Continuing through October 25, 2025
In the early 1930s, a then little-known photographer named Ansel Adams took a gig shooting marketing materials for Dominican University of California in San Rafael. Nearly 100 years later, Hiroshi Sato has used those photographs as reference material for the 20 oil paintings in his exhibition “Grounds.” While the paintings may represent an outdated image of college life as their subject matter, that is exactly what makes them relevant today.
Sato restages some of Adams’ pictures on the contemporary campus. In others he exercises creative license to depart from the source material. Lush green views of the campus, as in “Sunset on the Window” or “Mulch Mounds,” are subverted by an eerie sense of unease. Sato’s figures are often depicted in isolation or facing away from each other. A long man slumps in his seat in the cavernous “Lecture Hall.” A woman stands alone at the outskirts of a larger group in “Under Tree.” Their isolation and indeterminate relationships evince complex and kaleidoscopic narrative undercurrents.
Sato’s signature style blends Bay Area Figurative aesthetics with Edward Hopper’s tone of disaffected alienation. Beyond the Adams source material there are recognizable nods to other Bay Area artists, such as a study of Wayne Thiebaud’s “35 Cent Masterworks” and a cameo appearance of Mel Ramos’ “Superman.”
In Adams’s time, the school was a women’s college and his photographs — some of which are presented alongside Sato’s paintings — depict students reading in the library, taking shots on the archery range (now vanished), or gathering in common areas. These pictures were one of the rare occasions that Adams photographed people, even though he was no stranger to commercial work, even late in his career. Here, much as in his landscape work, idealism is on display, showcasing the mythology of the American dream. The 1930s was also a time of tightening political speech and rising fascist powers internationally, in response to which the United States assumed an anti-fascist position. Today, many universities in the United States are moving away from the pursuit of knowledge and democratic self-determination. Now such scholarship feels like a foreign concept, a veneer that is falling away to reveal a concept of intellectual freedom that rings as hollow as any advertising image.
In some instances, Sato’s own Polaroid studies accompany the paintings in prismatic assemblages. In “Office,” with its lone figure standing beyond a doorway, the composition includes Polaroids, smaller color studies, a pointillist rendering of a face (the face of the figure in the central painting is obscure), and a smaller painting of a women’s bathroom sign. The familiar stick-figure-in-a-dress is split down the middle with a yellow line. The figure in the central painting is similarly bifurcated, one half of its jacket billowing out like a dress, the other half hewing close to the figure, calling to mind signs for gender-neutral bathrooms which show hybrid male and female stick figures. Gender identity — specifically who can and can’t use which bathrooms — has been a hot button political topic on and off U.S. college campuses. Sato blurs the lines between the gender of his subject and highlights the absurdity of the related cultural debate.
“Carrier” focuses on two figures in a dimly lit hallway, one sitting on a staircase facing away from the other, leaning against a wall and carrying a tray. Between them is what might be a window or a painting-within-the-painting, the words “hyper normalization” scrawled across it. The phrase brings to mind Adam Curtis’ 2016 documentary film “HyperNormalisation,” itself titled after a term coined by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe a phenomenon he observed in late Soviet society as it was collapsing. Everyone proceeded with business as usual, acting out their day-to-day lives while aware that things were becoming increasingly dystopian. Sound familiar? In his film, Curtis argues that a confluence of political actors and developments in cyber technology and social media have created a similar bifurcation in today’s reality in the West, resulting in a pretend world in which many people experience a consensus reality while having less access to the real world.
In “The Art Department” Sato depicts an austere campus building after dark, one figure standing in the foreground, another partially obscured in a doorway. It isn’t a joyful representation of a department of higher education, but of one that is effectively defunct or at least barely attended. If there’s a hopeful undertone, it’s that the building is a literal beacon of light in a sea of darkness. Here, the arts symbolize a locus of resistance amidst myriad educational cutbacks and political demands. Maybe, “The Art Department” implies, art can light the way forward.
