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Closing March 4 - DE-MOBBING: Landscape, Structure, Bioform. The Headlands' annual pre-residency group show is always chock full of excellent local artists, some familiar and some completely new to me, and this year the selection is particularly strong. Spend an afternoon out there, fill your head with art.
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Auguste Rodin, The Kiss, 1889, photographed in the Rodin Museum, photographer unknown
Prajakti Jayavant
Prajakti Jayavant
Prajakti Jayavant
Already closed - Fold. Color. Limn. by Prajakti Jayavant at Meridian Gallery. Jayavant's work straddles the line between painting and sculpture as she is not content to merely apply pigment to paper but then prods and shapes her materials in such a way that her pieces become their own discrete objects. She describes her process best herself:
With the utmost intention, I refine the shaggy circumferences of smudges, cut precisely, crease and tuck. Determined curves, strategic color and encrypted folds combine to create ideological dimension. Each piece is a chosen accumulation of imprinted actions over time.
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Sarah Player Morrison
Darrin Martin
Elizabeth Bernstein
Closing January 29 - Corporeal at Martina }{ Johnston. The body has so long been a subject in art that it's rare to see truly fresh takes on the subject, but Indira Martina Morre and Farley Gwazda have very thoughtfully assembled a group of artists in their home gallery who grapple with our too solid flesh in all its complexity. Sarah Player Morrison's large-scale nude paintings carry the weight of those by Lucian Freud, but they come from a distinctly female perspective that is still no less unflinching in its gaze. Darrin Martin dresses up his bone-anchored hearing aid in handmade prosthetics and then stitches together sequences of self-portraits, and just as arresting is his video Navel Mining with its themes of alien abduction and biological invasion set to an otherworldly soundtrack of noises generated by the artist himself. Keith Lea and Alan Resnick present a sort of infomercial offering imperfectly rendered 3D avatars of sleeping friends, while in the gallery's beautiful new screening room Curtis Tamm takes you on a magical and vastly uncomfortable journey into inner space, edited together from found medical instruction videos. Finally I defy you not to be stopped in your tracks by Elizabeth Bernstein's honest, erotic, devastating photographs. That image above of the topography of her mom's knees crushed my heart.
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Anneke Eussen
Anneke Eussen
Anneke Eussen
Closing January 29 - Anneke Eussen: Close to What's Real at Highlight Gallery. Christy Chan in The Bold Italic recently wrote a piece about the awesome alternative art spaces Bay Area residents have created within their own homes to show art, among them 667 Shotwell, Unspeakable Projects, and Highlight Gallery. I had just had Highlight strongly recommended to me by an acquaintance as well, so I made the pilgrimage out to Pacific Heights during the gallery's open hours last Saturday. Highlight is concentrating on artists from Belgium in its first year (future countries will also get a year each), and Eussen joins an exhibition roster that has included Filip Dujardin, Christophe Coppens, and Renato Nicolodi so far. Eussen herself is not constrained by any one genre, displaying oversized colored pencil drawings tinged with shadows and unexpected textures in one room and an installation of a linked chain net draped over a floating metal pipe in another. Her Guests photographs, documenting sculptures composed of hotel room contents and of the hotel guests themselves, play with vision and perception. She has mounted the photos as transparencies on mirrors so that the people within the images seem to float, slightly displaced. Her work is like that: it attracts you, draws you closer, and then cleverly tweaks the plot.
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Sharon Lockhart
Sharon Lockhart
Just two images from Sharon Lockhart's 2009 video Podworka, vignettes of children at play in the urban landscape of Lodz, Poland, and her 2003 film No, a single 34-minute shot of two farmers in rural Japan spreading hay over a field. I watched both at SFMOMA last week while I was there saying goodbye to Lockhart's Lunch Break installation before it closed, and the moment No appeared on screen I suffered a severe shock of recognition: I had seen it at the Camden Arts Centre in London in 2005 as part of an amazing group show curated by Tacita Dean, An Aside. Dean had described Lockhart's film as "an autumn elegy about time, perspective and labour in a landscape that is changing colour." I was just as hypnotized seeing it now as I had been by it in London, and the work of the farmer couple was a beautiful contrast to the play of the children in Podworka too.
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Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro
Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro
Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro
Closing January 28: Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro's Par Avion at Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern. This is an installation that, although impressive all on its own, becomes even more interesting with a little bit of background. The pieces laid out on the floor in the shape of a plane are exactly that, a small fighter that the Berlin-based Healy and Cordeiro acquired in their home country of Australia and then summarily dismantled. Each section was sent to Frey Norris par avion (natch), propelling the Cessna through the air in a completely different way than it had traveled before when it was still all in one piece. I only wondered if the whole plane is accounted for, or if anything had been lost in transit.
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