Through October 30 - Maja Dlugolecki: Lost/Found at Glass Rice
This new body of work by Maja Dlugolecki reads as pure emotion on raw canvas, with the artist's intuition guiding every brushstroke and marker line. I continue to very much appreciate how artists are processing the pandemic, and here the title of each painting includes something lost and something found, taken from anonymous responses Dlugolecki crowdsourced from the internet. Layered on top of Dlugolecki's canvases, where in places the color is more sparse and in others diluted paint almost completely saturates the frame, these glimpses of other people's lives led me to meditate on my personal gains and losses over the last 18 months. And then Dlugolecki invites you to write your own anonymous experience of lost/found on a slip of paper and leave it in a box as you exit the gallery.
Other things I liked this week:
- Jennifer's Body directed by Karyn Kusama. I hear from my reliable source in Gen Z that this film is experiencing a resurgence on TikTok right now and rightfully so, with its sharp script by Diablo Cody that centers the female characters in a teen horror movie. There's gore and demonic possession for sure, but also smart things to say about high school friendship.
- My Little Sister directed by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond. Very difficult subject matter here as adult siblings face cancer, but it also has absolutely gorgeous direction that allows Nina Hoss and Lars Eidinger to just do their thing. The depiction of family dynamics, and of the magical thinking that accompanies grief, felt very real too.
- Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust by James Comey. Nothing in here that's new to anyone who regularly reads Heather Cox Richardson, but worth a look for the entertaining stories from early in Comey's career. He tries to explain some of his more controversial positions from recent times too, with varying levels of success.
- I'm grateful to my alma mater UCSC for the online events they've been holding during pandemic, and last week's forum "The 21st Century Revolution in Gender & Sexual Diversity: A New Generation Leads the Way" was particularly inspiring. Psychology professors Phillip Hammack and Adriana Manago made a good case for complicating the media narratives around social media and offered a lot of hope for the future besides.
- This year's Litquake is going full blast right now with an impressive hybrid line-up of outdoor readings and online events, and I was able to catch a virtual conversation Thursday evening between Bonnie Tsui and J.M. Thompson Thursday evening about Thompson's book Running Is a Kind of Dreaming. I will never ever be an Ironperson or even a runner of any kind but I do enjoy hearing about athletes' experiences.
- I also got to dive into the much-postponed Other Minds Festival 25 this weekend thanks to their excellent livestream that made me feel like I was right there in the theater with the musicians. The line-up includes West Coast jazz and new music from Anthony Braxton & Roscoe Mitchell, William Parker, Jen Shyu, Elliott Sharp, Tyshawn Sorey, Darius Jones, Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Halvorson, Amirtha Kidambi, Ikue Mori, Myra Melford, King Britt, William Winant, Junius Paul, Mark Dresser, Sylvie Courvoisier, Hamid Drake, and Ambrose Akinmusire.