped from Alexandra Navratil's video Objects Perceive Me, a free-flowing succession of pictures that the artist has collected over time.  The stream-of-consciousness aspect of the video contrasts nicely with the precise black-and-white shapes of Navratil's drawings, small pieces that yet manage to be imposing in their study of light and shadow.  This is not a show you rush through, and the longer you spend in the gallery the more layers will be revealed.  It's well worth the time.

See also:

• The Lab
• Maud Cotter
• Cath Campbell
• Anna Barham
• Linda Quinlan
• Laura Gannon
• Alexandra Navratil

high-def

I didn't manage to blog about the High-Def group show at Gregory Lind Gallery while it was still open, but I'm doing so now because it totally ruled.  Consisting of abstract work from five different artists, the show concentrated on the more precise end of abstraction where the lines often have sharp edges and geometry holds a strong influence.  Leonhard Hurzlmeier's paintings (pictured here) are downright symmetrical even as their visible layers reveal the artist's process, while Aaron Parazette's shaped canvases are slick paeans to contrasting color and read as simultaneously futuristic and retro.  Don Voisine creates work on wood panels that made me think of the dark brushstrokes of Franz Kline...well, maybe if Kline had ever gone Pop Art.  And the oblique architectural references in Voisine's art are more fully explored in Jake Longstreth's Matinee, a paintings that flattens its representation of a building into something approaching pure pattern.  My favorite pieces were by Chris Corales, however, a series of small folding books made of grey cardboard whose creases are lined with colored tape and into which he has pasted spare scraps of paper.  Probably the least "high-def" of all the work in the show, but so simple and so perfect.

See also:

• Gregory Lind Gallery
• Leonhard Hurzlmeier
• Aaron Parazette
• Don Voisine
• Jake Longstreth
• Chris Corales