Teresa Baker
Bailey Hikawa
Andrew Chapman
Through July 11 - An Arbitrary Group of Paintings at Et al. The title of this excellent group show is not intending to be misleading, or disingenuous. For their interpretation of the traditional summer exhibition Facundo Argañaraz, Jackie Im, and Aaron Harbour gathered together work from half a dozen artists that they like a whole lot, from the Bay Area and beyond, and then let the conversations develop in the gallery as they would. Teresa Baker's irregularly-shaped fluorescent vinyl piece grabs your attention as soon as you step into the gallery, and I continue to track her incisive investigations into color and materiality with great excitement. Artworks by James Chronister, Chris Hood, and Andrew Chapman adhere to more traditional notions of painting (i.e., flat rectangular canvases on the wall), but each artist applies paint with widely varying techniques, such as in Chronister's meticulous tape-strip abstractions. Alexander Wolff, like Baker, does not limit himself to the second dimension and sews dyed canvas pieces into concise tactile patterns, while Bailey Hikawa has contributed (along with a painting and a cheeky Putt Blug sculpture upstairs) two large floor works made out of carpet scraps that amplify Wolff's ideas about texture and form. Wonderful things always happen when the Et al. curators trust their artists, and what emerges here is not a show with a rigidly controlled theme but is instead a rich exploration of the possibilities of painting right now.
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