Through July 24 - Seeing Sound at Kadist
Slowly but surely I'm making it back to all my fave Bay Area spaces, and it was wonderful to spend some quality audio/visual time yesterday with the three artists curated by Barbara London for this show. I was mesmerized by Samson Young's video, pictured above, showing lion dancers in a traditional performance without the musical accompaniment, the better to hear the sounds of footsteps and breath that are usually buried under drums and cymbals. In a nearby room Marina Rosenfeld's installation of audio equipment accoutrements rewards the patient listener with brief, evocative sounds that seem to boomerang around the small gallery. And you might mistake Aura Satz's piece as a waiting area as you enter Kadist, but instead the comfy chairs are an invitation to sit and dial in to an incredible conversation between Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Spiegel as they riff on the concept of drone. This is an exhibition you experience with your whole body, and it engages in a way I desperately missed during pandemic. While I was out and about I also swung by the excellent Uplift / Heavy Lift juried group show at Berkeley Art Center, curated by Thea Quiray Tagle and speaking to both lockdown and this moment of emergence, and then the rescheduled 2020 Mills College MFA exhibition, which filled me with excitement about the graduated artists even as I'm filled with worry about the future of Mills.
Other things I liked this week:
- Little Snow Landscape by Robert Walser. In a week where my brain felt completely battered by the news it was sheer respite to open this book and read one of Walser's short (sometimes very short) stories. In many cases they are more meditations on landscape or human nature than what you might think of as a traditional story, and arranged chronologically they also show his progression as a writer.
- Aya of Yop City by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie. Abouet transforms her comics about three women in Côte d' Ivoire into an animated film (interspersed with actual vintage ads!) full of color and laughter and amazing music.
- I love bobcats and if you also love bobcats you will love this Bay Nature talk by conservation photographer Sarah Killingsworth about Bay Area bobcats.
- In the closest thing to a live music show I've experienced yet, the Panorama Paranormal program for Gray Area's Recombinant Rebound featured 360-degree sound and spatial cinema works by the likes of Ryoichi Kurokawa, Burial, Fennesz, and Paul Clipson with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. I'm still a little wary of indoor events but this was glorious.