Engineer's Daughter

american ledger no. 1

Through March 13 - Raven Chacon: Landscape & Life at Indexical

I'm always looking for an excuse to swoop down to Santa Cruz, and Indexical has been providing some excellent opportunities recently. Friday evening they presented a live outdoor performance of Raven Chacon's 2018 piece American Ledger No. 1 in conjunction with their current exhibition of his work. The score is printed on a blanket inside the Indexical gallery and is meant to be performed by "many players with sustaining and percussive instruments, coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match." Said players gathered in the Tannery plaza as the sun set on Friday to transform Chacon's anti-colonialist creation story about the founding of the United States into concrete sounds. Let's just say there was a lot of stimulating cacophony, and personally it inspired me to think about how we are still practicing violence when it comes to people and ecosystems in this country.

Other things I liked this week:

• Poison Ivy by Katt Shea. Not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but a fine example of '90s noir shot in L.A. with plenty of style and Gen X moodiness.
• Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott. A heartbreaking and perfectly claustrophobic novel set in occupied Athens during WWII where a Greek family is forced to house a German officer.
• I love walking over to OMCA to arrive as soon as they open on a Sunday morning, and right now they have both a special exhibition about Edith Heath and a tribute to Hung Liu that did good things for my soul when I spent some time with them last week. Topped it off with a delish Impossible meatloaf sandwich from their resident cafe Town Fare, eaten on a picnic bench in their gorgeous garden.

as i live and breathe

Through April 10 - Angela Hennessy: As I Live and Breathe at SOMArts

Angela Hennessy's solo exhibition at SOMArts is a full-body experience, the way that the warehouse gallery has been masterfully arranged to feature Hennessy's synthetic-hair sculptural pieces, the way that poetry fills your ears as you seem to float in darkness with her work. Ropes of braided and twisted hair twine into talismanic shapes that grow from the floor, while teased-out afro-puff planets dangle in space. I could see the evidence of Hennessy's hands throughout, where shimmers of regal gold contrast with darker strands in some pieces and in the large-scale blanket of black hair displayed on one wall that had me standing in awe of the time it must have taken to craft it. Through her work Hennessy wants us to ask, "How does our understanding of mortality, specifically as Black, Indigenous, people of color, shape the way we move through the world? What does it mean to practice both surrender and agency?"

Other things I liked this week:

• A Different Image by Alile Sharon Larkin. Made in 1982 during the LA Rebellion film movement and shot by Charles Burnett, Larkin's beautiful piece depicts art student Alana and her quest to connect with her heritage by embracing something other than patriarchal beauty and relationship standards.
• Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life by Sutton Foster. A very charming memoir told through the lens of the art and crafts Foster has made throughout her life.
• When I was at UCSC I always appreciated the amazing speakers they brought to campus for the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Convocation, and this year the whole thing was on Zoom so I could hear Ruja Benjamin speak about race and technology at home Wednesday night. Highly recommend checking out the recording here.
• Meanwhile on Thursday I teleported to Green Apple Books via Zoom to hear badass Silvia Vasquez-Lavado speak about her experiences as a climber and her new book In the Shadow of the Mountain: A Memoir of Courage. I will never climb any epic mountains but love hearing from those do.
• Josh Faught's current show at the Wattis Look Across the Water Into the Darkness, Look for the Fog is a must-see before it closes next week too. Faught literally and figuratively weaves together kitsch and queer history into an extraordinary body of work.
• I'm also very glad I squeaked in the High Plains exhibition at Johansson Projects featuring art by Rachelle Bussières, Blaise Rosenthal, and Andy Vogt on its last day yesterday. By juxtaposing photogramic lumen prints by Bussières, sculptural pieces by Vogt, and works on shaped canvas by Rosenthal, the show created a harmony of color and dimension that felt downright magical.

image gardeners

Through April 30 - Image Gardeners at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts

This group show of portrait photography by women and non-binary artists is full of gems. Alongside familiar pieces by the likes of Nan Goldin, Francesca Woodman, and Lynn Hershman Leeson the Foundation also commissioned Bay Area photographers Marcel Pardo Ariza, Carolyn Drake (pictured above), and Chanell Stone to create new work for the exhibition. As the title implies these are creators who employ photography as a generative practice, not offering bodies for consumption as in Susan Sontag's famous quote about photography as a "voracious way of seeing" but instead as a means of connection and documentation. Gina Basso has also curated the short film program seen only, heard only through someone else’s description to run concurrently that takes its title from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and further expands the conversation about presentation of identity.

Other things I liked this week:

• The Movement of Things by Manuela Serra. This lyrical 1985 documentary is a time capsule of everyday life in a rural Portuguese village where the older women perform the rituals of farming, cooking, and cleaning, while a young woman goes off to work in a factory.
• Parallel Mothers by Pedro Almodóvar. It is always such a pleasure to spend a couple hours in the worlds Almodóvar creates, and Penélope Cruz is at the height of her powers here as a single mom who befriends another in the birthing suite.
• Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades. Brilliantly written in a collective voice that nevertheless allows for a vast multiplicity of lived experience, this novel follows a group of young first-generation women from the "dregs of Queens" as they come of age and find their way out into our current version of the world.
• New Conservatory Theatre Centre's Gently Down the Stream was the perfect production to stream on V Day, with Donald Currie particularly affecting as older gentleman Beau recollecting his life to his (much) younger lover Rufus.
• And later in the week I chose another sweet romance to watch at home in the form of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. That last scene gets me every time.

a pound of pictures

Through March 26 - Alec Soth: A Pound of Pictures at Fraenkel Gallery

I'm back after winter hiatus to blog again, and to urge you to see Alec Soth's show of photographs at Fraenkel if you're in SF. I have been following Soth's work ever since I moved the Bay Area, and his ability to capture moments of perfect beauty and tenderness in our off-kilter world remains unsurpassed. Taken during the last few years these images feel especially poignant given our ongoing global crisis, though there are also humorous touches that never come at the expense of his subjects. Interspersed throughout the exhibition are snapshots from Soth's own collection, creating a rich conversation about the practice of photography itself and what might be considered art-worthy. Similarly the gallery has curated a room full of Friedlander, Goldin, Arbus, and the like at the end of the show that demonstrates Soth's influences and his place among them. 

Other things I liked this week:

• The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman, Chez Jolie Coiffure, and Delphine’s Prayers by Rosine Mbakam. Born in Cameroon and based in Belgium, Mbakam creates extraordinary documentaries centered around women and sometimes around her own family to illuminate both the female and the immigrant experience. 
• Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. A quietly exquisite trio of short films thematically linked by longing and loss and fate. 
• Troubled: The Failed Promise of America's Behavioral Treatment Programs by Kenneth R. Rosen. Rather than an exhaustive exposé of these highly problematic programs, Rosen concentrates on the personal accounts of four former teens whose lives decidedly were not changed for the better by them.
• San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory's virtual Birdy Hours have been a balm throughout pandemic, and Thursday's talk with writer and biologist Maya Khosla was full of her observations about wilderness recovery after wildfire. In a time when I continue to grapple with our climate catastrophe reality it was wonderful to see how wild lands can burst with new life.
• And they both close today but spending some quality time with the Leonard Cohen pieces by Marshall Trammell and Candice Breitz at the Contemporary Jewish Museum yesterday did my soul a lot of good too.

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.