Recent Reviews, Profiles and Special Reports
Sac City College 4 @ JAYJAY
26 July 2010
Ever since Robert Rauschenberg built his legendary “combines” from cast-off junk sculptors have relied increasingly on found objects and industrial materials. Repurposed, they convey meanings that transcend, explicate and sometimes even parody the associations we normally affix to them.
Flatlanders @ Richard L. Nelson Gallery, UCD
23 July 2010
Contrary to Bay Area opinion, which holds that Sacramento is a backwater, “Flatlanders”, now in its third installment, stands as a sharp and smart rebuke. It not only serves as a showcase for emerging artists, but also spotlights area artists who long ago established regional, national and international reputations.
Jennifer Little & Mike Osborne @ Stanford
20 July 2010
In 1861, photographer Felix Nadar captivated Parisians with his photos of the city's catacombs and sewers. In “Excavating the Underground”, Jennifer Little and Mike Osborn, explore subterranean urban spaces in much the same spirit.
Local Treasures @ Berkeley Art Center
11 July 2010
On the surface, the artists in “Local Treasures” – Katherine Sherwood, Robert Brady, Jim Melchert, Squeak Carnwath, Livia Stein and Gale Wagner – would seem to have little in common. Look deeper and you find that each, in their own, way, is obsessed with plumbing life’s deepest mysteries.
Post-WWII Asian Modernists @ Togonon
02 July 2010
Mixing works by Asian-American artists, both foreign and native-born, this show demonstrates how Zen, calligraphy and Automatism, as advocated by the Surrealists, combined to form one of the most influential movements of the 20th century.
Youngsuk Suh @ Haines
22 June 2010
During the brushfires of 2008-09, Youngsuk Suh photographed people in places that were engulfed in flames. What we get is a fresh spin on the New Topographics mode of photography and portrait of the American West that is true to life and a bit vexing: You can breathe the air; just don’t inhale.
Reed Anderson @ Gregory Lind Gallery
17 June 2010
Anderson's obsessive paper works are composed of thousands of small, geometrically shaped holes. From a distance they look like giant doilies. Up close they unfold kaleidoscopically, like fractals, revealing a virtuoso technique.
SF Fine Art Fair @ Fort Mason
06 June 2010
The Bay Area got a jolt of adrenaline when the SF Fine Art Fair came to town, filling 50,000 square feet of Fort Mason’s Festival Pavilion with $300 million worth of art from 500+ artists represented by 80 galleries from the West Coast, New York, LA, Asia and Europe.
Stella Zhang @ Chinese Cultural Center
18 May 2010
The personal, sexual, and bodily evocations of Stella Zhang prove that in some quarters of San Francisco, a woman’s sexuality can still be a potent and contentious statement. Lia Wilson reports on what made CCC's administrators so nervous on opening night.
William Eggleston @ Krowswork
14 May 2010
Peter Schjeldahl named Eggleston "one of the great Romantic originals of camerawork.” His sole video effort, “Stranded in Canton”, was shot with a Sony Portapak, and the result, is a manic home movie that mixes distance and drunken intimacy in equal parts.
Hung Liu @ Rena Bransten
04 May 2010
Unike the elegiac, rivulet-stained oil paintings of 19th century and pre-Revolutionary women that, for decades, Hung Liu has been painting from period photos, her latest series, "Drawings from Life and Death" carries a different kind of load: the weight of mortality
Ai Weiwei @ Haines
01 May 2010
Is Ai Weiwei the plucky, disciplined Horatio Alger of the art world or its lucky, virtuous Oliver Twist?? Despite a harrowing life story that surpasses even Charles Dickens’ novels for melodramatic reversals of fate, Ai now enjoys global art world celebrity
Jiayi and Shih-Wen Young @ Axis Gallery
19 April 2010
If you ever feel like contemplating infinity, try copying out by hand, several thousand digits of pi. It sounds punishing. But for Jiayi and Shih-Wen Young, such exercises inspire visual possibilities.
Raymond Saunders @ Stephen Wirtz
17 April 2010
Raymond Saunders casts an array of disparate elements into a pitch-perfect balance of order and accident, demonstrating the subtle poetry of random arrangements of everyday detritus.
SF Preview: Wiley, Graves, Hudson, Shaw!
20 March 2010
Talk about star-studded line-ups. This month the Bay Area hosts major shows from William T. Wiley, Morris Graves, Robert Hudson and Richard Shaw. Herein, a sneak preview.
Chris McCaw & Mario Giacomelli @ Stephen Wirtz
17 March 2010
Chris McCaw uses the sun’s heat to scorch the his large-format photos. Mario Giacomelli depicts the Italian landscape as a palimpsest of gestures and messages, overwritten by time and human activity.
Sacramento’s Stunning New Airport Art
11 March 2010
When the new International Airport terminal opens in late 2011, visitors will be greeted by a 56-foot rabbit that appears to be diving from the ceiling into a suitcase. Your first-time of this city will be transformed.
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
24 February 2010
Margaret Harrison explores the politics of domesticity, addressing from domestic labor to genital mutilation. Her work tracks gender oppression in the global and political sphere.
Trautrimas & 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.
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