Can thrift-store landscape paintings be re-deployed to say something that’s not kitschy or condescending? After 20 years, this duo is still counting the ways.
Reviews
Art of the Book @ Cantor Art Center & SVMA
For a reminder of what limited-edition fine press publishing looked like in the pre-digital age, two major shows offer a lively, literary display.
Jim Melchert @ Gallery Paule Anglim
Smashing and reassembling porcelain tiles, the artist demonstrates, in the most literal way possible, the old “truth-to-materials” credo.
Tony Berlant @ Brian Gross
For more than 50 years, he’s transformed found and fabricated pieces of tin into “paintings” that annex large tracts of art history. Now, Berlant raises the stakes on the game he invented.
Mark Emerson & Penny Olson @ JAYJAY
Emerson merges geometric abstraction with Op; Olson probes the microscopic essences of plants.
Tucker Nichols @ Gallery 16
With elegant, awkwardly humorous forms, Nichols reinvents the poetics of visual understatement in a moment when shrill and abundant plenitude characterize the visual arts.
Shahzia Sikander @ SFAI
Sikander’s densely layered compositions and videos, rooted in contrast and incongruity, subvert the notion of a singular, fixed identity, bearing witness to a fast-shifting world.
Christian Maychack @ Gregory Lind
Erasing the distinction between painting and sculpture, Maychack uses woven caning and wicker as a framework to create a new kind of pictorial space.
Doug Rickard @ Stephen Wirtz
In Doug Rickard’s photos – culled from Google’s mapping service – human beings register as mistakes, causalities caught by a lens intended to record geography.
Leonardo Drew @ Anthony Meier Fine Art
With ravages to the urban landscape imprinted on our collection imagination, Drew’s work seems harrowing in its timeliness.
David Maisel @ Haines Gallery
Using X-rays from the archives of the Asian Art Museum as source material, Maisel explores the ghostly space between the purposeful document and the otherworldly trace.
Song Dong @ YBCA
In “Waste Not” “everything is well ordered but dead, like the clothing, rings, and eyeglasses gathered from the doomed in a death camp,” reports Jeff Kelley. “The only duty left is to archive, and the only remaining utility is to remember.
Deborah Oropallo @ Gallery 16
In the gender-confused universe of Deborah Oropallo, nothing is real and everything is permitted. Her reworking of Internet images suits an era in which personal identity is reinvented on-the-fly.
Bolles & Westerhout @ SFMOMA Artists Gallery
The success of this unlikely pairing shows what can happen when inspired curatorial vision bridges the divide we sometimes erect between media.
John Hundt & Camilla Newhagen @ Jack Fischer
In Hundt and Newhagen the fighting spirit of Dada is alive and well. Their work points to the extant power of irrationality.
Hasan Elahi @ Intersection 5M
Hasan Elahi passed nine lie detector tests. But the FBI still thought he might be a terrorist. So the Bureau asked him to stay in touch. He complied. The artist filled their inbox with a torrent of useless information.