Engineer's Daughter

lost/found

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.

long kwento

Through December 4 - Maia Cruz Palileo: Long Kwento at the Wattis

This extraordinary solo show by Maia Cruz Palileo at the Wattis fuses Filipinx histories with the artist's own unique visual language into a simultaneously fractured and cohesive whole. Drawing both from extensive research Palileo conducted in the Filipiniana collection at Chicago's Newberry Library as well as the artist's own family stories, Palileo's paintings and sculptures refer directly to a violent, colonialist past while at the same time celebrate the vibrancy and craft of Filipinx culture. The complex narrative that emerges defiantly reclaims space and refuses to reduce the diasporic experience to any individual story. In the evocative booklet that accompanies the exhibition, curator Kim Nguyen quotes Grace Kyungwon Hong on the topics of memory and knowledge:

To bring out your dead is to say that these deaths are not unimportant or forgotten, or worse, coincidental. It is to say that these deaths are systemic, structural. To bring out your dead is both a memorial and a challenge, an act of grief and of defiance, a register or mortality and decline, and of the possibility of struggle and survival.

Other things I liked this week:

• A Will to Kill by RV Raman. A classic Agatha-Christie-style whodunit set in a remote manor in the Indian countryside, this book gave my brain a lovely rest as I left detective Harith Atreya to puzzle out a murder. Maybe I should have been reading more mysteries during pandemic.
• Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu. A gorgeous memoir of a childhood lived all over the world and the lasting effects of a mother's abandonment and a father's death plus bonus colonialism and racism. Loved the geological metaphor Owusu employed throughout too. 
• While I have been making sure my coffee is bird-friendly for some time now, I hadn't thought about my chocolate until a wonderful presentation this week by Sharol Nelson-Embry about harvesting practices such as agroforestry, wild harvesting, and shade growing and how they connect to some cool bird species. Nelson-Embry offers delicious bird-friendly chocolate options in her online shop Cocoa Case, and you can even pick up a set that benefits the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory during their fall fundraiser.
• In yet another brilliant shutdown hack the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival is presented as a streamable film this year, beautifully filmed in various locations around the Bay Area...including an elementary school near my apartment! I was able to attend the virtual premiere Thursday evening and hear intros from the presenting artists too, which was super-neat. 
• The Mill Valley Film Festival also has an impressive online program this year, including Bob Sarles and John Anderson's riveting documentary Born in Chicago about the birth and the enduring influence of the Chicago blues. I watched it last night and was grooving around my apartment to all of its amazing vintage gig footage.

witness

Through November 13 - Carrie Mae Weems: Witness at Fraenkel Gallery

In a week where we learned that U.S. police killings were undercounted by more than 17,000 over the past 40 years, it felt like a gift to be able to survey the work that Carrie Mae Weems has created over that same period of time. While her photographs could easily fill an entire floor of a museum, Fraenkel has curated a  focused selection that displays the breadth of her practice and creates meaningful juxtapositions besides. Two pieces from her famous Kitchen Series are here, in which Weems places herself into quiet scenes of domesticity and relationship, as well as heartbreaking newer work that speaks directly to police violence against Black bodies. I also loved the cluster of photos from her series Family Pictures and Stories with their depictions of family dynamics and Black joy. And then I stepped out of the gallery and directly into Market Street to join the Women's March and to yell for choice and reproductive rights. 

Other things I liked this week:

• Motley Stones by Adelbert Stifter. Set in the Austrian/German countryside and written in the nineteenth century with a surprisingly modern sensibility, these thematically-linked short stories are pure poetry, especially in the translation by Isabel Fargo Cole. Stifter wrote, "We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race."
• Working Girls by Lizzie Borden. Sex work is nothing but work in this 1986 masterpiece that follows a day in the life of working girl Molly at a high-end brothel in New York. With innovative cinematography and realistic interactions amongst Molly and her fellow workers nothing is gratuitous either.
• With virus transmission still at Substantial in Alameda and San Francisco counties I'm still opting for virtual culture where I can, and Crowded Fire's fantastic play The Displaced, written by Isaac Gómez, still managed to scare the bejeezus out of me even from the safety of my couch. What happens when the ghosts of gentrification become real?
• I was similarly grateful this week for Opera San José and their wonderful online presentation of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri, an opera that just goes to show artists have been exploring the fraught relationship between the two composers long before Amadeus.

did you know love is healing?

Through October 1 - Jeffrey Cheung: Did you know love is healing? at pt.2

I didn't intend to take a blogging break over the last couple months, but then the August doldrums hit hard, plus the Delta variant, plus trying to figure out what still feels safe to do (not much), plus canceled and rescheduled travel, plus several friends getting breakthrough infections...I just needed to hunker down. Thank goodness for socially distanced gallery visits though, especially when Jeffrey Cheung has a whole pile of joyful new work to unleash. Cheung remains reliably salacious in this show, and the way he groups nude figures together just hits differently after 18 months with very little proximity to other humans. His DIY roots are still firmly on display even as he is more assured in his artistic choices than ever, and Cheung's vision of a vibrant gender-fluid, shame-free utopia is completely necessary right now.

Other things I liked this week:

• Peach Blossom Paradise by Ge Fei. Despite some disturbing scenes of assault I was impressed with how Ge Fei wove together this fable, set during a time of Chinese history before the idea of revolution turned sour, and I also appreciated how the female characters were centered in the story.
• Old Enough by Marisa Silver. This gem of a coming-of-age film from 1984 takes place during a hot NYC summer and is anchored by Sarah Boyd's wide-eyed, fearless performance as she befriends an older teenage girl and broadens her privileged horizons. There's a great scene in a makeup aisle that was giving me serious Wet 'N' Wild flashbacks too.
• I was hiding out in a rainy Fort Bragg last Saturday for Coastal Cleanup Day, but was delighted to see so many friends posting pics of their environmental efforts! And it's never a bad day to gather up some garbage, particularly here in Oakland.
• During a time when even masked-and-vaxxed events feel nerve-racking to me I'm extremely grateful to the cultural organizations that are still offering Zoom options, and I had a ton of fun laughing along with Lockdown Comedy during their monthly online show on Thursday. Host Lisa Geduldig is always a pro and the bits she does with her mom Arline are pure gold.

one candle

Through October 3 - Nam June Paik at SFMOMA

First, the bad news. As an institution SFMOMA has been making extremely poor decisions for many years now, pretty much since the new wing opened and they hiked the admission and started policing the member tickets and practicing other exclusionary tactics. I had already let my 20-year membership lapse even before the pandemic because (with a few notable exceptions) the exhibitions seemed like the same things over and over again or blatant Instagram-bait, and then just a few weeks ago I joined the Bay Area art community by reacting with horror when the museum announced it was planning to cut the only programs that still kept it relevant: the film program, the Artists' Gallery, and its exceptional blog Open Space. All of this to say it was with great reluctance that I ponied up my $25 to visit yesterday, but there was no way I was going to miss the Nam June Paik retrospective. And the good news is it is an absolutely incredible show. My mind was blown around every corner and I learned a ton besides, especially about his collaborations with cellist Charlotte Moorman (pictured above) and Joseph Beuys and John Cage and Merce Cunningham and Laurie Anderson and more. There are jaw-dropping installations aplenty, like Paik's TV Garden and the immersive Sistine Chapel room, but I was most moved by the candle pieces that begin and end the exhibition as they use the simple metaphor of a lit flame to speak poetically to the brevity of life. I also carefully calculated my visit to coincide with several other excellent shows at the museum: new art/music by Charles Gaines about the Dred and Harriet Scott decision, work made by Bay Area artists in response to the pandemic and Black Lives Matter in the Close To Home exhibit, unconventional takes on photography in Off the Wall, and an unspeakably affecting dual show with pieces by Leah Rosenberg and Susan O'Malley. And of course I had to go stand in front of Diego Rivera's Pan American Unity for a while too.

Other things I liked this week:

• Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding by Daniel Lieberman. Not a self-help book but nevertheless full of gentle nudges, Lieberman busts exercise myths from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist. I was both fascinated and found some determination to get to a gym once it is safe to do so.
• The Grand Bizarre by Jodie Mack. I first became acquainted with Mack's dizzying visual collages when she was a resident at Headlands, and what a delight to sink into this full-length film that took me on a journey through many countries and through a wealth of textiles and patterns. The soundtrack is totally awesome too.
• I don't even have a garden but still very much enjoyed the webinar from the San Mateo Arboretum Society about gardening for butterflies with Susan Karasoff from the California Native Plant Society. Fellow members of Team Caterpillar please click here for the talk.
• Thursday night I was back at the Bruns Amphitheater for the first time in many years for a wonderful production of Janáček's Katya Kabanova by West Edge Opera, live and in person and safely outdoors. And I would have returned last night for Elizabeth Cree but sadly it was canceled due to a breakthrough case.

three forms

Through August 8 - Three Forms: JB Blunk at Blunk Space

I was looking for an excuse for a drive yesterday, so I trundled on up to Point Reyes Station (zero love to the asshole blonde in the Mercedes who tailgated me and the five cars in front of me the entire way) to revel in some beautiful scenery and to introduce myself to the work of JB Blunk by way of the new Blunk Space gallery. Blunk lived off the grid in Inverness until his death in 2002, and a connection to nature strongly informs all his work. I knew that he had carved the monumental redwood piece The Planet on permanent display at the Oakland Museum, and I was delighted to take in some of his semi-abstract paintings while seated in Blunk Space on one of his wooden stools, carved into sculptural and biomorphic forms from redwood, cypress, and bay laurel. Blunk's ceramic work is also represented in the form of a series of cups that have been recast from his original designs, and it was very tempting to walk out with an entire set in the sage glaze. I'm very excited for further exhibitions and further excuses to visit. And that wasn't the only art I saw yesterday, because earlier after fueling up at AvocadoCon I made a stop at Minnesota Street Project to visit Connie Zheng's brilliant new yam fish seed exchange (nyse) installation and to see everything at Anglim/Trimble: Ajit Chauhan's "erasures" upstairs, and the group show Contested Territories curated by Kim Anno downstairs.

Other things I liked this week:

• An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky. A collection of experimental essays/short stories/meditations themed around things lost that definitely had some tough moments but which I ultimately found quite beautiful. The physical book design is its own work of art too.
• Beyond the Visible - Hilma af Klint by Halina Dyrschka. This luminous documentary explores af Klint's astounding body of work, and the question of what happens to art history when work is discovered that completely rewrites the whole of it.
• I've been feeling pretty glum about environmental devastation lately, but it was very uplifting to hear local legend Doug McConnell give his perspective on our parks and conservation future courtesy of the Sempervirens Fund.
• Also inspiring: What is the water saying?, a screening of videos by Carolina Cayecedo, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, Sky Hopinka, Thao Nguyen Phan, and Charwei Tsai, curated by the Wattis Institute and hosted outdoors at Headlands.
• And because I'm back to outdoor performances only I was grateful to SF Playhouse for the option to stream their current play, The Song of Summer by Lauren Yee. Their video has a few glitches but still (mostly) captures the feeling of being in the theater for a live show, and the play is very sweet besides.

dance desert

Through August 21 - Cybele Lyle: Dance Desert at Et al. etc.

I continue to be in awe of artists who were able to create work during pandemic, and to see how Cybele Lyle synthesized the experience and extended her ongoing practice in the work currently on view at Et al. is hugely inspiring. Painted fabric is thumbtacked to wood panels to create portals that suggest a view to the outside (most pieces are alternately titled Desert Windows or Desert Walls), while wood poles propped precariously against the work on the walls imply a delicate architectural/mental stability. I loved the interaction between the inner and outer world in the detail above, and how the colors taken from nature are punctuated by pops of contrasting hues and patterns. In her artist statement Lyle speaks of how "this idea of breaking apart walls and windows and indoors from outdoors changed in meaning for me this past year," and for all of us who were experiencing similar shifts in perception this work resonates most strongly. Meanwhile, on this same art expedition, next door at Ratio 3 I stood rapt before the "aggregate" weavings Ruth Laskey created earlier this year, and then dropped in at Jessica Silverman to take in a multi-decade overview of Catherine Wagner's brilliant, subversive photographs.

Other things I liked this week:

• Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation by Reid Mitenbuler. A highly entertaining and well-written overview of the early days of cartoons, chock full of oversize personalities and fascinating details. I only wish there had been more women and POC in the book, but I also wish that of the industry.
• Clockwatchers by Jill Sprecher. This film came and went so quickly in the '90s that I never caught it at the time, but it absolutely deserves wider recognition for its ruthless and artful skewering of office contractor drudgery from the perspective of a quartet of women.
• Saved By Nature along with the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority hosted a wonderful talk this week about how awesome bats are and how we can help local bats thrive. Not currently posted on their video page but hopefully soon!
• Last Sunday I had a lovely day out in the city with lunch at the SSP Beer Hall and then a return to my beloved Roxie to see Linda and the Mockingbirds in person, with many of the local families featured in the documentary in attendance.
• That said, with the current virus surge I'm probably going to stick to streaming at home again now, and enjoyed checking out the twisty-turny doc Misha and the Wolves for the SF Jewish Film Festival's virtual opening night.
• The SF Mime Troupe is also committed to keeping everyone safe this summer and have produced a series of weekly radio plays that I highly recommend if you appreciate agitprop that makes you laugh out loud. I'll be eagerly awaiting each new installment.

the black index

Through August 14 - The Black Index at Palo Alto Art Center

After outdoor lunch with my folks in Redwood Shores yesterday I schlepped a little further down the Peninsula to the always-lovely Palo Alto Art Center to see this small but powerful exhibition curated by Bridget R. Cooks and organized around the theme of Black self-representation. Lava Thomas's renderings of mugshots from the Montgomery Bus Boycott (pictured above: Alberta J. James) take my breath away every time I see them, and Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle's 2020 project The Evanesced: The Untouchables is equally moving, composed of 100 gorgeous ink and watercolor drawings of Black women meant to bring attention to those who have been abused, murdered, and disappeared. Hinkle wants viewers "to think about how we are all agents in erasure, and we all have a role that we play," and the exhibition at large presents a strong statement about anti-colonialism even as it maintains attentive to nuance and complexity. Also currently in Palo Alto: the excellent Resonance show at Qualia gallery, featuring artists who merge the visual and the aural in their work.

Other things I liked this week:

• Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson. A very readable history of the filibuster and an extremely strong case for why it needs to be abolished that just added to the pile of rage that's going to sustain me all the way through next year's midterms. Stay angry, my friends.
• The Witches of the Orient by Julien Faraut. I loved Faraut's John McEnroe documentary and he uses similar experimental techniques here to tell the compelling story of the Japanese women's volleyball team that won the gold in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Highly recommended if you're ambivalent about this year's competition but are in the mood to watch some amazing women kick ass.
• Headlands held an "Open House Lite" last Sunday, their first in-person event since lockdown, and while I'm still feeling tentative about the future (and downright gutted about the loss of the Affiliate program) it was wonderful to be back and to see and hear inspiring work and to eat Chef Damon's mac and cheese.
• SF's Opera Parallèle has teamed up with the Dallas Opera to produce Everest, an inventive online graphic novel opera that I thoroughly enjoyed despite its intense subject matter. Very clever use of comic book conventions and you just have to abandon any disbelief (similar to any musical theater experience to be honest) that the characters are singing without oxygen on the top of Everest.

out of site

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.

seeing sound

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.