Engineer's Daughter

matokie mix 08.01.21

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matokie mix 07.25.21

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matokie mix 07.18.21

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matokie mix 07.11.21

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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.

matokie mix 06.27.21

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matokie mix 06.20.21

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remembrance of things paper

Through July 5 - Remembrance of Things Paper at Round Weather

Round Weather has been open since December in a beautiful space in an old Oakland bottle factory, and this week I swung by for a visit to the current group show and just loved everything I saw. Gallery director Chris Kerr not only has a thoughtful eye for art that addresses sustainability and the current climate catastrophe, but he and the gallery's Advisory Council are running the space as a nonprofit and are sending money from sales to environmental organizations. The current exhibition is themed around a specific material, paper, with its associations with recycling and just the sheer pleasure of its many textures and forms. Daniela Naomi Molnar, pictured above, uses collected rainwater, dew, and earth pigments to create her striking watercolors which in turn depict mankind's effects on landscape, while Michelle Yi Martin's mesmerizing woven pieces similarly take on added meaning when you learn she works with exclusively found materials. The motif of transforming one person's trash into new treasure continues in Ajit Chauhan's practice, where he erases the edges of discarded postcards into forms of his choosing. And in one of those wonderful moments of Oakland serendipity, while I was at Round Weather I glimpsed a piece by Miguel Arzabe resting under the stairs from a previous show, which reminded me I needed to see his current solo exhibition at Johansson Projects so I went yesterday and it is super fantastic.

Other things I liked this week:

• The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays by D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence can certainly be a frustrating and problematic writer, but I admire his endless curiosity and his inquisitive way of working out the world around him. He'll find a particular turn of phrase that just lights up your brain, whether he's describing the New Mexico landscape, or birdsong, or metaphysics, or a scammer acquaintance. Geoff Dyer edited this collection and his introduction is top-notch too.
• Mädchen in Uniform directed by Leontine Sagan. I love watching queer film during Pride month and this is a classic, depicting forbidden love between a student and teacher at a boarding school in Germany between the world wars. Also worth watching just for the Expressionist close-ups.
• This past week was Kronos Festival week, and I spent a good part of the day last Sunday wandering around Golden Gate Park with Ellen Reid's wondrous Soundwalk in my ears, which had premiered as part of the festival. The rest of the programming is available on YouTube through August 31, and the Soundwalk is sticking around for a few years.
• Another fun way to celebrate Pride is Canela's to-go rainbow picnic bag filled with Spanish chips and candy and the most delicious sangria. Highly recommended.
• I also sampled this year's Frameline festival at home this week in the form of Chen Hung-i & Muni Wei’s As We Like It, a giddy gender-bent reimagining of Shakespeare that had me grinning ear-to-ear throughout. The whole Focus on Taiwan program is very cool too.
• Megablack SF threw one heck of a Juneteenth party at the Ferry Building farmers market yesterday, and I walked away with bundt cakes from Minnie Bell's Soul Movement, various puddings from Yes Pudding, and sprinkle cookies from A Girl Named Pinky. All the sweets, in other words.
• MoAD also had great Juneteenth programming all day, including a panel discussion in conjunction with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History that featured Annette Gordon-Reed, Jelani Cobb, Imani Perry, and Kevin Young.
• And to celebrate Summer Solstice, I recommend this virtual saunter on Mount Diablo courtesy of Greenbelt Alliance.

Programming note: I'm taking some time off this week to go run around Los Angeles and see art and friends in SoCal, my first getaway out of town since pandemic. I'll be back in two Sundays.

matokie mix 06.13.21

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matokie mix 06.06.21

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