Engineer's Daughter

expanded field

Emma Spertus

Sarah Hotchkiss

Christine M. Peterson

Recently closed: the group show Expanded Field at MacArthur B Arthur, curated by Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour.  Crack local curatorial team Im and Harbour put together five fantastic Bay Area artists, told them to play with the space of the gallery in some way, and then set them loose in MacArthur B Arthur's converted storefront.  Amy M. Ho chose to construct an eyebending white curve in one corner that actually eliminated the corner entirely, while Torreya Cummings installed a piece in which you peered through wood slats to glimpse mirrors and a disco ball, her cheeky take on the promise of SF gay culture.  Christine M. Peterson used black plexiglass to cleverly highlight the inside of a doorway and create the mirror image of two windows high on one gallery wall, while her slide projection piece utilizing found professional vacation photographs shot diffuse colors right out the window and onto the street outside (or onto whoever happened to be walking by).  For Emma Spertus's trio of sculptures she took black-and-white images of Rococo and Baroque architecture and fit them precisely to corners of the gallery walls and also wrapped them around the interior and exterior of a hexagonal shape, and then Sarah Hotchkiss launched the exhibition theme quite literally into the ether by asking attendees to fill out a questionnaire in which they imagined a meeting space for her Young Astronaut Club.  The compiled results will be forthcoming.

See also:

• MacArthur B Arthur
• Amy M. Ho
• Torreya Cummings
• Emma Spertus
• Christine M. Peterson
• Sarah Hotchkiss

stochastic

The First Gift, for kindergarten play, devised by Friedrich Froebel, Germany, 1898

topple the table of correspondences

Elijah Burgher

Elijah Burgher

Elijah Burgher

Already closed: Elijah Burgher's Toppling the Table of Correspondences at [ 2nd floor projects ] with an accompanying limited edition broadside by Scott Treleaven.  I visit Margaret Tedesco's [ 2nd floor projects ] far too infrequently, but when I do a number of things are guaranteed.  First of all the art on display will be thoughtfully curated and presented.  Secondly, somehow some of the nicest and most interesting people in the city will happen to be there at the same time as I am.  And last but definitely not least, I will walk away with a beautiful edition produced specifically for that show featuring some top-notch writing.  This time Scott Treleaven, himself a noted artist and filmmaker, elucidates Elijah Burgher's fascinating colored pencil drawings:

Burgher's work embodies all kinds of paradox.  In one respect his drawings are unapologetically formal, sober and controlled, built with an almost architectural consciousness.  His "sigil" drawings, especially, suggest a Hans Hofmann painting set upon by cookie-cutters and then reassembled with a modernist hand that allows the pictures to be appreciated on a purely structural level.  On the other hand, his images are also deeply sensual, obscure, subterranean; his flirtatiously scholarly and guttural titles, the scattering of glyphs and intuitive symbology embedded in the work, its unapologetic celebration of gay sexuality, its lusty Fauvist colors.

Personally I also see Maholy-Nagy and the Russian constructivists in Burgher's sigil drawings, and his more representational works span the very breadth of art history, sometimes even quoting from it specifically as when he reproduces a Caravaggio or an ancient sculpture.  Margaret also had a copy of AA Bronson's remarkable book Queer Spirits on hand, a tome that loosely documents (including through drawings by Burgher) secret group rituals Bronson conducted in locations like Fire Island, New Orleans, and Winnipeg.  Eye-opening to say the least, and often funny too.  Even though the Burgher show is now down he is always posting new work on his blog, and then the next show at [ 2nd floor projects ] featuring paintings by Amanda Kirkhuff and an edition written by Amy Scholder also looks bona fide amazing.  Tell Margaret I sent ya.

See also:

• [ 2nd floor projects ]
• Elijah Burgher
• Scott Treleaven
• Queer Spirits

ostranenie

Laura Zaylea

Chris Kennedy

 

Sarah Wylie A VanMeter

Closing January 21: the Ostranenie: Reconsidering the Known group show at Aggregate Space, curated by Jennifer Rarick.  Last Friday I made one stop during Art Murmur at this newish space in West Oakland, a former grow house that has been completely transformed into a gorgeous gallery (complete with built-in screening room) by proprietors Sarah and Conrad.  They are especially committed to showing sculpture and digital media, as is evidenced in this current show, and I was beyond thrilled to see so many female film and video artists included.  Themed around the idea of recognition, Ostranenie presents works that tweak viewer expectations and deliberately try to make the familiar unfamiliar again.  Laura Zaylea's hanging sculptures are vaguely biological but are not easily identified as any particular organisms, and then she heightens the feeling of mystery by implanting flickering videos in their skins.  Nearby faint lines of light courtesy of Sarah Wylie A VanMeter dance over the walls, inviting the viewer to step right into their midst and try to guess their source.  I also loved Chris Kennedy's Phantoms, a grainy black and white film of a suspended monorail in Wuppertal, Germany, that is playing in that aforementioned screening room.  I had no idea such a people-mover actually existed in the world and at first assumed Kennedy had somehow invented it.  My thoughts were echoed out loud by one of the children in the room with me, who asked his dad, "It's real?!?!"

See also:

• Aggregate Space
• Laura Zaylea
• Chris Kennedy

show 227

playlist

hypochondriac

Annette Messager, Let's Laugh, Black, 2003

pine flat

Sharon Lockhart

Sharon Lockhart

Sharon Lockhart

Closing soon: Sharon Lockhart's Lunch Break installation at SFMOMA, photographs and a film that provide documentation of the year Lockhart spent with industrial workers at the Bath Iron Works in Maine.  The museum has been celebrating the last weeks of her exhibition with special events including a pop-up lunch room at SFMOMA on Friday (the vegan duck banh mi from Rice Paper Scissors was out of this world, as was Blue Bottle's homemade crackerjack) and a short series of Lockhart's films.  Thursday night I attended the first half of her 2005 film Pine Flat before running off to John Wiese's show at The Lab, but the part I saw was wonderfully meditative.  Really just a sequence of extended shots in which very little happens (people started sneaking out of the theater after about fifteen minutes), Pine Flat focuses on adolescents who are growing up in the foothills of the Sierras, catching them at that poignant moment in between youth and adulthood.  The settings are pastoral and recall classical figure painting as Lockhart's subjects find ways to pass the time, some with patience and others exhibiting a more restless spirit.  For more Lockhart this coming Thursday SFMOMA will be showing two more of her films, Podworka and No, or just head up to the museum's fourth floor to experience Lunch Break.

See also:

• SFMOMA
• Sharon Lockhart

show 226

playlist

here be dragons

Val Britton

Eric Fischer

Tucker Nichols

After sleeping on it for months I finally made it over to the cool new space Intersection for the Arts is now inhabiting at 5th and Mission tonight for their current group show Here Be Dragons: Mapping Information and Imagination.  For someone who adores maps and data as much as I do there is much to love in this exhibition, particularly Eric Fischer's renderings of things like MUNI route density and tourist concentration and a beautifully nonsensical conglomeration of street-grid-like forms by Tucker Nichols.  The real reason to run over there right this moment though is Val Britton's installation Burst Apart in which she finally explodes her work off the wall and into the third dimension.  It has to come down this weekend before she heads off to a project in Brooklyn, so make a trip to the gallery part of your lunch break.

See also:

• Intersection for the Arts
• Val Britton
• Eric Fischer
• Tucker Nichols

noosphere

Natalia Goncharova, Portrait of the poet Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilov smoking and writing his poem "A Blue Summerhouse on a River," date unknown