NorthBeach Scat
A visit to the Diego Rivera student Gallery and the SF Arts Institute offers an unexpected level of brilliant enjoyment. It is a three student show that deals with art object, pop-culture and mass media and a couple other things that I can't fully articulate right now but rather than wait for my brain to fully order what I've seen here it is...
As you walk off the courtyard into the high-ceilinged gallery nothing in particular greets you until you walk into the center of the room. Not sure if this is the intention but as soon as you are in the show’s rough charms take hold.
“FUCKIT” is spelled out in huge five-foot high letters just below the Diego Rivera mural finished in attractively colored green paint and glitter. In front is a bucket of money or rather a wastebasket. Created by Ryan Verzaal this 3-d expletive exhibits alongside two videos a large poster of a woman screaming at what looks like a 60’s rock concert and two long clear plastic bags perpetually inflated by fans. The inflated bags which hover steadily are painted with colorful horizontal lines. While it isn’t clarified the two bags seem to represent skyscrapers. One video shows three people jumping up and down on a bed in slow motion. One man dressed in a suit and holding a bouquet of flower bounces in the foreground of two women wearing short skirts and looking pretty trashy. Yikes. The second video plays like a Univision melodrama including English subtitles. The dialogue is between two men sitting at what looks like a lunch table at an institutional looking building. Interspersed within this gay-ish melodrama is jarring and relatively low-quality footage of what looks like spliced TV commercials and (is it?) a Selena concert.
The artist’s statement does not plainly describe the intentions of the work but the two words that jumped out at me were game-show and offal. Whether this is a cohesive commentary on reality shows or a youthful view of the monetary excesses there is not clear but the visuals do create an aura of melodramatic inscrutability.
If you ever wanted to see what falling ass-backwards into a brilliant idea is like check out Rives Granades photo prints hung in a crude grid along the east wall of the gallery. On the face of it these look like a montage of snapshots from a trailer park. Included with the images though is an essential explanation of the work which tells of the artists’ parents’ house being burglarized. The resulting images being shown on the wall were retrieved from their digital camera after property was located and recovered. What makes this work interesting in concept is more obvious than some of the visual elements. A lot of the pictures include scenes of people goofing off for a camera: a girlfriend, a boyfriend and a mom with some lesser characters. Mixed within this John Water’s hyper-reality are photos of porn centerfolds not only revelatory of retreated male gaze but of a warping picture plane. These images oscillate between the picture of a naked centerfold model and that of a magazine sitting on a table or a bed like some readymade object. The curvature of the magazine pages in relation to the flat picture plane warp the image of the centerfold models distending heads, limbs or bodies out of proportion. Work like this is exciting because it has the potential to create something interesting out of accidental and painful events.
Erik Wilson rounds off this show with an installation-video composed of a walk through box adorned on the inside with fabric and stuffed animal arms. It’s the "real-life" Otaku sculpture that calls a scene from Roman Polanski’s film Repulsion to mind. As one walks through the short hallway the little furry arms in the way trigger seemingly random sounds. On one end of the short passage there is a video playing, on the other a pile of $20 worth of broccoli. The video features a collage animation using elements of the stuffed animals and the hero of the show – broccoli – which appears after a fishtailed rabbit thingy is devoured by a mountain range with eyes after flying matter of factly toward it. If this exhibit doesn’t reveal a curated theme each work on its own merits bring something to the table actively incubating.
The Diego Rivera Gallery is located at the San Francisco Arts Institute to the left of the courtyard as you walk in the front door on 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco 94133 (between Jones and Leavenworth)
