Engineer's Daughter

disputed episodes

Martin McMurray

Martin McMurray

Martin McMurray

Through December 22 - Martin McMurray: Disputed Episodes.  McMurray's paintings are not exactly comfortable, often depicting moments where there has been a disconnect, where things have clearly taken a turn for the worse.  This show encompasses a wide range of his work: full-scale paintings, smaller works on paper, trompe l'oeil books.  The latter with their evocative (and often hilarious) titles and back-cover author portraits allow the viewer no further access as they are made out of solid wood and do not open.  McMurray's figurative work can be similarly impenetrable but remains psychologically rich, especially when he veers into the outright surreal.  His hyper-expressionist style is well suited to those dark corners of human relationships he examines closely where others might choose to look away.

See also:

• Gallery 16
• Martin McMurray

matokie mix 12.16.12

mix

This one won't be updated for a little while because I'm DJing next week:
9pm - midnight PST, Sunday, December 23
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

And the week after that:
Noon - 3pm PST, Sunday, December 30
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

claudia x. valdes

Claudia X. Valdes

Claudia X. Valdes

From Valdes's site:

Minutes to Midnight is based on a series of performances that took place between 2006-2008 at the Trinity Test Site, located on White Sands Missile Range in Alamogordo, NM.  Documented in Super 8 film, an eight second clip of the performance is distended to over 10 minutes.

The piece was featured in a group show last year at SITE Santa Fe called Time-Lapse.  From the press release:

Time-Lapse challenges the notion that an exhibition is a fixed entity with artworks that remain consistent throughout the time the exhibition is on view. Time-Lapse explores the possibility of a more dynamic exhibition environment by including artworks that change over time and utilizing curatorial structures that are based on change. With hourly, daily, and weekly alterations to the works in the show, no two days of Time-Lapse will be the same...Questioning the nature of time is a subtext for some of the works in the exhibition; other works question the nature of current curatorial practice by exploiting alternative time-based exhibition platforms such as the performance series or the Internet.

agenda 12.12.12

Thursday, December 13:

• Women, Art, and Technology: An Uneasy Access? at the Performance Art Institute
• Kala “Artists’ Annual” Exhibition and Opening
• Thrill Jockey Records 20th Anniversary Show at The Independent

Friday, December 14:

• Marine Hugonnier and Taha Belal "Disrupt" Opening Reception at Highlight Gallery
• SF Cinematheque Year End Party Fundraiser + Auction at Incline Gallery and the Roxie
• Points of Departure: Trivial Pursuit: A nomadic talk series curated by Zoë Taleporos and Pablo Guardiola at Royal Nonesuch Gallery
• The Mountain Goats at The Fillmore
• Psychic TV, Lumerians, King Dude, Youth Code at the Uptown

Saturday, December 15:

• Record Weasels Record $wap at Brownstar Studios
• Small Art Show at Warehouse 416
• Chris Ballantyne, Michael Light at Hosfelt Gallery
• Artist Talk with Colpa Press’s Luca Antonucci & Carissa Potter at Kala
• Art Hack Day: Lethal Software Exhibit & Holiday Party at GAFFTA
• Mago with Dohee Lee at Meridian Gallery
• Psychic TV, Lumerians, King Dude, Youth Code at the Uptown
• No Way Back with Optimo, Conor, and Solar at Monarch

Sunday, December 16:

• Flowers at Artists' Television Access

Monday, December 17:

• Dee Dee and Brandon play songs from Dum Dum Girls and The Crocodiles at the Rickshaw Stop
• KMEL Holiday House of Soul with The Weeknd at the Warfield

Tuesday, December 18:

• There's a Song In My Heart: a Holiday Party for Visual Aid at Varnish Fine Art
• Sunn O))) at Mezzanine

Wednesday, December 19:

• Fuzz with Ty Segall & Charlie Mootheart at the Hemlock Tavern
• Psychic Ills, Wymond Miles at Bottom of the Hill

nincompoop

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Golden), SFMOMA.  May 13, 2010.

temporary structures

Amy M. Ho


Christian Nagler & Azin Seraj

Michael Robinson

Through December 15 - Temporary Structures at the SF Art Institute.  One of the most cohesive group shows I've seen recently, Temporary Structures plays with ideas about architecture and the space of the Walter and McBean Galleries in various ways.  From the moment you step through the entrance and into Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt's so-timely tribute to the Brasilia of Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer's imagination you are ushered into a series of transformative experiences, many of them specific to the exhibition.  The floor-to-ceiling arch that Paul Kos carved into the gallery wall in 1985 has been uncovered once again, and you can clearly see footprints up the sides from when he reenacted his climbing performance at the show opening.  The concrete waterfall David Ireland poured down the gallery steps for another show in 1987 is (sadly) included in photo documentation only, but Amy M. Ho uses mirrors and projections on that staircase to create some Escheresque sleight-of-hand around and underneath it.  Christian Nagler and Azin Seraj's witty Market Fitness videos that combine economic theory with strenuous workouts are displayed on angular metal structures that echo Jonathan Runcio's nearby installation commenting on architect Paffard Keatinge-Clay's 1969 expansion to the Institute that melded brutalism to the school's original Mission-style building.  Also take the time to watch all of Michael Robinson's Victory Over the Sun, a mystery-laden journey through the World's Fair structures that in large part inspired the whole exhibition.

See also:

• Temporary Structures

matokie mix 12.09.12

mix

donna huanca

Donna Huanca

Donna Huanca

Donna Huanca

From CCS Bard:

El Saturn Records’ founder Alton Abraham’s notebook sketches of an imaginary, multi-leveled El Saturn Cosmic Research Center – with an “El Saturn Wisdom Research Culture Art Foundation” and “Sound Department” – hold a special place in Afrofuturism’s history of sonic experiments. This exhibition was conceived with a speculative premise: what if the Center had actually come to fruition and continued to operate in our present context? Invited to contribute work to this imaginary site as a “sound scientist” is multidisciplinary artist Donna Huanca. She will create a sonic-installation testing the potential of her sound-based art practice and subjective investigations into her Incan-Andean ancestry. If El Saturn offered a relation between myth-science, counter-narratives and ideas of self-determination, Huanca takes up this relation in the context of sound technology and the gallery space. As a site for this interdisciplinary investigation, the gallery offers a dialogue between Huanca’s longstanding interest in the psychology of genetic memory, and the diasporic effects of heritage and ancestry. While the installation quotes histories of ethnographic display, sound will interrupt the temporal sequence of objects, creating a fragmented experience, but also producing alternate channels of narrative production and movement within the exhibition space. Stemming from explorations into national origins and feelings of cultural displacement, Huanca engages with cultural imaginaries and myths that for her are both present and absent. As Sun Ra once said, “The myth is neither bad nor good, its potentials are unlimited.”

See also:

• Donna Huanca

agenda 12.05.12

Thursday, December 6:

• Publication Studio Printing On-Demand at The Popular Workshop
• To Be Determined #2 at new nothing cinema
• Poolside, Blackbird Blackbird, DJ Kele of Bloc Party at the Rickshaw Stop

Friday, December 7:

• Dis/Order: Juried Annual 2013 at Pro Arts
• MFA in Event Planning at Rise Above Graphics
• Mission Holiday Block Party
• MacArthur B Arthur's Final Exhibition: The Home Show
• TALKIES Holiday Show at Lost Weekend Video
• Destroy// 11 dancers + Ava Mendoza, Dominic Cramp, Mike Guarino, Leyya Tawil at Joe Goode Performance Group
• Point of No Return at Southern Exposure
• Cathy Cunningham-Little and Amy M. Ho at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary
• [email protected]: Sam Sax at the Berkeley Art Museum
• Quartet San Francisco Plays the Music of Raymond Scott at the Berkeley Art Museum
• MadC at 1:AM Gallery
• Jack White, The Shins, Metric, Two Door Cinema Club, Of Monsters and Men, The Gaslight Anthem at the Oakland Arena
• White Lung, Turbo Fruits, CCR Headcleaner at Bottom of the Hill
• Low End Theory SF at 1015 Folsom

Saturday, December 8:

• PrettyBluePresents: ReligiousGirls, MTNS (Seattle), Laughters, Believe at Purple Haus
• Everything Is Terrible Holiday Special West at ABCO Art Space
• Misfit Toy Factory at Root Division
• M83, Passion Pit, Tegan and Sara, The Killers, Grouplove, Imagine Dragons at the Oakland Arena
• The Polyphonic Spree at Slim's
• John Prine, Justin Townes Earle at the Warfield
• Dispirit//Thrones//Bädr Vogu//Crypt Keeper at 1530 E. 12th St.

Sunday, December 9:

• Points of Departure: Trivial Pursuit at Royal Nonesuch Gallery
• Meshell Ndegeocello, Con Brio at the Great American Music Hall

Monday, December 10:

• Tom Grrrl / Bitter Fruit / Pig DNA / S.B.S.M. at Menage Twat
• White Cloud + Freak Heat Waves + Means Streets + Chief at The Hidden Temple
• David Bazan, Stagnant Pools at the Independent

Tuesday, December 11:

• Jaberi & Deutsch, the Spencer Owen Consortium, Makeunder at the Night Light

Wednesday, December 12:

• Take Off: Kota Ezawa, Kenneth Goldsmith at Kadist SF

decimate

Platja de la Barceloneta, Barcelona.  November 26, 2009.