Recent Reviews, Profiles and Special Reports
Chris McCaw & Mario Giacomelli @ Stephen Wirtz
17 March 2010
Photographer Chris McCaw uses the sun’s heat to literally scorch the gelatin-coated paper of his large-format images. Mario Giacomelli depicts the Italian landscape as a palimpsest of gestures and messages, effaced or overwritten by time and human activity.
Sacramento’s Stunning New Airport Art
11 March 2010
When Sacramento’s new International Airport terminal opens in late 2011, visitors will be greeted by a new urban mascot: a 56-foot red rabbit that appears to be diving from the ceiling into a suitcase. It’s one of 13 new pieces of public art that will transform how many visitors see the city for the first time.
Road Trip: Fallon, NV
04 March 2010
Fallon (pop: 7,536) may be the hippest little town in the way-out-there West. Need proof? Check out Bob Brady at Oats Park Arts Center, a cultural oasis where you can also catch big-city jazz. Joe Lovano, anyone?
Haute Romantics @ Verge Gallery
24 February 2010
Nodding to historical notions of Romanticism, this show of New York artists filters its subject through the lens of various other isms: narcissism, voyeurism, consumerism and careerism.
Margaret Harrison @ Intersection for the Arts
24 February 2010
Margaret Harrison explores the politics of domesticity, addressing issues that range from domestic labor to genital mutilation. Her work tracks gender oppression in the global and political sphere.
David Trautrimas & Kristina Lewis @ Johansson
14 February 2010
David Trautrimas makes digitally manipulated photos from yesteryear’s appliances; Kristina Lewis builds futuristic objects from spike-heeled shoes. Wham! Zap! Kapow!
Mari Andrews & Sheila Ghidini @ Chandra Cerrito
13 February 2010
The sculptures and drawings of Mari Andrews and Sheila Ghidini aim at what Suzi Gablik called a “resacralization” of the world: a reclamation of all that has been lost on our beleaguered planet.
Luc Tuymans @ SFMOMA
11 February 2010
Whether he’s sneering at bourgeoisie social conventions or savaging institutional powers that feed on human suffering, painter Luc Tuymans is all about exposing the things that carefully crafted appearances are designed to disguise.
Ian Harvey and Koo Kyung Sook @ JAYJAY
30 January 2010
In their collaborative works, Harvey and Koo wrest order from manufactured chaos. Their wall-sized montages, built from thousands of images, show painting at its maximally expressive.
Eleanor Wood @ Don Soker Contemporary
25 January 2010
Eleanor Wood’s hermetic Minimalism embraces a sense of infinitely plotted spatial extensions while instantiating an intricate, insistent, rigidly contained, eye-catching, hypnotic singularity.
Diane Arbus @ Fraenkel Gallery
21 January 2010
After the exhaustively hagiographical 2003 Diane Arbus retrospective, Revelation, at SFMOMA, what more can there be to say or look at? Plenty, as this show of around 30 early works and outtakes.
Markus Linnenbrink @ Sweetow
18 January 2010
Markus Linnebrink doesn’t compose in the conventional sense; his works are a kind of visual archeology: an exploratory process in which the artist is both creator and excavator.
Mike Henderson @ Haines
15 January 2010
Employing Cubism’s floating color planes and Abstract Expressionism’s turbulent paint and ambiguous ideographs/hieroglyphs, Henderson's works generate their own force field.
Theodora Varnay Jones @ SJICA
21 December 2009
Can Minimalism’s geometry, impenetrable surfaces and modular units be recast with feeling? Theodora Varnay Jones answers with an emphatic yes.
Richard Gilles @ B. Sakata Garo
13 December 2009
Richard Gilles' photo aren't just about our wrecked economy. They document the void that exists between cities, suburbs, mountains and farmland.
David Wetzl @ JAYJAY
09 December 2009
David Wetzl's paintings attempt to make sense of the anarchy of human history. You may disagree with his positive forecast, but you can't help but marvel at his inventiveness.
‘Afterlife’ @ SJICA
05 December 2009
This show of “re-purposed” junk demonstrates how socially relevant art can spring from idiosyncratic, personal investigations and material invention.
Robert Brady @ B. Sakata Garo
25 November 2009
Bob Brady works with the figure, but the figure hasn't really his subject. Like a jazz instrumentalist who uses song structure for self-expression, Brady is all about stretching his materials.
Hattori and Essoe @ Swarm
21 November 2009
With mixed-media light-boxes, Hattori comes to terms with war and memory. Essoe, using video, installation and still photography, addresses the existential conundrum of suburbia.
Peter Honig @ Mercury 20
16 November 2009
Peter Honig uses the conventions of commercial photography to subvert the consumer desires with a style applies Dadist and Surrealist sensibilities to set-up photography.
Profile: Peter VandenBerge
11 November 2009
There's plenty of mystery in Peter VandenBerge's elongated, primitive faces; but their punch comes from a distinct brand of ‘60s-era, Duchamp-influenced absurdism.
‘Keepers’ @ Skinner/Howard
01 November 2009
The title of this show, curated by Aaron Petersen, suggests possession and certitude, but the works themselves traffic in mystery and ambiguity.
Phil Amrhein @ Axis Gallery
22 October 2009
Many artists have stared at, painted and even feigned leaping into The Void. But few do so as energetically as Phil Amrhein.
Deborah Oropallo @ Wirtz & Gallery 16
05 October 2009
These seductively posed apparitions drive us to question whether what we're seeing. It is photography, painting or some new hybrid?
Rex Ray @ Gallery 16
27 September 2009
Employing a boggling array of shapes, textures and colors, Rex Ray's collages resemble mash-ups of ’50-style home décor motifs, extraterrestrial floral fantasies and symbolist imagery.
GEO-MORPH @ PENCE GALLERY
20 September 2009
The artists in GEO-MORPH expand the language of biomorphic and geometric abstraction in ways that are materially inventive and intellectually challenging.
JENN SHIFFLET @ CHANDRA CERRITO
17 September 2009
Jenn Shifflet’s paintings are like pools of light emanating from indeterminate sources. They exist in a brackish wash of terrestrial, aquatic and celestial atmospherics.
Joan Moment @ LIMN & JAYJAY
07 September 2009
Joan Moment's paintings suggest that we exist outside of time and space: that we are at once everywhere and nowhere -- like stars and galaxies whose images are history before they even reach us.
Enrique Chagoya @ Electric Works
06 September 2009
Enrique Chagoya builds on his love of pop culture, European high art and his knowledge of the dark side of sunny American optimism.
Paper Mylar Vellum @ Brian Gross
10 August 2009
The goal was simply to showcase works from the gallery’s estimable stable. The result was one the strongest summer group shows in San Francisco.
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