Engineer's Daughter

show 206

playlist

public service announcement

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, July 31
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

in extremis

You have just a couple more days to make it to Meridian Gallery for their most excellent group show In Extremis: Prints Monumental, Intimate, and Encompassing, so fold it into your Friday lunch break if you work anywhere near Union Square.  All three floors of the gallery are filled with a huge variety of prints: linocuts, screenprints, woodblocks, lithographs, and much much more.  The geographical focus of the show is rooted firmly in Northern California, so of course there is plenty of political messaging (and very well-designed political messaging at that) from the likes of the San Francisco Print Collective and the Sit/Lie Posse.  I was also impressed with Joanne Dunne's small, achingly beautiful aquatints (one pictured here) and how she uses the blurriness resulting from her particular printing process to great effect, capturing the rhythms of life in the Bay Area.  I also loved Anthony Ryan's pyramid of psychedelic screenprints, their colors and patterns swirling together into a mind-blowing whole, while the Great Tortilla Conspiracy create their own optical illusion out of an array of printed tortillas.  And yes that is Jesus himself winking at you from their wall.  At the closing party tomorrow night you can take home one of those tortillas for a mere $5, or just watch as Imin Yeh creates prints on the spot, providing his Authentication and Protection Services for all of your Urban God needs.  I guarantee it will be a good time.

See also:

• Meridian Gallery

the book

According to Erika Tsimbrovsky and Vadim Puyandaev of Avy K Productions dance can be improvisational, immersive, participatory.  Entering their current installation at SOMArts I felt as if I myself was walking onto a stage, with lights, free-standing walls, and painted backdrops scattered tantalizingly around the gallery.  Indeed the exhibit is really meant to be inhabited, and over the course of the show Tsimbrovsky and Puyandaev have invited artists and dancers to perform and create work that metaphorically adds pages to the book they have prepared.  You can go now and see videos and photographs documenting some of Avy K's work, suggestions of movement, of connection and separation.  There is a back gallery in which the floor is covered with long strips of plastic while mechanically-generated lines and grids shimmer in one corner.  Puyandaev's abstract paintings adorn some of the walls, and he has also created a "garden" out of sheets of hanging paper and light.  But really you should go Friday night for the closing when the entire space will be activated with dancers, projections, and the audience members themselves, each person bringing their own cache of memories and experiences through which to interpret the proceedings.

See also:

• SOMArts
• Avy K Productions

agenda 07.27.11

My compendium of excellent events this weekend, just for you

Thursday, July 28:

• Comedy at Escapist Comics
• Mind Cemetery/Sister Fucker Tour Kick Off + Cops & Waste Rig at Three Doors Down
• SFWAR Benefit at Lipo Lounge

Friday, July 29:

• Sister Fucker/ Mind Cemetery 4 Day Tour in SoCal and AZ
• The Book: Free Closing Reception at SOMArts
• Common Eider King Eider+Paul Clipson, Bill Orcutt, lazyboy at The Lab

Saturday, July 30:

• Doggie Ice Cream Social at Alpha Pet Supply & The Wild Bird's Nest
• Sneaky's Summertime Social at Sneaky's BBQ
• Whiskey Waxing at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
• Hands Up: Drawing Sesh and Talk at RockPaperScissors
• Ringworm, Nails, New Lows, Crucified, Deep Cover at 924 Gilman
• NO/HO/MO, American Splits, Prison Library, Sunny Reaper & Meat Pressure at Jam City

porcine

An eye for shells: magazine cover, July-August 1955

summer 2011 open house

It was a typically gorgeous afternoon at Headlands Center for the Arts yesterday for their summer open house with plenty of sun and fresh air to be had by all.  Blake and I rolled in for a late lunch of delicious sandwiches in the Mess Hall (a Reuben for him, a vegan concoction for me) and then proceeded to stick our heads into every available studio.  My brief notes:

• Aideen Barry - A dress held aloft by a ring of toy radio-controlled helicopters, tiny films projected onto a fold-out book filled with drawings, one studio wall repurposed into a homemade green screen.  Anxiety cleverly elucidated.
• Nathan Lynch - The entire room set as if it were a stage with ladders, cartoon-like waves cut from wood, a huge inflatable silver pillow, a yoga ball pressed into captivity between two pieces of wood.  I know Lynch for his bird decoy sculptures and am interested to see him moving in what seems like a more deconstructed direction, at least in the Headlands Project Space.
• Mark Braunias - Pages and pages and pages of impressively-rendered drawings, almost caricatures, with humorous typed texts accompanying containing snippets of satire and a personal philosophy of the universe.  Also larger paintings of shapes suggestive of surrealism, Tanguy, Dali.
• Jillian Conrad - Sculptures made of ephemeral materials and seemingly casually assembled, but with real attention paid to the inherent properties of things like plaster and cinder blocks.  She also had a very attractive sand saw.  
• Neil LeDoux - LeDoux is the new Tournesol awardee, which means he'll be at Headlands for an entire year, and has apparently decided to devote his time right now to creating images of enormous magical kitty cats.  I could not more heartily approve.
• Asud Faulwell - Amazingly intricate, hypnotic paintings that utilize pattern and texture in beautiful ways as Faulwell depicts female combatants from the Algerian War of Independence.  He was moving out and only had two works on display, but man they were good.
• Danielle Rante - I liked Rante's works on paper full of thoughtful lines and colors, but the painstakingly-cut webs of paper ladders strung along one side of her studio made me smile even more.  Especially loved the scraps of discarded paper on one of her work tables.
• Swintak (pictured above) - Uncertain about the one-name thing, but thought her fog cannons made of repurposed trash cans were pretty cool.  Also enjoyed the way she had literally thrown a room up one wall complete with chairs and reading material (including a pamphlet about dry ice).
• Benjamin Levy - Dance improvised with several dinner tables, the audience seated around them as if for a meal, with the action occuring on and near said tables.  There was a smattering of cutlery involved too.  One of my favorite things all day.

show 205

playlist

public service announcement

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, July 24
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

As an added bonus High Castle will be joining me roundabouts 11am for a live in-studio performance.  Tune in!

here.

I recently made another appointment at Pier 24, aka our own local climate-controlled photography wonderland, this time to see their current group show that focuses on Bay Area photographers and images of the Bay Area.  Many of the gallery's 20+ rooms are given over to a single photographer, and it is really wonderful to get to spend time with (for instance) a whole suite of Henry Wessel's humor-inflected studies of suburbia or Richard Misrach's intimate pictures of Telegraph Avenue street life.  Larry Sultan (pictured here) brings classical formalism and a subtle sense of mystery to his large-scale images, shot just where nature meets man-made development, while Jim Goldberg makes visible the secret lives of runaways trying to survive in the city.  The natural landscape is well-represented too, from early images of mountains and waterfalls by Carleton Watkins to Eadweard Muybridge's famous panorama of the San Francisco Bay (cleverly paired with a more recent series of photos by Mark Klett of the exact same vista).  I was sad to find the gallery's projectors down for maintenance during my visit, so I was unable to see either work by Kota Ezawa or the scenes from Bullitt that are normally part of the show.  But those should be up by the time you go, and if you get stumped by the lack of wall labels feel free to tap one of the helpful docents who will happily explain what you're looking at. 

See also:

• Pier 24