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

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”.