Michael Stevens, “Three Wishes”, 2009, pine and enamel, 72 x 46 x 24"

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.

The haul during these past few years has been rich and diverse, and if nothing else, a testament to the taste and well-known eccentricities of Renny Pritikin who, like any good curator, scours the landscape to unearth novelty and quality, both of which appear in equal proportions in this bi-annual show of Sacramento-area artists.

Where in the beginning, in 2006, Pritikin included nearly 50 artists, he has now culled the herd to a manageable eight: Michael Stevens, Irving Marcus, Jim Albertson, Suzanne Adan, Jack Ogden, Patrick Marasso, Ianna Frisby and Mitra Fabian.  They range in age from their mid-30s to 81– a fact that normally wouldn’t mean much; but here age really does matter: The older artists – those in their 60s, 70s and 80s — who grew up under the influence of the Chicago Imagists, exhibit a gnarled, battle-hardened cynicism that simply isn’t present in the younger artists.

Pritikin didn’t set out to build a theme show, but certain themes do jump out. A fitting and encompassing subtitle for this one might be Americana. Each artist, in their own way, speaks about American culture and history, sometimes through the jaded lens of harsh personal experience, sometimes not.  That the pieces don’t all fit together perfectly doesn’t really matter; there’s enough coherence and quality here to more than compensate. Clearly, the loudest, most boisterous “conversation” in the show takes place in the main gallery between Stevens, Albertson, Marcus and Adan. 

Irving Marcus, “Cult”, 2010, oil on canvas, 38 x 65”

In Stevens’work, deceptions, double crosses, abductions, disappointments and bad outcomes play out in wood sculptures based on fictional cartoon characters that recall early days of television –days of supposed innocence.  Into that fiction, which exploded in the ‘60s with assassinations, violence and protest, Stevens, 65, lobs a grenade of his own.

His meticulously carved pieces, which often employ thrift-store paintings as backdrops, posit a Howdy Doody-meets-Alfred Hitchcock universe where demons lurk behind every white picket fence.  As the artist explained in a Squarecylinder profile last year, “I’m a satirist.  I draw on universal situations, like being out on a limb and using a comedic saw to cut yourself down, as in Three Wishes, “where you have three choices for the place where you will fall.  The imagery that I use talks about the human condition, that theatrical predicament that we’re all in.” Chop Suey, a floor mounted work that acts as a focal point for the exhibition, is also a signature piece for Stevens.  In it, symbols of an American dream run aground – a hatchet, a saw, a fish, a suitcase, a log cabin and a lunch pail – pile up on the back of a dog: a teetering structure of idyllic, homespun icons that flash like a warning signal saying: “This could happen to you.” 

Jim Albertson, “Art Lesson”, 2008, oil on canvas, 40 x 30”

Dark visions emanate, too, from Irving Marcus, 81, but they’re brightened and considerably softened by his Fauvist color palette — and by a floating cast of characters (devils, terrorists, prostitutes, politicians) whose positions in space are ambiguous.  As Mark Van Proyen observed some years back, these fractured allegories “express a confused consciousness of their own disembodied state, as though discontented with their reality yet unable to do anything to improve it.”  The paintings on view here — 911, Brothel and Cult – work similarly; they insist on the persistence of evil, yet their hallucinatory colors and disjointed structures vehemently deny it, like a person who’s witnessed a crime but can’t acknowledge having seen it. 

In contrast, Jim Albertson seems to have witnessed all manner of nastiness with his eyes pinned open. In 1978 he achieved notoriety by being included in Marcia Tucker’s ground-breaking New Museum show, Bad Painting.  The term doesn’t refer to badness per se, but to the collective nose-thumbing certain artists gave to conventional notions of high and low, presaging the breakdown of categories that would soon follow.  Working in an imagistic style similar to that of his then-partner, Louise Stanley, Albertson repurposes classical themes and myths, rendering lecherous and often mute characters in a loose hand and in lurid colors. His oeuvre reads like a catalog of nightmares from a molested child.

Suzanne Adan, “Shorthand”, 2008, oil on canvas, 15 x 20"

In Young Fragonard, Albertson reworks The Swing, Fragonard’s painting of a woman’s skirt blowing open to prying eyes.  In this version, a zombie-eyed mother with exposed thighs stiffly attempts to caress a swinging boy.  The kid looks terrified, and so does a fleeing cat. Art Lesson, a self-portrait, shows the artist-instructor as a leering, tongue-wagging clown, towering over his acolytes.

Suzanne Adan, 64, to whom Stevens is married, makes some of the most mysterious paintings you’re likely see anywhere.  Filled with figures, objects, animals, text snippets and symbols, her paintings owe equal debts to ‘40s-era American cartoons, Joan Miro and to Jim Nutt, a seminal influence who taught briefly at Sac State in the early ‘70s, and whose roots in Surrealism are clearly seen in the frozen-in-time dream sequences that appear in Adan’s energetic canvases.  Like the visionary artists that first inspired the Imagists, Adan works in an obsessive manner; the backgrounds of her paintings consist of scalloped marks done in a heavy impasto which, in contrast to the representational elements, flatten out the action almost completely.  Emptied of emotion, they echo the mute, repressed qualities seen in Stevens and Marcus.  

Jack Ogden, "Two Men in Tuxes", 2010, oil on canvas, 21 x 23”

Unlike his peers, Jack Ogden, 77, has no personal or ideological axes to grind, and as such he seems like the odd man out in this grouping.  He makes pared-down oil paintings of cowboys and robber barons.  But rather than reframe myths of the American West as a postmodernist might, Ogden remains a formalist, committed to executing simple narratives and portraits with the fewest marks needed to establish, character, setting and mood.  His large-scale oils aim for a bravura effect, but it’s his small-scale portraits that show how much impact can be squeezed from the smallest gestures.  Imagine Luc Tuymans painting 19^th century American plutocrats and you get some idea of what Odgen’s up to in works like Two Men in Tuxes.  The faces are smears, the backdrop is built from a few black strokes, and the domes atop the silver service tray are opposing shadows.  But where Tuymans dispenses with painterly effects to make political statements, Ogden simply paints. At age 77, the former Sac State professor is vital as ever.

Patrick Marasso and Ianna Frisby, both in their 30s, offer visions of the past that are neither nostalgic nor critical.  Marasso makes oil paintings from found snapshots of white, middle-class, middle-aged Americans drinking and having fun.  While painting from photographs is hardly a new idea — Gerhard Richter did it most famously — Marasso’s glossy-surfaced pictures exert a unique kind of pull.  By themselves the throwaway snapshots he reproduces are unremarkable.  But by painting the original images at substantially larger sizes, and by exaggerating their blurry, yellowed surface textures almost to the point of parody, Marasso gives these images new meaning.

Patrick Marasso, “Xmas at Joann & Pat’s”, 2009, 11 x 11"; "The Move", 2009, 10.5 x 10.5", both oil on panel

They force us to look for tell-tale signs, and as such, they transform banal objects into cultural artifacts, capable of telling stories that the original photographs, by virtue of their artlessness, could not.  Ianna Frisby also turns one thing into another: she reproduces fashion illustrations as embroideries.  At a distance they look like the originals; but up close they’re all about texture and dimensionality – and, most remarkably, the skill required to turn two-dimensional representations of people and clothing into tactile objects.

Ianna Frisby, “Fashion Pattern # 3”, 2010, embroidery, 24 x 16”

Lastly, Mitra Fabian, using binder clips, constructs a floral-shaped sculpture that covers an entire wall in a room adjacent to the main gallery; it’s wondrously simple and it activates the space nicely; but given the narrow dimensions of the room, it is impossible to view at a proper distance.  To see what Fabian is really capable of, head to JAYJAY where several of her sculptures are on view through Aug. 7.  (I’ll have more to say about Fabian and the JAYJAY show in a future posting.)

Given Flatlanders’ inclusive past, some people may feel short-changed by Pritikin’s abbreviated take on the Sacramento scene.  But from this vantage point, less is not only more, it’s flat-out better: This is the strongest, most cohesive Flatlanders show yet. 

–DAVID. M. ROTH

Flatlanders 3: A Regional Roundup @ the Richard L. Nelson Gallery & Fine Art Collection, UC Davis, through August 15, 2010

Cover: Irving Marcus, 911, 2010, oil on canvas, 40 x 60”

Photos: David M. Roth

Jennifer Little, "Drainage Ditch at Poplar Avenue, North View, Memphis, TN”, 2005, pigment print, 50 x 40"

In 1861, photographer Felix Nadar (1820-1910) captivated Parisians by giving them their first glimpse of the city’s mysterious catacombs and dark sewers. In Excavating the Underground, Jennifer Little and Mike Osborne, explore subterranean urban spaces in much the same spirit.

Little, who teaches photography at UOP, created her Barriers and Conduits series between 2005 and 2008, focusing on streams trickling beneath freeway overpasses in Austin and Memphis. Her works seem to be primarily about the poetic visual effects that can be wrung from making pictures in such spaces.  Osborne’s photographs, from 2009, of silent passengers waiting on the platforms of a German subway line, appear to be portraits of people in transit, bur are more about the relationship between architecture and painting. 

The idea of travel runs through both artists’ work, and to emphasize that fact, Little installs a video of cars driving across bridges and overpasses. Though the feeling of transit doesn’t stick while viewing the entire show, the random rumblings of cars and sirens remind us of what’s actually going on above-ground.

Below ground, Little photographs her works from inside culverts, pointing her lens towards the outside, as if emerging from the tunnel’s depths. While keeping the bright light, green vegetation, and grey cement walls of the urban landscape visible just beyond the edge of the culvert, Little aims her camera to cut off the sky from view. What she captures in the tunnels’ dark pools of water are near-perfect reflections of the things that cannot be seen clearly from inside, namely trees, sky and clouds.

L to R: Mike Osborne, "Young Punk", 2009, archival inkjet print, 44 x 54"; Jennifer Little, "Waller Creek at 41st Street, Austin, TX", 2008, pigment print, 37 x 48"

While reflections can be a shop-worn cliché, Little’s photos serve up interesting conjunctions between the natural and the manmade, the heavens and the underground, rigidness and fluidity, clarity and the unknown – all of which are symmetrically interlocked, with the edges of the culverts and their watery reflections literally framing the interactions, like the dualities embodied in the yin/yang symbol.

With the video reminder of the fast-paced of the world above, the dank world underneath an overpass becomes an oasis of calm. The cement structures, sometimes crumbing or covered in stains, carry their own kind of history. Neither beautiful nor ugly, the structures seem both opposite to and integrated with the natural elements. In this original portrait of two American cities, nature and the invasive urban form come finally to a compromise.

In Mike Osborne’s photographs, man-made forms – subway platforms, hallways, windows artificial light – hold sway.  His main interest is in solid, rigid lines and forms.  Photographed during a residency in Stuttgart, each piece captures a certain type of individual (i.e. a stewardess, a punked-up teenager, a businessman, suburban wife) framed against the glaring background of the stations’ 1970s architecture.  (Apparently the colors — yellow, blue, red – represent a separate stop on the Stadtbahn.)

Though Osborne’s later works explore such cities as Houston and Beijing with specificity, the fact that these pictures were made in the Stadtbahn serves as little more than a fact for curious viewers. His photographs center less on people than on the backgrounds they inhabit. Thus, his skill with urban forms lies in transforming the tacky architecture into something aesthetic. As in an Ellsworth Kelly color-field painting, it’s the colors that give Osborne’s photos their powerful presence.

Take Man from Gerlingen where a handsomely dressed man leans against one station’s solid-blue walls, smoking a cigarette. His character is defined by the overwhelming blue light emanating from the background.  In Aufzug, shot from a low angle, a long yellow hallway leads to a figure standing behind the graffitied blue doors of an elevator.  Stand close and the yellow swallows you whole.

“Immersive” is a word that has lately been overused.  But this show is one case where it actually applies.

–MYRA MESSNER

Excavating the Underground @ Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery through August 8, 2010.

Cover: Jennifer Little

Katherine Sherwood (detail), “Mansur Nurse from the Yelling Clinic”, 2010, mixed media on canvas, 98 x 30 x 12”

Pairings of big-name artists, especially those of disparate sensibility, are always fraught propositions.   One always wonders how and why such combinations appear and what the connections might be.  In the case of Local Treasures: Six Extraordinary Artists, there are some obvious clues.  One is that co-curator, Richard Whittaker, who collaborated on this show with BAC Executive Director Suzanne Tan, interviewed all of the artists at length for his magazine, works & conversations, copies of which are stationed throughout the exhibit.  The other is that all of the artists have deep roots in the Bay Area art scene. 

By themselves, those are fairly slender pegs on which to hang a show.   However, if you scratch beneath the surface of this one, you find that most of the artists, divergent though their styles may be, deal with two issues: healing and transcendence.  

Berkeley painter and UCB Professor of Art, Katherine Sherwood, examines the workings of the human brain, a pursuit that’s been central to her work ever since she recovered from a cerebral hemorrhage that debilitated the left side of her brain and paralyzed the right half of her body.  The event, which occurred in 1997, forced her to not only relearn language and basic motor skills, but also to paint with her left hand.  Her pictures combine healing symbols that were once employed as seals by King Solomon and photo transfers of her own angiograms – both of which are united pictorially by congealed globs of poured paint that look like frozen-in-time geological events.  

Robert Brady, “Area 51”, 2010, freestanding wood sculpture, 112 x 27 x 32

Two of the works on view here point toward even greater dimensionality.  In Mansur Nurse and Burgundy Nurse (both from the Yelling Clinic series), the artist appends skirts to a pair of vertical canvases to create figures that are practically animate.  Where she once focused exclusively on what was going on inside her head, she’s now creating bodies and accessorizing them with dotted, Indian-looking details accompanied by text that appears to be Sanskrit or Arabic. 

Robert Brady, another long-time Berkeley resident and a former Sac State professor, also traces his beginnings as sculptor to a debilitating illness – one that struck twice: once when he was a teenager and again in adulthood never to return.  Though his work has never been about sickness, the experience pushed him to explore life’s essences, using the figure as a malleable template for wide-ranging explorations of what can be wrought from wood.  His best-known works are emaciated, long-limbed figures whose inscrutable, totemic features call to mind Cycladic sculptures.

They’ve always been highly abstract, but in recent years they’ve become even more so.  Area 51 is a good example.  It’s an outsized piece named for the U.S. Air Force base in southern Nevada, long been rumored to be harboring the remains of space aliens and their conveyances.  With its rocket-shaped, nose-cone of a head set on a platform held aloft by four skinny legs, and with its oval-shaped feet adorned with painted-on polka-dot “eyes”, it gives palpable form to the rumors.

A bigger surprise for Brady watchers, though, may be his drawings.  He’s made them for years but rarely shown them.  Unlike the informal sketches that we are accustomed to seeing from sculptors, Brady’s are exacting, detailed works that incorporate the full range of his iconography, illustrating a world view that could function as a backdrop for a theatre performance – a desert epic, perhaps — that has yet to be staged. 

Jim Melchert, “Untitled Rubbing of Verbs #1”, 1993-4, graphite and black lead on paper, 60 x 49”

Ceramic sculptor Jim Melchert, another celebrated Bay Area figure, gained fame by firing and then painting assemblages of smashed tiles to create wall-mounted sculptures that were at once Conceptual, Op and Minimalist.  The work he exhibits here is markedly different, and as a result it fits neatly into the theme of the show.Two oval-shaped “rubbings” (of graphite and black lead on paper) emit an inner glow through an epidermal surface texture, evoking ancient spiritual and fertility symbols.  There are also two ceramic boxes (Words in an Unknown Tongue) filled with serpentine forms that hit the eye like a kind of visual glossolalia, squirming incomprehensibly while remaining resolutely still.

Livia Stein, who’s traveled extensively in India and whose retrospective opened last month at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, has for years worked with images of Ghandi, a healing figure if ever one existed.  One of them, a monotype simply titled, Ghandi, has an almost reliquary feel, as does the etching called Airplane.

Together, they sound the themes of flight and transcendence that echo throughout the room in works by Brady and by Gale Wagner.  Wagner, who was wounded in Vietnam and used art to self-heal, makes exquisite rubber band-powered model airplanes that dangle from the gallery ceiling, activating the airspace.  His works deserve permanent museum space. 

Squeak Carnwath, “Hours”, 1990, dog tracks, charcoal, graphite, paint stick, acrylic on paper, 72 x 68” framed

With Squeak Carnwath, who last year wowed the Bay Area with a 15-year survey at the Oakland Museum, the curators tried to go beyond the tried-and-true.  She’s best known for lushly painted word and number-filled canvases that function as illuminated diaries.  What we get here are more words than pictures.  They appear in two drawings and in seven framed notebook pages.

The notebook pages I read reluctantly because they seemed too intimate.  But two outstanding drawings– Hours and New Rule – demonstrate the central premise of her work, which is that our thoughts, however small or seemingly insignificant, are worth examining.  For Carnwath that process is the essence of consciousness, validating her own existence and affirming that of viewers as well.  While the absence of her oil paintings is lamentable, oil does show up in an unexpected form: cigar boxes overflowing with raw pigment.  The meaning of these Dada-like objects is hard to fathom, but whatever the intent, they’re a great tactile pleasure.

Flight is the show’s one visible through-line, but the idea doesn’t really fly.  The pictures and objects that relate to flight generate a certain synergy amongst themselves, but they don’t always relate meaningfully to the rest of what’s in the room.

No matter.  The act of bringing artists of this stature together in a community art center setting is commendable.  Each artist has a long history of delving into life’s mysteries and hitting hit pay dirt wherever they choose to strike.  Local Treasures proves it yet again. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

Local Treasures: Six Extraordinary Artists @ Berkeley Art Center through August 8, 2010.

Cover: Squeak Carnwath: Partegas Londres Finos #6, 2001, paint, cigar box (paper covered mahogany), 6 x 8 x 4”.

Gary Woo, “For a Drum”, 1967, oil on canvas, 54” x 43.5”

When Abstract Expressionism burst onto the scene in the post-WWII years, it was touted as the first truly American style of visual art.  Like jazz – the other polyglot art form everyone thinks of as all-American – Abstract Expressionism was as much an outgrowth of Asian and European traditions as jazz was of musical ideas that originated in Africa and Europe.

Gold Standard: Nine Asian-American Modernist Artists explores this notion of historical melding.  It mixes works by Asian-American artists (both foreign and native-born), to demonstrate how Zen, calligraphy and Automatism, as advocated by the Surrealists, combined to form one of the most influential movements of the 20^th century.

Some of the work is exceptional and occasionally revelatory, and for many it will be an introduction to a group of Bay Area modernists from the post-war years whose names, for the most part, are not household words.  Part of the reason they are not is that they were stymied by the war and its aftermath of racial prejudice which didn’t really begin to abate until the 1980s when multiculturalism helped end the most overt forms of institutional discrimination.  Yet even at that, the nine artists brought together here by critic and curator DeWitt Cheng, have enjoyed substantial career success. 

Carlos Villa, “Reading Images”, 1980, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 58” x 45”

Locally, the most prominent among them is Ruth Asawa, best known for her bulbous wire basket sculptures, last seen en masse at a 2006 de Young a retrospective.  A student of Joseph Albers who learned to weave wire in Toluca, Mexico, she is represented by a series of Japanese watercolor and woodcut-influenced lithographs and drawings that show some of the thinking behind the allusions to liquidity found in her sculpture.  Had some of her 3-D work been present, we’d have a stronger idea of how she adapted Asian forms to Modernist ends.

What the show does make clear, over and over, is that an artist’s birthplace doesn’t necessarily dictate the degree to which Modernist ideas were assimilated or the degree to which classical forms from an artist’s homeland were retained.  Take George Miyasaki.  He was born in 1935 in Hawaii and arrived on the mainland knowing nothing about art – Asian, European or American.  After graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts, he quickly assumed an internationalist stance to avoid being pigeonholed as an “Asian artist”.

Two oil paintings from the late ‘50s show him operating in the Bay Area Figurative mode, melding the influences of Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira, two of his instructors.  One is a landscape; the other is a figure study.  Both are dominated by thick grounds of green ochre punctuated by colors that are brighter, but equally mutes, as was typical of the period.  Later, he abandoned this style in favor of the geometric abstractions he makes today – lithographs that owe more Cubism and traditional forms of Japanese calligraphy than to Bay Area influences.

Ruth Asawa, “Plane Trees, 1965, lithograph, 22.5” x 28.5”

Carlos Villa, a Filipino-American artist born in San Francisco, actively cultivated his ethnic roots, and went even further afield, diving deep into Oceanic art and incorporating into his work feathers, bones, blood, teeth, hair and shells.  Here, his three paintings on paper from 1979-81 feature swirling, dancing, gestural forms painted in brilliant hues, with cloth-wrapped pieces of bone attached to the surfaces.

George Miyasaki, “Untitled”, 1958, oil, 46.6” x 47.75”

Fetishistic, ritualistic and talismanic, these jubilant paintings generate their own electrical force fields.  So, too, does the vibrating, calligraphy-influenced painting, For a Drum, by Gary Woo, a Chinese immigrant who came to San Francisco from Gaungzhou as a teenager.  In contrast, C.C. Wang, who fled China in 1949, and John Way, a native of Shanghai, make calligraphic paintings and drawings with few modernist embellishments.  Their spare, elegant, tradition-bound works, when set against those of others who use calligraphic marking more expansively, show just how deeply Chinese writing influenced Abstract Expressionism in the Bay Area, New York, Paris and beyond.

Leo Valledor (1936-1989), a San Francisco native (who also happened to be Carlos Villa’s cousin), is the show’s sole color-field painter.  Though better known as a hard-edge abstractionist, he’s represented here by a circular, white-painted canvas and an orange field painting interrupted by two small apertures.  Both works, from the early ‘70s, are compelling examples of how the Zen notion of the void appeared as a reoccurring motif throughout Ab Ex painting in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

John Way “Abstract Landscape”, 1977, oil on paper, 18.75” x 23.5”

The most contemporary and most revelatory work in the show comes from Arthur Okamura (1932 -2009).  Green Twigs with Yellow Dots (1996), built around single line, writhes like a box of snakes.  Anchored by four yellow points that float on the surface, the painting feels like a twisting geometric maze or an elastic weaving in which the artist was both a master and a prisoner.  It prefigures by a decade work that Ed Moses would show at MOCA in 1987.  Splattering Red Flower (1996) looks like it was made by a different artist. Parts of it appear to be liquefied, as if Matisse had tried his hand at symbolist painting.  With its crosshatched vase and tendril-like drips that shoot out from the flowers to the edges of the picture, it, too, points to future developments, most notably the work of Laura Owens.  Paired with two erotic etchings of flower-like shapes, Core and Slice, this small sampling of Okamura gives us a glimpse into his versatility and the distance he traveled as an artist.

Asian-American modernists traveled many paths in the post-war years, and the diversity of their efforts can only be hinted at in a gallery setting.  If this show were transported whole to a museum and enlarged to include these and other artists’ current works, that would be an historic event.

Arthur Okamura (L to R): “Green Twigs with Yellow Dots” and "Splattering Red Flower", 1966, watercolor, 24” x 18”

On the other hand, one can’t argue too much with a show as handsome and as well-chosen as this.  While its core concept may seem elemental to the cognoscenti, it’s worth repeating, just as it’s worth repeating on these shores that the blues didn’t begin with the British Invasion.  Curators, should they choose to follow Cheng’s lead, have their work cut out for them.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Gold Standard: Nine Asian-American Modernist Artists @ Togonon Gallery through July 10, 2010.

This show also included works by Constance Chang.

Cover Detail: Gary Woo, For a Drum, 1967, oil on canvas, 54” x 43.5”

“Waterskiing”, 2008, 36” x 46”, archival pigment print on rag paper

During the brushfires of 2008-09, when anyone who could stayed indoors, Youngsuk Suh (or “Young” as he is known among colleagues) was outside with a 4 x 5 film camera, recording images of places throughout the West that were engulfed in flames. Through the smoky haze, he photographed not only the visible features of the landscape, but also people in various pursuits of leisure and labor: bathing, hiking, boating, rafting and firefighting.

Contrary to appearances, these pictures are not part of an explicit environmental treatise.  Rather, they are an attempt to get us to question received notions of landscape.  Using the visual conceit of smoke, Young attempts to re-frame a variety of ideas about nature and culture that have run throughout American history.  These range from the romantic impulse of Hudson River School painters to the socially engaged WPA-era pictures of Walker Evans, and from the fiercely polemical works of Robert Adams to the more open-ended existential studies of Richard Misrach.  It’s also safe to say, given the preponderance of smoky vistas, that the artist’s Korean heritage and the traditions of Asian landscape painting play an equally strong role in this project.

“Gas Station”, 2008, 36” x 46”, archival pigment print on rag paper

As such, Wildfires is a conversation across history that, without asserting a singular viewpoint, touches on the ways American landscape is used, abused, perceived and enjoyed.  Irony, alienation, majesty and an inverted sense of the sublime infuse the dozen medium-sized (36 x 46”) photos on view.  Their most distinguishing feature, apart from a persistent scrim, is the peculiar quality of the foliage: it has a fuzzy, almost pointillist texture that lends the images a physical presence that would otherwise be absent.  As for people, you really have to look to find them, and in the screen views you see here, they are difficult to locate. Nevertheless, they and their surrogates (animals and signs) are the content bearers in these images.

Squirrel, shot from a deserted vista point, shows the animal staring back at the camera with a “What, me worry?” expression, mocking Edward Abbey’s warning about the dangers of what he called “industrial tourism”.  Gas Station, which has one of those machine-powered inflatable figures cowering in the background, feels like a scene created by extraterrestrials with a taste for clever graphics.  The lone gas pump in the picture carries one of those colorful “eco-friendly” logos that corporate polluters use in magazine ads to assure us they’re the good guys.  Taken two years ago, before the BP fiasco, it feels prescient.

“Cigarette”, 2009, 36” x 46”; “Coffee”, 2009, 36” x 46”, both archival pigment print on rag paper

Others, like Cigarette and Coffee employ the kind of simple ironies that have been staples of American street photography since Walker Evans.  The first shows a firefighter in the midst of a smoke-filled scene dragging on a cigarette; the second is of a small roadside billboard for coffee.  The heat of the beverage is represented by orange flames, a case of advertising foretelling real-life disaster.

“Conversation”, 2009, 36” x 46”, archival pigment print on rag paper

All of this falls squarely into the New Topographics mode, a style of image making that originated the ‘70s and focused on the impact of development.  Conversation is a photo of a parched desert landscape with three people walking along a sandy, tree-lined trail.  At the top right of the picture we see a series of sprawling, low-slung concrete buildings, one of which is a Costco.  Seeing these elements in the same frame feels slightly surreal and yet they stand as resolute facts — one of the hallmarks the New Topographics movement.

Elsewhere, Young explores the notion of the sublime as it was conceived by Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederick Church and the German romantic Caspar David Friedrich. Their impulse was to glorify nature by presenting it as something we could conquer and bask in.  Later, photographers adopted similar techniques to promote tourism.  But there was also a spiritual aspect, which Young, through the pictorial scrim of smoke, evokes to question the equation of nature and godliness. He does this by shooting nearly all of his people scenes (Bathers and a Dog, Bathers under a Bridge and Rafting) from high angles so that they are dwarfed by their surroundings.  The result is an upending of a historic dynamic: Where the romantic painters made nature the object of an omnipotent gaze, Young, in the manner of Misrach, puts his attentuated subjects inside the picture, asserting that nature holds the upper hand.

“Bathers under Bridge”, 2008, 36” x 46”, archival pigment print on rag paper

Scale and camera angle are not the only things that draw us into these pictures.  Given the toxicity of the air, one wonders if the people in Young’s pictures are real or whether the photographer inserted them after-the-fact.  (The artist assures that the pictures are, in fact, “straight”; the only exceptions are instances where he overlaid multiple negatives to add more people to scenes than actually appeared in any single frame.)

Young doesn’t reinvent New Topographics, but he does give it a fresh spin. By showing people operating in the face of disaster as if nothing unusual were occurring, he gives us a psychological portrait of the American West that is both unsettling and true to life.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Youngsuk Suh, Wildfires @ Haines Gallery through August 20, 2010. 

“Cover”: Bather at Sunset, 2009, 36 x 47 inches, archival pigment print on rag paper

"You Would If You Loved Me", 2010, acrylic and collage on cut paper, 94-inch diameter

For a painter, Reed Anderson is pretty clever with razor blades.  His obsessive paper works, which are both additive and subtractive, are distinguished by thousands of small, geometrically shaped holes.  These appear in various guises: in hand-cut bits of the paper ground that are removed to form negative shapes; in pieces that are hand-painted and collaged; and in spray painted, stenciled shapes that appear on the same ground from which they were cut.

Anderson’s pieces undergo a lot of surgery before they reach completion.  In the wall-sized piece, Nuppet Tree, the 86" x 90" sheet of paper has not only been cut and punched with patterns of hundreds of holes of various crisp, clean geometric shapes; it has been glued, airbrushed and brush painted, splashed with a drip of gloss medium here and marked in colored pencil there. It is also creased by stenciling actions, marked by scuffs and stains in places, and poked with an array of thumbtack holes at the corners. This evidence of manhandling brings to mind the presence and gesture of the artist’s body so characteristic of action painting; yet Anderson’s work appears to be highly nuanced — marked more by the fine motor skills of craft, than by the gross flailing glorified by Pollock or de Kooning.

"Nuppet Tree", 2009-2010, acrylic, airbrush and collage on cut paper, 84 x 90 inches

Bay Area artists such as Val Britton and Queena Hernandez, and Portland-based Anna Fidler use finely cut paper as a distinctive element in their painting.  Anderson occupies a similar space, but his work is unique in that it employs paper as both a medium and a tool.  The cut holes in his flamboyant, biology-inspired works function not only as patterns unto themselves; but also as a stencil for airbrushing patterns onto other parts of his pieces.

Take the show’s title piece, You Would If You Loved Me.  From across a room it reads like a giant doily.  This eight-foot circle of paper is cut and punched till there is almost as much paper missing as there is present.  Painted in tones ranging from violet to cadmium red, it delivers, against a white ground, a floral, leafy pattern defined by slices, folds, cuts and airbrushed “paint-throughs”.  At close range, unfolds kaleidoscopically, bringing to mind a porous, web-like membrane or the structure of bone marrow.  It might also be likened to fractals, except that Anderson claims to have little knowledge of the subject apart from what he gleans from scientific magazines and journals.  He is, however, is inspired by the idea of autopoietic systems.

Although fractals are autopoeitic, I should score one for my biomorphic interpretation, since the term autopoiesis was coined by biologists to describe living systems that self-propagate, like cells.  Better still, leave behind the “what-does-it-look-like" game that seems such an irresistible way to speak about abstraction.  Anderson’s work functions beyond a mimesis of any type of imagery.  It operates on its own principles, revealing the logic and process of its making.

L to R: "Pinko Salad", 2010, acrylic on cut paper, 29 x 27 inches; "It Was So Romantic…", 2010, acrylic and spray-paint on cut magazine, 10.5 x 8.5 inches

"I enjoy seeing all the history within the materiality of the paper." Anderson explains. "Each crease is a sign of a place or happening…each patch another mark within the complex palimpsest that becomes the finished work." The result has stunning visual texture at close view.

Throughout Anderson’s works, tensions between the obsessive, intentional cuts and the coarsely painted strokes and the incidental rough-ups have a slow-breaking effect.  Distinct layers and processes continue to reveal themselves: The positive shapes removed from the holes are re-applied elsewhere as collage materials. Color is painted in thin rims around the edges of some holes but brushed broadly over others, and stenciled through in other places.

"Good for Business 2", 2010, acrylic on paper, 26.75 x 25.75 inches

Look closely at piece like Nuppet Tree and you find even more dimensions unfolding. This "tree" has its own tensions: the marks defining its "branches" — rectangular strips painted in fully saturated primaries, secondaries and solid blacks — couldn’t be more jolting.  Against these, the floral clusters of punched-hole patterns seem improbably delicate. The whimsy of the word "Nuppet" suits this picture perfectly.

Elsewhere, several works built from magazine pages (It Was So Romantic, One for Joseph and others) are less successful, largely because the juxtapositions of text and images against the artist’s marks don’t function as cogently as the marks do alone. The works on plain paper are already rich with layers whose internal tensions are compelling.

Thus, the beauty of Anderson’s works lies in how they progressively reveal themselves at different viewing distances.  The first of these is the Internet image – how they appear online.  Some artists’ efforts don’t register through a 72 dpi screen image; Anderson’s caught my attention even there. From that point, through my first scan of the gallery, to my journey through the distressed topography of each piece, my time was well spent.  You can, of course, take the virtual view, but if you really want to understand what Reed Anderson is saying, you must see his work in-person.

–LIESA LIETZKE

Reed Anderson: You Would If You Loved Me @ Gregory Lind Gallery, SF, through July 10, 2010.

“Cover”: Detail: You Would If You Loved Me

“0-Viewpoint #1”, 2010, metal & fabric, variable sizes; overhead: “0-Viewpoint #5”, 2010, fabric installation, 10 ft x 94 ft

On the opening night of Stella Zhang’s exhibition, 0-Viewpoint, at the Chinese Culture Center, the administrators were tense with apprehension and anticipation. I gathered with the crowd in the lobby outside the CCC and waited through 30 minutes of speeches from the artist, the curator, the director of the Center and others before being allowed to view the work.

Thinly veiled in the tone of these speeches were warnings about the intimate and controversial nature of Zhang’s art, apparently a major departure from the traditional aesthetic of the CCC. While the Center was originally founded by Chinatown locals who wanted to preserve their cultural heritage, the Xian Rui (Fresh and Sharp) series highlights the work of emerging and underrepresented Chinese artists. This is a much-needed step for the Center’s relevancy within San Francisco’s art scene, not to mention the vibrant contemporary Chinese art market.

Zhang, who was born in Beijing in 1965 but educated both in the United States and Japan, relies on her personal intuition to create this work, which she claims in her artist’s statement is “an embodiment of my inner conflict and struggles”. This private focus clearly pushes the institution’s boundaries.  I suspect Curator Abby Chen probably fought to get the work in the door. After the speeches, which bordered on excuses for any sensibilities that might be offended, a ribbon cutting ceremony finally opened the entrance to the gallery. I was prepared for erotic fanfare and shock.

 “0-Viewpoint #3-1” and “0-Viewpoint #3-2”, 2010, fabric on canvas, 48 inches x 68 inches

The work on view doesn’t merit such expectations.  The gallery is filled with pure white work, an untainted palette sustained throughout. Five cylindrical sculptures over ten feet high, made with stretchy white cotton fabric pulled over a ridged internal structure, are installed in the first room.  As these tall phalluses towered over me, there seemed little to ponder beyond their initial recognition. (I heard later that a male visitor straddled one of the sculptures, laughing and posing for pictures.) 

As I moved onto the next room, the works became more dimensional. Dozens of small white cotton-like puffs pierced with sharp wooden spikes lay nestled in a circular cradle of fabric; others hung suspended, hovering from above, appearing fluid and in motion. Each piece is unique. Many are bulbous-shaped or egg-like, some with centers deeply creased as though they were about to split apart and multiply, like new cells breaking from one another. These little cushiony forms feel distinctly bodily, like an internal process of nuclei morphing and regenerating. They can be seen as eggs nestled within the uterus, some clinging and growing, others falling away. However, the tactile quality and visual interest of their abstracted forms keeps them from being anchored to a singular vaginal reference, producing an ambiguity that keeps one lingering.

Detail: “0-Viewpoint #2”, 2010, cotton, fabric, toothpicks, variable size

In a third room hang five all-white canvases with fabric knotted, stretched, and torn across their rectangular planes.  Each holds a palpable tension, evocative of something desperately trying to come up for air and reveal itself, only to be repeatedly covered up, silenced, and concealed. Some of these compositions do look like labia and folds of internal skin, but I found myself distracted by these more obvious references. The nuances of the knotting and ripping of the fabric are far more compelling, and to me seem like an apt metaphor for the resistance and discomfort caused by public discussions of female sexuality.

The video in the last room of the gallery — a projection of swirling vapor or smoke spiraling on the carpeted floor – feels like an afterthought.  The film is looped and synched to generic, new age music and concludes with a projection of the number 0 before repeating itself.  After the lofty phalluses and other overt sexual references, I assume these forms are meant to signify swirling sperm.  It’s a simplistic assumption, I admit, but the work suggests little else. Overall, the projection feels like a premature experiment with new media, and it utilized none of Zhang’s skill with materials and composition.

Foreground: “0-Viewpoint #2”, 2010, cotton, fabric, toothpicks, variable dimensions. , — Overhead: “0-Viewpoint #5”

Hanging along the hallway linking the gallery’s four rooms are 12 paintings made of sand, glue and white paint on canvas. These depict various fluctuations with an oval shape, and are apparently meant to allude to Zhang’s feelings about her monthly menstrual cycles, or so a gallery assistant told me. Above them, billowing clouds of elastic cotton fabric hang from the ceiling, draped and pulled along the length of the hallway. It’s a provocative, but ultimately decorative gesture that succeeds only in blocking the light that would otherwise illuminate the paintings.

Conceptually and aesthetically, the strongest works are those left untethered to obvious sexual or physical indication, for such allusions flatten any potential for complex meaning. That said, perhaps it really is important to fill the first room with enormous phalluses. What better way for the curator to signal to Chinatown, San Francisco, and especially the Center’s board of directors, that the CCC is done playing it safe?  The show clearly shocked some people at the opening. What else would motivate a man to straddle a sculpture in a gallery and mock it before a crowd? What was so threatening or uncomfortable that he needed to turn it into a joke?

"0 Viewpoint 3-4", 2010, mixed media, 30 x 48 inches. Photo: Danxiong Wang

The phallus sculptures are certainly not groundbreaking or shocking to an audience versed in Western contemporary art. Nearly 40 years ago, we saw Linda Benglis advertise herself wearing a giant strap-on, Annie Sprinkle filming her cervix and Carolee Schneemann reach inside her vagina and pull out an internal scroll to read to an audience. What the 0-Viewpoint exhibition acutely demonstrates is the disparity between the San Francisco contemporary art scene and the artistic sensibilities of the Chinatown community. The fact that this disparity was called to light by the very personal, sexual, and bodily evocations of a Chinese woman, as supposed to a radical or sweeping political statement, is particularly striking. Apparently, a woman’s sexuality can be a potent and contentious statement in this community. And while I find the phallus sculptures to be vacant and one-note, they strategically function as an effective icebreaker for the CCC. I can also see them as a deeply liberating exercise for Zhang whose original artistic training was in traditional Chinese ink painting. If this frees her up and allows her to delve more fully into her materials and engage her ample skills, as she does with the torn and knotted canvases and the cotton-like sculpture installation, then the effort is worthwhile. When Zhang resists the predictable she more effectively communicates an intimate, sensual, and multifaceted feminine perspective. This is no small achievement, especially with only a white palette; it is a prime example of the artist making abstraction work when she fully commits to it.

I applaud the CCC for engaging in the very necessary, but also very precarious, challenge of balancing Chinese tradition and heritage while also taking steps to make itself relevant to a younger generation.  Zhang’s work opens this dialogue. My experience, however, was hampered by the apologetic tenor of the speeches at the opening.  A contemporary exhibition space doesn’t need to issue warnings or play to expectations.  Zhang’s work speaks for itself.

–LIA WILSON

 Stella Zhang 0 Viewpoint @ Chinese Cultural Center through Sept. 5, 2010

Artist Talk: June 24, 2010 at 6 pm.

All other photos: Chih Chang

As a color photographer, William Eggleston’s contributions are esteemed. His 1976 show at the MOMA in New York was decisive in the establishment of color photography as a fine art form.  Peter Schjeldahl, writing in The New Yorker, named him "one of the great Romantic originals of camerawork, with Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Stephen Shore and Nan Goldin."

Stranded in Canton (1973-75), his sole video effort, was culled to 77 minutes from of 30 hours of black and white footage shot in and around his home city of Memphis, Tennessee.  Eggleston recorded it with a Sony Portapak, a device whose benefits — low cost, ease of use and instant playback — enabled video art.  Using it to delve into recesses that he previously only explored with a still camera, Eggleston shot a kind of a manic home movie with his social life as the setting.

Some of his friends ignore the camera entirely; in one household scene, a standing man speaks to his guests or relatives who are seated around a living room in armchairs. He punctuates his story with an abrupt "shut up!" every time someone else tries to speak, which grows more and more frequent as the Tennessee Williams-like scene progresses. Everyone seems oblivious to the camera; that is, until you hear someone off-screen carp "put that machine down!" That sentiment echoes in a later bar scene, where one man calls Eggleston a "posing asshole" and another comments, "I think what you’re going to find out is that not everyone wants to be filmed." A woman illustrates this point with her middle finger.  Others are quite willing to mug for the camera. They mimic documentary narrators describing artworks, newscasters, actors in a hot romance, perpetrators in a crime drama and nightclub singers.

Stranded in Canton requires a strong stomach—and not only because of the acts of "geeking" recorded: I learned here that geeking means more than biting the head off of a live chicken—it also involves holding up the body like a wineskin and sucking blood from the remaining neck stump.  If you happen to be prone to motion sickness, like me, nausea may beset you just from the lurching to and fro of the hand-held camera. Some of these experiments, though, yield sophisticated forms of camera play that did not get integrated into the general cinematic vocabulary until much later. In a gas station scene, for example, the camera revolves in a rapid circle around a man who follows it with his eyes and remains the target of the lens as the background scenery whirls. Such effects, though they were long ago perfected by such directors as Orson Welles and Max Ophuls, still exert a dizzying effect.

They certainly fit the circumstances, which, for the most part, are thoroughly alcohol-drenched, though it takes a while for this to fully register. In the early scenes, Eggleston throws us off balance with images of his children. His daughter provides dreamy and ethereal looks, while his son seems utterly transparent, exposing raw fascination through wide eyes and unguarded expressions. After that, the bleary and outrageous behavior of the adults takes over, signaled by the appearance of a whiskey bottle and party scenes.

All the while, Eggleston, with his Portapak, seems to be making notes of things he doesn’t want you to miss.  In his extreme close-ups he moves all the way in — into people’s eyes and even into their mouths. The close-up of "Lady Russell" reveals his eye makeup; blues musician Walter "Furry" Lewis’s missing front teeth are the target of another zoom.  This is not the side of Eggleston we are familiar with.  His photographs may direct us to tender details, but his experiments with the Portapak magnify them.

Still, despite the close-ups, the film fills me with a sense of distance. As a Gen-X Californian, I am distant from the South, where my parents and grandparents grew up, and distant from the ‘70s, which I barely remember. Black and white film seems to push the action even further away; I am constantly aware of looking into another time and place. Yet the distance contrasts with the spontaneous quality and the informal, personal settings of the video which seem to invite you into their very real, private lives. The kids in the opening sequences certainly show an excruciating transparency.  

Still, moving pictures can lie just as effectively as a static photograph. John Szarkowski, the curator of Eggleston’s 1976 MOMA show, noted that Canton, despite its cinéma vérité leanings, doesn’t necessarily provide access to the lives it purports to represent.  And it’s precisely that tension — between openness and distance – that gives this video its essential frisson. 

After I watch it, gallery director Jasmine Moorhead shows me Eggleston’s chromogenic prints. The contrast is vast.  Where the stills are visually quiet, the video is verbose and raucous, and where the photographs are mostly devoid of people, the video explodes with them.  If there are any quiet moments in Canton, they seem to center on a particular young woman who gazes at the camera with a calm, knowing look.

–LIESA LIETZKE

William Eggleston, Stranded in Canton @ Krowswork through May 23.  (The show, Closer than they Appear, also includes work by Sade Huron and Ryan Smith.)

Learn more about William Eggleston.

Qi Bu (Seven Steps to Heaven) I-VI, 2009, oil on linen, 44 x 66 inches each

“Drawing from Life and Death”, Hung Liu’s latest cycle of paintings feels, at first, like a departure for the 61-year-old chronicler of Chinese history.  But is it? People are absent, and so is her usual narrative structure.  But like the elegiac, rivulet-stained oil paintings of 19^th century and pre-Revolutionary women that, for decades, she has been painting from period photos, these pictures carry a heavy load:  the weight of mortality.

Liu grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and witnessed all kinds of suffering; but she has never, as far as I know, taken on mortality directly.  She does so here using animals as surrogates in pictures that are painted with an expressionistic handling. They are tempered by dripping lines, calligraphic marks and abstract surface gestures that instead of grounding the pictures in space they erase it altogether.  Thus, her animals are akin to specimens.  They float on the surface, apparently dead, but not quite inanimate.

Xiao Lu III, 2010, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches

Among the animals depicted are deer that were freshly killed by cars near the artist’s home in the Oakland hills, a robin that fell out of the sky into her studio parking lot and a human corpse viewed at a local medical facility.  Liu photographed them and made paintings from the photographs; but apart from her bravura wet-on-wet technique, what distinguishes these pictures is the forensic method she used to document the evidence: circling around the fallen animals from above and snapping pictures.  Thus, the different views of a dead fawn that we see in Qi Bu (Seven Steps to Heaven), a sextet of 44” x 66” paintings mounted in two rows, are something of a forensic experience, too, as we circle the animal exactly as the artist did, seeking clues from its splayed legs and the rocks nearby.  

The pictures are executed in oil on raw linen in thick strokes and in rich, dark colors that emphasize vitality.  So even though we know the animals are dead, the vivacity of the paint tells us quite convincingly that these deer could just as easily spring to life as lay there comatose.  From the Sky, her large-scale (72” x 72”) paintings of a robin, operate in a similar fashion.  The bird’s claws, frozen in rigor mortis, say one thing, but its bright orange breast, framed by palpably real charcoal-gray flight feathers, says another.  (This is more than just a pictorial device: If you’ve ever watched a bird, drunk on toxic berries, knock itself unconscious by crashing repeatedly into a window and then magically take to the sky, you understand how this can actually happen.)

From the Sky II & III, 2010, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches

For Liu the series probably has more to do with historical fact than with imaginary resurrections.  In 1958, the Chinese government decreed that all the nation’s sparrows should die because they were competing with the people for grain.  “Kill the sparrows to save your crops,” Mao ordered.  The Chinese did that by destroying nests and by banging pots and pans which kept the birds aloft, killing them from exhaustion.  “The ecological consequences…were disastrous; it turned out that sparrows had been the people’s allies all along, eating mostly insects,” wrote Jeff Kelly in his catalog essay for the 2008 show of contemporary Chinese art, Half-Life of a Dream at SF MOMA.  By the time Mao countermanded the order it was too late.  “Insects,” Kelly recounts, “ate the grain and famine set in.  The state dream became a nightmare in which sparrows fell from the sky.”

Deer Angel III, 2010, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches

In Liu’s cosmology, life is a fluid exchange, a cycle of birth and decay signified by her repeated use of the circular enso – a Zen calligraphic mark that symbolizes an “endless cycling, encompassing everything and nothing,” according to Nick Stone who wrote those words in his preface to Deer Boy (Magnolia Editions), an artist’s book that Liu published last year with a poem by Michael McClure.  Another Liu trademark, weeping vertical stains, is an ever-present trope in this series, underscoring the tragedy of so much Chinese history.

Kelly maintains that the dissolution of the collective fever-dream that was Mao’s regime threw China into a state of confusion from which it is still recovering; and it is within this hypnagogic realm, between the 50-year snooze of state-dictated consciousness and whatever comes next, that China now operates.  Beyond its obvious allusions to mortality, Drawing from Life and Death is, ultimately, a metaphor for this limbo condition.  It’s something that Liu, an immigrant with close ties to China, understands intuitively.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Liu Liu, Drawing from Life and Death, through May 22, 2010 at Rena Bransten Gallery, SF.

Learn more about Hung Liu.

Michael McClure reads from his latest collection, Mysterioso, Tuesday May 4, at 7 p.m. at City Lights Bookstore, SF.