Engineer's Daughter

notes from the weekend

• My art wanderings found me close to home in Oakland this weekend, starting with the Open Source show at Gearbox Gallery that features work by Maria Porges and Harry Clewans in a fascinating juxtaposition between Porges's ceramic vase-shaped sculptures and pieces by Clewans composed of wood-block prints that have been combined into imagined landscapes and interiors. As the title of the exhibition suggests, both artists pull from cultural artifacts and reconfigure them into something personal and new.
• Meanwhile over at Slate Contemporary a trio of artists seem to bend photons themselves in their work in a show entitled Catching Light. I was utterly smitten by the gradations of color in Jenn Shifflet's abstract oil paintings and glass pieces, and I also loved Kana Tanaka's chunky glass installations alongside large-scale sunset photography by Thea Schrack. The whole mood created in the gallery is decidedly meditative.
• Saturday night I returned to the theater at BAMPFA for the first time since pandemic for one of my fave Preston Sturges films, The Lady Eve, complete with a special introduction by Sturges scholar Stuart Klawans. What a treat to laugh along to the onscreen antics with a sold-out audience too.
• And then yesterday afternoon I took advantage of the fact that the 2023 West Edge Opera Festival is being held walking distance from my apartment at the Oakland Scottish Rite Center and went to go see their glorious production of The Coronation of Poppea by Monteverdi. This former classics major delighted in all of the ancient Roman intrigue onstage...and tried not to think too hard about the real-life Poppea's fate as she and Nero sang their ever-so-gorgeous duet at the end.

matokie mix 07.31.23

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notes from the weekend

• Anyone who knows me knows that I have long been a huge cheerleader for Headlands Center for the Arts, and mercifully their Graduate Fellowship program made it through the pandemic intact. The 2022-23 awardees have a wonderful show up at The Lab right now as the culmination of their year-long residency at Headlands, and it's a great cheat sheet for which artists to keep your eye on as they embark on their careers post-grad-school. Rumor has it that Headlands will be doing more programming in S.F. in future, and it's so wonderful to see art back at The Lab again too!
• While I was in the neighborhood I took a stroll down a car-free Valencia to City Art Cooperative Gallery, which is still going strong after 25 years. I remember when they opened just after I'd moved to the Bay Area myself, and I always recommend popping in to find an affordable piece of art or to chat with the artists behind the counter.
• My final stop for the day was the Haight Street Art Center, where in the current exhibition Dawn State collaborative artists Monica Canilao and Xara Thustra have used Reuben Kadish's trippy on-site WPA mural as a jumping-off point for their own exuberant installations. The show also includes life-size queer icons by Silky Shoemaker and artwork by Samedi Djeimguero and Adam Ansell, and the joyful, defiant chaos will leave you feeling uplifted indeed.

matokie mix 07.24.23

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midsummer mozart festival

Is there anything more divine than listening to Mozart on a midsummer evening, in a room designed by Julia Morgan upstairs at the Berkeley City Club, with golden light gently filtering in through the trees outside the windows? Not much, I say. Thanks to the Midsummer Mozart Festival that's exactly where I found myself last night, delighting in a program of chamber music that seemed especially selected for the environs. MMF music director Paul Schrage played us a jig, a fantasy, and the wondrous Adagio in B minor on piano, while executive director Robin Hansen (who also happens to be an accomplished violinist) wowed us with the composer's Sonata for Violin and Piano in B flat major. The evening came to a close with the spritely Quintet for Piano and Winds and E flat major, with notes from oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon twining together just perfectly. The Festival is also performing a separate symphonic program this year, including the comic opera Bastien and Bastienne which Mozart wrote when he was 12, and though that sounded mighty tantalizing I deliberately sought out these more intimate works in a venue that I adore. Mozart's music always lifts my spirits and soothes my troubled soul.

Masking? A smattering.

notes from the weekend

• Undeterred by 91-degree heat, perhaps foolishly, I made a couple of inspiring stops in San José this weekend starting with the Museum of Quilts & Textiles for their Queer Threads group exhibition. Featuring a multitude of contemporary West Coast artists loosely linked by their queer identity and work in fiber arts, the show embodies a lot of sass and joy and humor along with more sobering moments, as with the inclusion of a small portion of the AIDS Quilt.
• And just down the street the Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist retrospective at the San José Museum of Art is a bona fide showstopper and a worthy tribute to an important and influential feminist icon. I loved López's monumental drawings of herself, her mother, and her grandmother, but her more intimate paintings and collages are wonderful too. Sadie Barnette's very cool Family Business installation is still up at the museum too, just follow your ears.

matokie mix 07.17.23

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the great animal orchestra

Run don't walk to experience The Great Animal Orchestra at the Exploratorium right now, a gorgeous installation that melds the amazing field recordings Bernie Krause has been archiving for the last 50+ years with a mesmerizing visualization of the sounds you are hearing. Divided into segments that range around the world and under our oceans, the Orchestra shows you the waveforms wildlife create in a continually-scrolling spectrogram. It is sheer pleasure to immerse yourself in the sounds of the natural world (the howling coyotes in one segment brought tears of happiness to my eyes), but Krause is also intent on showing what happens when we don't protect these habitats and allow them to succumb to drought, to logging, to bleaching, as in the sobering "Before/After" segment that opens the entire piece. If you prefer your Exploratorium with only adults and no kids you can attend one of their Thursday evening After Dark sessions, as my friends and I did last night, and in our case we were also able to catch an incredible talk by Krause and Kronos Quartet violinist David Harrington. They reflected on their personal histories with sound and mused about the importance of listening, and above all emphasized how we need to preserve biodiversity and reverse the damage we've done.

Masking? A smattering of masks, which is probably just where we're going to be from here on out.

notes from the weekend

• I'd never attended a SPARC Theater production before but the chance to see Lauren Gunderson's Silent Sky, about the women at Harvard who made important contributions to the field of astronomy, under the canopy of the actual night sky in Livermore was just too good to pass up. And both the idyllic outdoor location at Darcie Kent Vineyards and the production itself, focusing on the brilliant Henrietta Leavitt as played by Elena Wright and full of Gunderson's trademark firecracker dialogue, was well worth the schlep.
• As I'd hoped, I was able to visit many galleries on Saturday and started with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, where their What Are Words Worth? group show is their last exhibition before the space closes for good (sigh). The curators chose work from the McEvoy collection that utilizes text in sculpture, photography, collage, neon, you name it, and with one whole gallery dedicated to the work of German conceptual photographer Natalie Czech of whom I am now a new fan. Thank you for all the great exhibitions, McEvoy!
• Meanwhile over at Creativity Explored, one of my fave writers Hilton Als curated a beautiful show called Figuratively Speaking: Art in Advertising, Writing in Art. Primarily featuring the work of Douglas Sheran and his transformations of magazine print ads into subtle pieces of abstract art, the exhibition also includes a single artwork each by Bertha Otoya and Roland Record to create some thought-provoking juxtapositions.
• And Jessica Silverman has not one but two fabulous shows up right now, the first being Jeffrey Gibson's Once More With Feeling featuring a series of his mesmerizing mixed-media collages. Gibson freely incorporates elements of his Native heritage including beadwork and pattern and then throws in song lyrics besides, creating a riot of color and reference, and I could stare at any one of these pieces for an hour.
• The other exhibition, Isaac Julien's Once Again...(Statues Never Die), is a complete showstopper as it conjures scenes out of Black history and culture filtered through Julien's sharp eye. Julien is referencing specific figures from the past but you don't have to know that to appreciate how he reframes the narrative and shifts our collective gaze.
• Last but definitely not least I took myself out to the Concord Pavilion last night for the Hot Summer Nights tour and specifically to see my girls En Vogue and TLC. I can't remember the last time I'd been at a show that large and certain aspects of the experience were absolutely ridiculous but also I danced like I was 16 again.

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