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.

man with a movie camera

I'm back from a week soaking up the glories of Copenhagen (and I didn't get sick!) but still dreaming of faraway places. Luckily I got to do a little vicarious travel at the New Parkway last night thanks to their screening of Dziga Vertov's wondrous 1929 experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera. Justin Sherburn of Montopolis is currently touring his live soundtrack for the film to indie theaters as a fundraiser for Ukraine war relief, and I got a little choked up as he played the Ukrainian national anthem over Vertov's explanatory opening credits. Man with a Movie Camera is one of my favorite silents for how modern it still looks today and for those shots of Vertov jauntily schlepping his camera all over Kyiv and Odesa, and Sherburn's synthy score was the perfect accompaniment to Vertov's images, emphasizing both the joy and the tenderness of this portrait of daily urban life almost a century ago.

Masking? Not required but about half-and-half, which after zero-masking Denmark was pretty nice to see.

notes from the weekend

• The Chron didn't like it but I thought Josh Costello's adaptation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano at Aurora was a wonderful, with particularly affecting performances from local faves William Thomas Hodgson as Cyrano and Leontyne Mbele-Mbong as Roxane. Costume designer Maggie Whitaker outdid herself too, cleverly integrating African fabrics and period frippery into her designs.
• ICA San José is just bursting with awesome exhibitions right now, beautifully curated to lead a visitor from Masako Miki's neon outside the gallery, to Susan Blaustein's sensuous paintings in the room just inside the front doors, to Bridget-Riley-themed work in the main galleries by Sarah Hotchkiss, Lordy Rodriguez, and Susie Taylor, to Rudy Lemcke's installation about the transit of Venus in the projection room, to Rhonda Holberton's melding of the digital and the physical in the back room.
• And while I was in town I ambled on down to the San José Museum of Art because Sadie Barnette has a new exhibition there and I always love to see her glitter-spackled meditations on family and community. I was also excited to see the Kelly Akashi show again, which is so deliciously uncomfortable, and to marvel again at her use of materials.
• I leapt at the opportunity to see NEA Jazz Master saxophonist David Liebman live at the California Jazz Conservatory Saturday night, accompanied by Liberty Ellman on guitar, Jeff Denson on bass, and Gerald Cleaver on drums. He started with Cole Porter and ended with John Coltrane, and Mike Zilber jumped on stage to help out on his own sax for a couple numbers too.
• Two period plays in one weekend! Under Patrick Dooley's direction at Shotgun, Pierre de Marivaux's The Triumph of Love crackles with wit and humor, even if the audience is not quite sure how to feel about the duplicity of the main character at the end. She wins at the game of love, but at what cost to those around her? Very real.
• Last but definitely not least, Mick LaSalle wrote a tribute to my friend Steve Salmons that had me wiping away fresh tears. I've been trying to get my own words together about how much Steve meant to me but I'm not quite there yet, and I really appreciate what Mick was able to capture about what an amazing individual he was.

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.