Through August 14 - Brett Goodroad at Cushion Works
It was pure delight to visit the gallery that Jordan Stein oversees at Cushion Works for the first time yesterday, and yes it is directly above the city's best cushion company, and yes I really have to get my couch cushions restuffed after a year+ of pandemic. I first saw Brett Goodroad's work when he was the Tournesol recipient at Headlands and was happy to see his paintings are as dreamy as they ever were, loosely abstract with suggestions of figuration and landscape that shift with the viewer's proximity. Some of his canvases are quite large now too, and one of my favorite pieces was a deconstructed still life that took up almost an entire wall. Goodroad utilizes impressive technique, building up the paint here and allowing the canvas show through there, and though his work is reminiscent of Romantic era paintings it is at the same time completely contemporary. And spending some time with a gallery full of his work almost feels like a meditation.
Other things I liked this week:
- The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. While I was familiar with excerpts from this marvelously surreal novel thanks to the interpretations Anne Walsh and Moira Roth (RIP) performed several years back, I'd never sat down and read the whole thing and I am so glad I did and in fact I am now planning to reread it at least once a decade as I continue to age into my own eccentric womanhood.
- Freak Orlando by Ulrike Ottinger. An assault on the senses in the best possible way, Ottinger's take on the Virginia Woolf classic has almost no correlation to the later Sally Potter version but instead you get Magdalena Montezuma and Delphine Seyrig cavorting through a succession of bizarre scenarios both historical and mythological. My jaw was hanging open the entire length of the film and I loved it.
- I spent a lovely Independence Day roaming the newly reopened galleries and the newly relandscaped gardens of the Oakland Museum, and almost the most exciting part was my "NorCal NOLA" picnic box from Tanya Holland's new museum café Town Fare.
- Lake Merritt's Rotary Nature Center has been doing wonderful virtual "lakeside chats" throughout the pandemic about the lake's flora and fauna, viewable on their website here.
- Outdoor walking plays are one of my favorite things right now while I work up to being ready to sit in a theater regularly again, and Eye Zen's Out of Site: Haight-Ashbury is particularly special. Actor Tina D'Elia fully embodies two SF icons, entrepreneur Peggy Caserta and Hibiscus of the Cockettes, in and around their old haunts in the Haight, and the show/tour includes a heap of other queer history besides.