Archive | November, 2009

Robert Brady @ B. Sakata Garo

Robert Brady @ B. Sakata Garo

Posted on 25 November 2009

"Natomas 1,2,3", wood, 92" x 12" x 23"

Bob Brady has made a career out of creating lithe, attenuated figures out of wood whose inscrutable countenances long ago became iconic within Bay Area art. For his sparseness and economy of means, Brady has been compared to Giacometti whose signature trait –ragged gauntness – is echoed in two other Northern California artists: Manuel Neri and Stephen de Staebler. But where the latter two extend Giacometti’s portrayal of existential angst through rough-surfaced figures that seem to be laboring under great stress, Brady’s sculpture has always conveyed the exact opposite: transcendence and grace.  

In particular, his see-through stick figures, now on view now at b. sakata garo, seem to float outside of time — not exactly in a gravity-free zone — but in a realm where antiquity meets the present. While Brady works primarily with the figure, his art has never really been about the figure in the way that, say, de Staebler’s has.  Like a jazz instrumentalist who uses song structure for self-expression (as opposed to a singer who is obliged to express a certain fealty to melody), Brady uses the body as a laboratory to see just how far he can stretch his materials. What’s amazing is how much variety he has wrung from a single, repeated idea: forms that look like cleaved tree trunks wedded to roughed-up pool cues. 
 
"Empire", wood and gold foil, 51" x 33" x 7"
With improbably long limbs bent into anatomically impossible positions, these figures — which sit, stand, kneel and fold into fetal-like positions — articulate a geometry textbook’s worth of angles and shapes. They suggest, in their negative spaces, as many spatial possibilities as their positive elements do, and they mix delicacy and toughness. The surfaces are gouged and abraded, painted and sanded; yet some of the limbs of these pieces are delicate enough for air currents move them around the axis of the pins that hold them in place. 
 
There’s also a highly personal element. These contorted torsos and their sometimes shoe-gazing stances reference a period in Brady’s life when he was immobilized by a debilitating illness that struck twice, once in childhood and again when he was an adult. Memories of those events seem to have permanently lodged in his output, but their expression is curiously bifurcated: the forms are both sleek and awkward.
 
These obvious signs of corporeality are counterbalanced by a persistent inscrutability.  Since the 1989, when Brady quit ceramics for wood, writers have ascribed to his sculpture all manner of spiritual properties, owing to their incorporation of tribal motifs from all over the globe. Brady, himself, doesn’t claim deep knowledge of these sources; but like Picasso, Brady is acutely aware of their totemic power and he knows how to use it. As it happens, the centerpiece of this show — the three, 7-foot-tall figures of his Natomas series, pointedly reference Cycladic figures, a touchstone modernism. They greet you at the door like a phalanx of mute soldiers and introduce half a dozen similarly styled figures, along with an array of other works – including drawings, wall-mounted sculptures and wire-armature birds — that demonstrate the true breadth of Brady’s art .
 
"Untitled", mixed media
The birds – seven multi-media gems built of paper, wood, wire, string, straw and other studio-floor effluvia – testify further to the influence of early modernist practices.  Brady’s birds don’t stretch any boundaries, but they do carry his distinct imprint and stand with the best historical examples.  
 
Lately, Brady also seems to have brushed up against high minimalism. Stretched across an entire gallery wall are a series of wooden shields that seem to allude to tools and architectural forms. Painted white, slightly curved, and with small gaps between segments, they are all about shape and edge. They strive for iconic status, and to some extent they achieve it, but they feel like anomalies within Brady’s otherwise expressive oeuvre.
Both "Untitled", 2009, 15" x 14", mixed media
More in character are six multi-layered drawings that recycle in 2-D, visual ideas that have been more or less continuous themes across Brady’s career. Reconfigured in a graphic and sometimes cartoon-like form, and with edges perforated by stitching, they thrust the artist into an almost pop surrealist realm that feels fresh. The same holds for a wall-sized sculpture called Empire, which looks like an Afro comb made from walrus tusks whose gold-leaf trim gives it the aura of an artifact excavated from the tomb of a giant.
 
Taken together, the 32 pieces in this elegant show could easily stand as an abbreviated retrospective of Brady’s post-ceramic period.   They also highlight an aspect of his career that is seldom noted: the path not taken. Where his peers at UC Davis in the mid’60s were busy creating funk, Brady went on to pursue beauty in the form of outsized ceramic vessels.  The ancient primitivism embodied in that early work continues to stand as Brady’s trademark as his workevolves to encompass current trends.
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
Robert Brady, Sculptures and Works on Paper, through Nov. 28, 2009 at b. sakata garo.
 
"Cover" image: Flit IV, wood, 15" x 62" x 18"


 

 

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Hattori and Essoe @ Swarm

Hattori and Essoe @ Swarm

Posted on 21 November 2009
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Taro Hattori, "V-2", 2009, corrugated cardboard installation, variable size

Ed and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, makers of savagely satirical sculptural tableaux that excoriated post-WWII American culture, declared that they wanted to make art “on a scale that competes with the world.”  The explosion of esthetics and media in recent years has caused many contemporary artists to erase any distinction between art making and other forms of activity (following the ideas of Robert Rauschenberg), and to consider art as simply a microcosm of society, instead of an alternate or even adversarial reality. The unintended consequence of art’s assimilation by life is that all too often art loses its power and relevance. Two Bay Area artists, Taro Hattori and Jordan Essoe, directly confront this diminished capacity of contemporary art by choosing ambitious and even daunting historical and philosophical themes.
 
Taro Hattori, with sculpture and mixed-media light-boxes, comes to terms with war and memory.  V-2 is a life-sized model of a WWII German “retaliation weapon.” Those rockets, designed by Wernher von Braun, are the prototypes of all military rockets, and von Braun was recruited after V-E Day by the United States to jump-start its postwar ballistic missile program. 

Taro Hattori, "1951 Patrilineality", 2009, archival pigment print, acrylic paint, wood, fluorescent light, 20" x 20" x 3.25”
Hattori, who has also crafted models of the Hindenburg airship and a B-29 Superfortress (like the Enola Gay, which bombed Hiroshima), admires the beauty of weapons, despite their monstrousness, and he exorcizes his fascination by creating harmless, room-sized models built of latticed cardboard.  In the gallery, whose dimensions only accommodate an abbreviated version of the structure, the nose cone, midsection and tail of the imaginary aircraft lie strewn about the floor, bathed in a harsh, lurid, yellow glare that signifies insanity to Hattori, who clad the gallery’s windows with yellow plastic film to achieve the effect.
 
Hattori also shows a series of collaged archival prints affixed to wall-mounted light boxes.  Entitled 1951, the year his father took the prominently featured family snapshots, the prints include grids, engineering diagrams of weaponry and snippets of writing from Hattori, Milan Kundera, Von Braun and others. Kundera: “No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us. It is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”  Von Braun on Hitler: “But also you could see his flaw – he was wholly without scruples, a godless man who thought himself the only god, the only authority he needed.”
 
Together, these elements — the family pictures, the quotes and diagrams — juxtapose family and world histories. With light from the light boxes streaming from behind the black-margined prints onto the surrounding walls, these boxes (Patrilineality, Sewing Machines, Craftsmen) serve as icons or altars to history, or to alternate histories.  
 
Jordan Esssoe, "The Myth of Sisyphus", 2008, digital video still
Essoe’s multimedia Living Room installation derives from the postwar period as well, namely French existentialist philosophy and art, invoking the Swiss sculptor Giacometti who made emaciated, attenuated figures that are now almost universally seen as icons of existentialism. Critic John Berger postulated in 1966 that Giacometti had been isolated and alienated his whole life, essentially born into a sack, and thus incapable of intimacy. Essoe sees modern American life as just as isolating: the suburban home is no more than “a personalized, psychological space … a confining experiential shell,” but, curiously, a dynamic one, evolving with circumstances that dictate living in a perverse way.  
 
Essoe’s own dining room often serves as his studio. Thus, the room where he spends most of his time alone is his livingroom and the template for this project; it includes photos, drawings, video, sculpture and installation.  Photographs of the room’s carpeted floor and textured plaster ceiling symbolically transform the gallery into a symbolic living room; while a border of glossy, black bondage tape encircling the room serves as a virtual horizon—and a psychic boundary. A video showing the artist absurdly vacuuming a hillside as seen through a chain-link fence pays homage to Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus with its tragicomic/heroic protagonist, doomed to futility, but never giving up.

Jordan Essoe, "Floor", 2009, digital pigment print
 “It is an exercise in curiosity and hunger, but equally an attempt at the sanitization and domestication of the world,” says Essoe. Two drawings of the artist straddling a coffee-table-sized trunk derive from a filmed performance on the theme of containment, and the white sculpture entitled Rock, covered in a plaster-like texture, duplicates the interior volume of that chest, serving as the artist’s assigned (and philosophically embraced) Sisyphean boulder.
 
Hattori’s and Essoe’s works are ambitious, intelligently conceived and flawlessly executed. Like many contemporary works, they are the residue or by-product of investigations, procedures of methodologies, rather than ingratiating or beautiful (or even generally accessible) objects. It is encouraging that, after generations of formalist dogma, artists are now tackling larger themes again, though, of course, in a thoroughly contemporary manner. 
–DEWITT CHENG
 
Taro Hattori , V and Jordan Essoe, Living Room, through December 6, 2009 at Swarm Gallery, Oakland.

Learn more about Taro Hattori and Jordan Essoe.

 

 

 

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Peter Honig @ Mercury 20

Peter Honig @ Mercury 20

Posted on 16 November 2009
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Dream of Flight, 2009, digital print on aluminum, 48”x36”

The striking, surreal large-format digital photographs of Berkeley’s Peter Honig employ the conventions of commercial photography — sharp focus, straightforward composition, shadow-less lighting and a white backdrops — to examine and subvert the consumer desires implanted by ads bombarding us from catalogues, newspapers, magazines, television and the internet.

Honig is a commercial photographer by day, with a background in fine-art photography and art history, so he knows how powerful images can be, even when multiplied ad infinitum and ad nauseam (despite Walter Benjamin’s erroneous theory about the loss of esthetic aura). The son and grandson of photographers, Honig brings to the setup table not only his workman-like skills (fifty product shots a day), but in addition, three separate but related strands of visual culture: the Dada collage tradition of Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield, and Max Ernst; snippets of reality from pre-existing printed matter, recontextualized to reflect the disjuncture of contemporary life; and the setup tradition of James Casebere, Laurie Simmons and others who manufacture sculptural subjects or tableaux in the manner of set designers and prop artists solely as subjects for photographs.
 
Revised Testing Station, 2009, digital print on aluminum, 48”x36”
Honig, with large-scale pictures, fills our mental “consumer advertising space, … [our] space of desire…. a delivery system or channel that people are conditioned to respond to” with enigmatic subjects, sometimes humorous and absurd, sometimes more serious. A fan of both the “warm” handmade tradition of California Beat and Funk assemblage art (Bruce Conner, William Wiley, Robert Hudson) and the deadpan, conceptual studies of contemporary industrial landscapes by the likes of Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and Bernd and Hilla Becher, Honig searches out “everyday objects with potential for vocabulary,” and over the course of sometimes lengthy gestation periods, teases out the “resonances” that various conglomerations reveal.
 
Curiously, works that read too strongly as sculpture in real space read as mere documentation in photographs; so the assemblages have to play to the camera, so to speak, and work visually only in reproduction.
 
Printed at three by four feet and mounted on aluminum panels, the images resemble store display signage — but advertising what? In Dream of Flighta bird appears to have crashed onto small salmon-pink bed and decayed into a skeleton sporting a few feathers; the headboard and footboard are carved into wavy lines suggesting birds in flight, perhaps Van Gogh’s crows. In Follow-Up Visit, Neurologist’s Office, 74 Harley St., London,we see a stone wall with an arched, transomed doorway and gated porch, before which sits a small shapeless figure with a baglike torso and a disc-shaped head — Kafka’s tragically stoic Man from the Country, the eternal supplicant, crossed with one of George Grosz’s fussball-headed, featureless automatons.  
 
Extension, 2009, digital print on aluminum, 48”x36”
In Revised Testing Station a cylindrical electric motor sits atop a small table, forming the torso and legs of a mechanical horse; a gooseneck plastic sleeve and dangling sock constitute its neck and bowed head. A similar metamorphosis takes place in Extension. In it, a giraffe’s neck, covered by a long red snakelike sleeve has ingested the animal’s head; it arches down and rests on the ground between the hooved feet. Pan Am Disaster refers, of course, to Flight 103, the jetliner that crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Honig’s pile of smithereens becomes a toy-like symbol of human pride and frailty, a modern version of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Romantic painting, The Wreck of Hope: dreams dashed to pieces.

It is unlikely that collectors will cease to see art as speculative investments and consumer goods; that revolution that would be economically undesirable anyway. Honig’s parody product shots, however, like Barbara Kruger’s subversive détournements of fashion photography, remind us that the art we admire, acquire and display really do say something about us, just as lifestyle ads do, only it’s not always as flattering as we think.
—DEWITT CHENG

Peter Honig at Mercury 20, Oakland, through Nov. 28, 2009

 

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Profile: Peter VandenBerge

Profile: Peter VandenBerge

Posted on 11 November 2009

At CSUS Annex Gallery with "Ace", 2007, ceramic 15" x 32" x 9.5". Photo: David M. Roth

For the past 35 years Peter VandenBerge has been creating outsized ceramic busts whose hand-worked features are as mesmerizing as they are confounding. The mystery of these elongated, primitive faces resides primarily in the slit eyes and oblong noses; but their whimsical ornamentation and outlandish headgear – a distinct brand of ‘60s-era, Duchamp-influenced absurdism – seems to mock their otherwise inward-looking demeanor. This month, seven of his busts will be on display at the Solomon Dubnick Gallery, along with works by his daughter, Camille, 40. An equal number of pieces from the elder VandenBerge, now 74, are also on display in a group show, “Three Friends: Fifty Years”, at the CSUS Annex Gallery through Nov. 13.

One of the sculptor’s most recognizable themes is topping his figures, which often resemble South Sea Islanders, with caricaturized automobiles that look they were pulled from R. Crumb’s Zap Comix.  The obvious metaphor, of “cars on the brain”, is as blatant as those telegraphed by similarly styled heads that in many instances look like they could have been imported from Balinese temples. Those, too, VandenBerge crowns with airplanes, houses, birds, cows, baseballs and other everyday objects – all without allowing the faces to betray the slightest hint of irony, self-consciousness or pastiche. (VandenBerge says he got the idea for topping his sculptures from photographs he’d seen of Madagascar where tribes place various forms atop graves to depict the lives of the deceased.)
"Amsterdame", 2009, ceramic, 43" x 12" x 19"
 
In the mid-1970s, when his career took off, East Coast critics who were unfamiliar (or else hostile) to the comic spirit of the West Coast Funk tradition from which VandenBerg’s ceramics spring, wondered aloud if his work was confused. To that the sculptor asks, “Can’t one be serious and funny?” The obvious answer, given VandenBerge’s stature in the front rank of ceramic sculpture, is “yes”. His work has been exhibited at SF MOMA, the Smithsonian Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Louvre, and the Shigioki Museum in Japan. None of which does anything to silence the charge that his busts are the visual equivalent of “Have a nice day”. 
 
In some part they may be. Still, you’d be wrong to categorize VandenBerge’s aesthetic as mere folly. His most obvious influences, apart from a childhood spent Holland and in Indonesia, are Modigliani and Giacometti, two artists who exposed the human soul by emaciating figures to such an extreme that the only thing left was bare essence. VandenBerge achieves the same effect through opposite means. Where Giacometti’s sculptures are monumental exercise in subtraction, VandenBerge’s heads are about the piling on of material.  He rolls out clay in long cylindrical ropes, and then builds his figures by coiling the strands vertically to the desired height. The overall shape and specific features are molded by hand, then daubed with earth-toned pigments that, when fired, bear little resemblance to the shiny glazes so often associated with ceramic schlock. Alternately, in an act of self-appropriation (or perhaps simple recycling), VandenBerge has lately been molding clay around existing busts and then peeling it off in slabs to create new heads with completely hollow interiors that bear little or no resemblance to the originals.  His recent homage to his native country, the Netherlands, Amsterdame, with its window-shaped eyes, is a good example.
"Two for the Road", 2009, ceramic, 30" x 16" x 12"
 
Regardless of how they come into being, VandenBerge’s heads always have individual topographies. With chisels, forks, knives and other abrasive tools, he works the surface of his objects in an almost painterly fashion – so much so that one writer actually termed the work “painting in three dimensions.” What’s less apparent to the casual view is the degree to which this work represents a profound transformation of personal tragedy. 
 
Living as a Dutch citizen with his family in Indonesia, where his father worked as a geologist for Shell Oil, VandenBerge, at age seven, traveled to remote regions of the Javanese and Sumatran jungles. While his father scratched the earth for signs of oil, young Peter observed exotic flora and fauna: monkeys, crocodiles, elephants and the like, and people whose countenances were, like those in his sculptures, decidedly non-European. 
 
It was wild stuff for a kid born in The Hague. In a home situated on a mountaintop outside Jakarta, Peter – despite his family’s privileged position – lived pretty much like a native. “I was obsessed with making things out of clay,” he recalls in sipping a cappuccino in a coffeehouse a few blocks from his East Sacramento home. “I was like Pigpen,” the Peanuts character. “My mother and father were always telling me to get out of the mud.” VandenBerge also remembers being entranced by the leather figures Javanese shadow puppeteers used to illustrate epic narratives that held pre-TV-era children transfixed. 
 
In 1942, the same year VandenBerge’s dream began, it ended abruptly. When the Japanese invaded Indonesia (also in search of oil) and herded the population into POW camps, the VandenBergs’ life became a living hell. “The whole goddamn thing was a nightmare,” he recalls. “There was not enough food, there were no sanitary conditions, and people were bashed around; they were dying like flies.” When the war ended in 1945 and Shell evacuated the family to Australia in the wake of Sukarno’s revolt against the Dutch, “we were just about dead; we looked like those guys in Somalia.”
 
Part of the legendary UC Davis TB-9 crew (L to R): Steve Kaltenbach, Ruth Rippon, Robert Arneson, Peter VandenBerge, Gerald Walburg in Sacramento, 1987.  Photo: Tony Novelozo
After a year in Australia and a few years in post-war Holland, VandenBerg’s father moved to California, and Peter, then 19, followed. Twice over the next several years he returned to Europe where he visited Giacometti and Joan Miró. The impressions made on him by both artists were long-lasting, and as a result, he’s continued, throughout his career, to employ the color palettes and gestures of artists who he admires. Two examples in the Solomon Dubnick show are Bonnard at Le Cannef and Jonah Under Surveillance, where the deep grooves of the character’s beard bring to mind Van Gough’s brushstrokes. About a decade ago, I also recall VandenBerge executing a bust that incorporated a credible rendition of De Kooning’s slashing brushstrokes.
 
Backtrack to UC Davis, 1962. There, in the company of virtually every innovator in the then-emerging California Funk movement (Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest and William Wiley), VandenBerge began working, as Arneson’s first graduate student assistant, toward an MA degree. Arneson, of course, was the ringleader of that revolution, and would later gain notoriety for his scathing anti-war statements and his bust of assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. Arneson’s mission was to take ceramics out of the lowly realm of crafts and inject it into the world of fine art.
 
"Vrouw", 1984, ceramic, 15" x 40" x 19"
It was a period of wild experimentation, of finding out what could and could not be done with clay, and of pushing ideas and techniques beyond previously accepted limits. Fueled by political tensions, loosened sexual mores, ‘60s style surrealism and a distaste for the cold conceptual art then sweeping New York (and a good bit of the Bay Area, too), Northern California Funk artists succeeded briefly in tilting the axis of cultural authority to the West Coast.
 
Arneson was building clay telephones based on human genitalia; Wayne Thiebaud (who opens a show next month at the CSUS Library Gallery) was deep into pop, making pictures of candies, cakes and pies; while VandenBerge, for his part, was casting clay vegetables with crazy anthropomorphic features. But it wasn’t until 1975 that he made the connection with his past that enabled him to forge a signature style. “The linkage between where I came from – the temples where I was growing up and the Indonesian puppet theater – that,” he says emphatically, “was my link.”
 
The result – clay heads that bear a strong resemblance to the much mythologized East Island figures – have been VandenBerge’s trademark ever since. Despite the fact that WWII influenced him deeply, these ethereal (but wry) figures reveal none of the anger and outrage that his immediate contemporaries, Arneson and Wiley, were expressing about America’s involvement in Vietnam. VanderBerge’s highly symbolic figures have always been about primitive man’s collision with modernity, and by extension, his own loss of innocence in the face of forces far beyond his control.
 
If they make you smile, well, VandenBerge doesn’t mind. His main concern in the studio, he says, is the simple “pulling and pushing and punching of clay – the physical act of working it to see what I’m going to come up with next.” 
-DAVID M. ROTH 
 
Peter VandenBerge, The Usual Suspects, at Solomon Dubnick Gallery through Nov. 28, 2009.
 
Cover image: (Detail) Vincent in the Yellow House, 1996, 20" x 36" x 10".  Photo: David M. Roth

 

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‘Keepers’ @ Skinner/Howard

‘Keepers’ @ Skinner/Howard

Posted on 01 November 2009

Aaron Peterson, "Cradle, 2009, mixed media on wood panels, 48 x 78 inches

Keepers, a group show curated by Bay Area painter Aaron Petersen, brings together painting and sculpture from several contemporary currents of biomorphic and geometric abstraction. The title suggests possession and ownership. It also conveys a self-appointed seal of quality assurance.  But the show itself, of emerging and mid-career artists, carries no such certainties. With a nod and a wink, it traffics in ambiguity and mystery.

Petersen is one of the six artists on view. In the past, his oil-on-aluminum paintings have mixed Chinese landscape imagery, symbolist-like orbs and swirling P&D gestures. They’ve also offered viewers a portal into an alternate reality that stopped just short of pure fantasy. Now, he’s ventured somewhat cautiously into pop surrealism, proffering a universe populated with insects and comet-like forms that orbit around “hives” that seem suspended in space. Their exact domain – sub-aquatic, terrestrial or astral – remains uncertain.   

Vestiges of oozing translucence that once characterized Petersen’s work remain, but they’ve largely been overtaken by swirling shapes and bee-like forms rendered in bold stripes or dots. Where calm once reigned in his Asian-influenced world, a frenzied style of cartoon action now holds sway. Overall, this body of work feels a little like The Jettsons recast in a subtropical environment. “Zap-Pow!” meets Zen.

Lorene Anderson (detail) "Flapper", 2007, cassein, acrylic, ink, mica on panel, 12 x 12 inches

 Lorene Anderson’s small panel pieces, by contrast, seem almost hermetic in their quietude. Their gauzily painted grounds have an ethereal openness and luminosity that suggest the outward trappings of spiritual abstraction; but if you don’t look closely you might easily miss their virtues. The detailed forms that dance on the surfaces of her most intriguing works are practically microscopic.  They range from images that have the chiseled precision of magnified snowflakes to amorphous paint pours that, before running astray, coalesce into shapes that look like chorus lines spelled out in hot wax.  They have a lyricism that sneaks up on you. The smallest of her works, Aglaura, at 5” x 5”, is a revelation. 

Reed Danziger, "Above the 4th", 2008, watercolor, gouache, graphite, silkscreen on paper, 47 x 45 inches
Reed Danziger’s works on paper are perhaps the purest demonstration in this show of the kind of crosspollination between biomorphic and geometric abstraction that seems to be on the rise, from Leslie Shows and Val Britton in the Bay Area to Julie Mehretu and Kristin Baker in New York. Danziger’s watercolors, with their allusions to things natural and man-made, microscopic and macroscopic, seem to unfold kaleidoscopically, in layers. References to molecular forms, shards of stained glass, starbursts, prisms, flowing water, textiles and architectural rubble abound, leading one to the conclusion that she’s sampled the world’s flotsam and jetsam and figured out a way to unite it without inducing claustrophobia. This she does by patterning her forms at different scales, using plenty of open space, both inside and around her compositions.
 
Cynthia Ona Innis, like Danizger, employs natural forms, and like Danizger, she uses them as vehicles to comment on the human condition. Her vision – and her forms – seem closely linked to Terry Winters who, in the ‘80s, diagrammatically painted cellular shapes atop vaporous grounds to investigate the organizing behavior of biological units. Similarly, Innis’ pictures feature thinly painted cocoon-like shapes that sprawl across monochromatic grounds.  Another reoccurring motif are lozenge-like patches that, in her most compelling work, Sow, covers the entire flesh-toned panel in various shapes, colors and textures, including one furry substance that almost begs to be petted. 
 
It’s a fitting segue into the sculptures of Michael McConnell whose faux, life-sized taxidermies – some in bondage, some not – make disquieting statements about human-animal relationships that border on, but never quite cross over into, pointed activism. At once low-brow and kitsch, cuddly and perverse – they have no eyes — they seem at odds with everything else on view. 
Mary Alison Lucas, "Blister", "Sprout", "Thyme", 2009, stoneware clay, finish nails, casting slip, low-fire glaze, varying dimensions
 
Mary Alison Lucas’ gnarly ceramic sculptures are a welcome tonic. Bulbous, chartreuse-colored blobs covered with spiny protuberances whose interior textures resemble those of sea chitons, they connect us to that part of the earth we seldom see: the ocean depths. Sure, we’ve seen forms like these before — in the work of UC Davis professor Annabeth Rosen, who no doubt was a strong influence on Lucas — but in this fish-out-of-water context, they feel fresh, if not radical in their unabashed, muscular biomorphicism.
 
Yes, the show feels a bit crowded; there are 42 works dispersed throughout the gallery. Still, it’s hard to complain about a gathering of this quality. Hats off to Petersen and to Skinner-Howard for making it happen.
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
Keepers through Nov. 1, 2009 at Pamela Skinner/Gwenna Howard Contemporary Art.
 
Cover image: Aaron Petersen (detail), "Catcher", 2008, oil on aluminum, 12 x 72 x 3 inches.  

 

 

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