Grace Munakata’s unique deployment of painting’s arsenal of tricks, to both illuminate and obscure, makes an elegant case for the medium’s continued relevance in the digital era.
Reviews
Dave Lane @ Nelson Gallery, UC Davis
Lane’s sculptural visions incorporate mythopoetic fantasies based on childhood dreams, the likes of which most adults lack the capacity to summon.
Stephen Kaltenbach @ Verge Gallery
In the late ’60s he mixed Duchampian absurdism with text-based object making to lampoon every myth the art world was manufacturing and refining.
Cathy Stone @ Limn Gallery, SF
In sculptures and large-scale drawings, Stone pits black against white, gravity against buoyancy and spontaneity against calculation in works that display grace and pugnacity.
David Wetzl @ CSU Stanislaus
Never mind the so-called zeitgeist. Wetzl wants to show how every belief system in human history continues to shape our experience.
Todd Hido @ Stephen Wirtz, SF
Hido’s pictures of rural roads to nowhere put a new spin on the all-American themes of rootlessness and alienation.
Katy Stone @ Johansson Projects, Oakland
Stone’s complex, multi-layered installations flow across walls in amoeba-like shapes.
John Yoyogi Fortes @ Skinner/Howard
Fortes’ quasi-expressionist paintings hint at oblique political and personal conundrums.
Linda Day & Stuart Allen @ JayJay
Linda Day has taken the basic tenets of hard-edge, geometric abstraction and turned them upside down.
Kent Lacin @ Sac State Library Gallery
At the heart of documentary photography lies an epistemological conundrum: What do we know and how do we know it?
Katherine Sherwood@ b. garo sakata
In what amounts to a visual roman á clef, Sherwood demonstrated why she is one of the most important painters working today.
Robert Buelteman @ Spur Projects
Buelteman employs camera-less form of image making that relies on the application of high voltages to subjects on light-sensitive media.
Chris Daubert @ Pence Art Gallery, Davis
Dauber plays havoc with our sense of equilibrium by injecting urban sounds (á la Cage) into a rural setting of his own making.
Ian Harvey/Koo Sook @ CSUS
If awards were given for labor-intensive art, Ian Harvey and Koo Kyung Sook would surely be contenders.
Brenda Louie: “The Flower Series” at Sac State Library Annex Gallery and the Pence Gallery
In two separate Sacramento-area shows from her 300-painting “Flower Series,” Louie covers heaven and earth and a lot of space in between.