Engineer's Daughter

shovels, physiocrats, and the light-footed heavy souls

 

The above video is a mere snippet of a much longer piece by the ever-amazing Suzanne Husky entitled Wash that examines how people who are living off the grid go about the simple act of getting clean.  It was featured in Husky's solo show at Gallery Wendi Norris last year:

In "Shovels, Physiocrats, and the Light-footed Heavy Souls", San Francisco-based artist Suzanne Husky presents the results of her ongoing artistic research into the history, moral underpinnings, quotidian realities, and potential futures of green anarchist lifestyle practices.

See also:

• Gallery Wendi Norris
• Suzanne Husky

agenda 08.28.13

Thursday, August 29:

• Etienne & Bart in Berkeley
• McSweeney's Night of One Hundred Apocalypses at Amnesia
• Fire and Ice NightLife | Music presented by Icee Hot at the California Academy of Sciences
• Decades & Mashi Mashi Present: N.O.W.//Airport//Bankie Phones//Deastro at The Knockout
• MGMT at the Mondavi Center
• Scout Niblett at Cafe Du Nord
• Washed Out at the Rickshaw Stop
• Cafe Tacvba at the Warfield

Friday, August 30:

• Swell Break Workshop: Deep Craft on the Edge at Headlands Center for the Arts
• OtG: Lake Merritt at OMCA
• West of Center Screening: Anna Halprin at Mills College
• Doing Your Dirty Work Two: a sampler of contemporary art about sex at the Center for Sex and Culture
• The Hop, Ladies Night w/ Thee Merry Widows, The Rumble Strippers, DJ Miss Cherry Bomb, Sheba Queen of the Night, Ava Lanche, Truly A Tomic, MC Miss Eva Von Slut, Beefcake Contest by Bettie Page Clothing, Peter Thomas Hair & Karen Knoller Photography at the Elbo Room
• Above and Below: Stories From Our Changing Bay at the Oakland Museum of California
• America's Most Wanted Music Festival 2013 at the Sleep Train Pavilion at Concord

Saturday, August 31:

• Cynic Cave
• San Jose Bacon Festival of America at the Night Market
• Stairing Contests: Stairwell's LPP+ Residency
• Jewel House Rock and Punk Art Show
• The Richmond Sluts, The Asteroid No.4, Lolita + DJ Joel Gion at Brick & Mortar Music Hall
• Battle For The Helm at Showdown
• West of Center: The Body Works Workshop at Mills College
• Regeneration Tour 2013 at the Mountain Winery

Sunday, September 1:

• Stranded In-Store: MX-80 Sound Release Party
• The Psychedelic Furs at the Uptown Theatre Napa

Monday, September 2:

• Quiet Lightning + the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers present: The Greenhouse Effect, v.8
• Ty Segall Performing Sleeper at the Great American Music Hall

Tuesday, September 3:

• Bike Tour of New Bay Bridge
• Gary Numan, Cold Cave at the Oakland Metro Operahouse
• Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards Exhibition at SOMArts
• Superchunk at The Fillmore

Wednesday, September 4:

• Voulkos, Inspired at Berkeley Central Arts Passage
• Zomby at Public Works
• The Zombies at Yoshi's Oakland

syncope

Ivy Hill, Oakland.  August 27, 2013.

go see this

Aimé Mpane

Through August 31 - Aimé Mpane at Haines Gallery.  You don't have to know the history of Mpane's native Congo to be affected by his masterful carved portraits, but add that layer and the images become downright devastating.  Besides the life-size heads pictured above there are gorgeous large murals created on conjoined pieces of wood and a series of topographical faces displayed so they can be viewed from the front (where the colors are muted) and from the back (where the colors are decidedly more vibrant).  If you're reminded of Picasso in those faces that's very much intentional, as Mpane sets up a dialogue with the artist who was himself inspired by African art.  Mpane fearlessly grapples with the dichotomies of Africa and Europe, of colonized and colonizer.

The Single Wing Turquoise Bird

Through September 1 - West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977 at the Mills College Art Museum.  Co-curated by Elissa Arthur and Adam Lerner, this exhibit collects artifacts from a number of individuals and collectives who embraced the kind of expansive thinking for which the American West is known.  As a West Coaster born and raised I was inspired at every turn by (just for starters) the inflatable architectures of Ant Farm, the life-as-theater genderfuck antics of the Cockettes and the Angels of Light, the Bucky-domes of Drop City, the anti-establishment feminism of the Womyn's Lands of Southern Oregon.  I'd recommend this show over Burning Man any day, and you also have a chance this week to party at a special reception Wednesday night and/or to attend a screening Friday evening documenting the revolutionary dance of living legend Anna Halprin.

show 272

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panorama

Hendrikje Kühne/Beat Klein

Hendrikje Kühne/Beat Klein

Hendrikje Kühne/Beat Klein

Hendrikje Kühne and Beat Klein repeatedly take collage to another level, as demonstrated at their Panorama installation at Kunsthalle Wil in Switzerland last year.  The pair utilized art posters as their raw material but used the imagery to invent their own 26-meter-long version of reality (there are some close-ups at the gallery link below).  Your dorm room walls this ain't.

See also:

• Kunsthalle Wil
• Kühne/Klein

agenda 08.21.13

Thursday, August 22:

• Stranded DJ Set: Colm O Ciosoig (My Bloody Valentine)
• Nobunny / Violence Creeps at Eli's Mile High Club
• Artists Drawing Club: Rendition with Toyin Odutola at the Asian Art Museum
• Speaker Series: Charles & Ray Eames, Their Legacy of Ideas at the Museum of Craft and Design
• Melvins at Slim's
• Beat This Summer Tour at Shoreline Amphitheatre

Friday, August 23:

• Natural Organized Wonder (LA) /\ Mohani (oakland) /\ Pregnant (Sac) at MOCO
• The Lieutenant of Inishmore at Masquers Playhouse
• Kill Your First w/ Windsor Waterworks & Classy Pants ((Improv at Cynic Cave))
• No Age at the Berkeley Art Museum
• Under the Influence at The Emerald Tablet
• My Bloody Valentine at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
• The Funky Meters at The New Parish

Saturday, August 24:

• Pint Sized Prints Closing Reception at Turpentine
• 20th Street Block Party
• Stranded In-Store: Richie Unterberger (Velvet Underground historian)
• Twin Steps 7" RECORD RELEASE w/ Wide Streets(LA) + Michael Vidal (Abe Vigoda) + The Tambo Rays at 1-2-3-4 Go!
• KFJC Listener Appreciation Party at Homestead Lanes
• Shine On presents Manatee / #1 Smash Hits / Nacho Business
• Name Dropping Stories Off the Top of My Head & The Curtain Raiser at Ever Gold
• Courtney Love at the Phoenix Theater

Sunday, August 25:

• Soul Sundays feat. Tugboat & Fro/Zen at Local 123
• Queer/Trans* Night with Violent Vickie, Annah Anti-Palindrome, Young Coconut, more at 924 Gilman
• Speakeasy Show: People's Palms, Former Selves, Gossimer, Briana Marela, Curved Graves
• 4th Sunday at the Ruby Room
• Gargamel - DJ Night at the Night Light

Monday, August 26:

• Off the Grid: Southside Berkeley Reopening
• Try the Pie//Ryan Stark//SBSM//this or that at MOCO
• Nerd Nite East Bay #11: Materials, Monotremes, and MMMMM...Mollusks at the New Parkway
• Health Problems | WIld Moth | Dead Seeds | Cold Circuits at Casa Sanchez
• Workshop | Print Your Own Broadside at the Book Club of California
• Deerhunter at the Great American Music Hall
• Black Sabbath at Shoreline Amphitheatre
• How to Dress Well at The Independent
• The Breeders at the Rio Theatre

Tuesday, August 27:

• Myron & E at Amoeba Berkeley
• Mal Blum (NY) + A6/2GENERATOR + Rybree at MOCO
• The Breeders at The Fillmore
• Stones Throw Soul Tour at The New Parish
• Cold Cave at the Blank Club

Wednesday, August 28:

• ::Draft Horse:: Doctor Striker & Le Fomo at MOCO
• Carey Lin: & what have you // Opening Reception at Tartine Bakery
• International Freakout A Go-Go with guest Russell Quan at the Make-Out Room
• Shelley Hirsch at Meridian Galley
• MGMT at the Warfield
• The Breeders at The Fillmore

procrustes

Doughnut Plant, NYC.  March 16, 2011.

schrödinger's cats

Ginger Wolfe-Suarez & Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe

Christopher Füllemann

Dana Hemenway

Andrew Chapman

Aaron Finnis

Through August 23 - Schrödinger's Cats at The Popular Workshop.  In honor of Erwin Schrödinger's birthday last week (and the lovely Google doodle that accompanied it) I decided it was high time to visit this group show curated by the unstoppable Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour.  Using the paradox at the heart of Schrödinger's famous thought experiment as a starting point, the duo have assembled artworks that collectively hover in a delicious state of uncertainty.  The show itself existed in a different form at Oakland's Important Projects back in the spring, and though there are some witty references to that earlier iteration the current exhibition at The Popular Workshop contains its own set of surprises.  A visitor practically has to walk through a massive installation by Ginger Wolfe-Suarez and Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe to enter the show, and the pair have also contributed architecturally-inspired works on paper similarly entrancing, poignant, and confounding in turn.  Dana Hemenway cleverly presents the common gallery artifacts of pedestal and vitrine all wrapped up, as if in transit, while the moving blankets themselves become the works of art.  The exuberance of Christopher Füllemann's palm-topped sculpture is a beautiful foil to the quiet minimalism of Aaron Finnis's luminous striped panels, while a trio of paintings by Andrew Chapman appear to shimmer and morph before your very eyes.  I was also moved by how the curators extended the theme of the show into human relationships in an excerpt from the exhibition statement:

A confession: often I see you in passing and though we know each other and have met on multiple occasions neither of us flinches, waves, or nods.  Are we pretending we don't recognize each other?  Maybe we don't connect what we're seeing with the person we knew.  Contact is a risky enterprise, and not always what we're looking for; perhaps we're avoiding excess communication likely to be rote and unsalutary.  As likely a scenario: we recognize each other, we veer from our path to greet and upon beginning to speak we realize we've mistaken each other for someones else, or we are ever-new, forever people wearing the disguise of who we used to be.

See also:

• The Popular Workshop
• Ginger Wolfe-Suarez
• Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe
• Christopher Füllemann
• Dana Hemenway
• Andrew Chapman
• Aaron Finnis

show 271

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