Nothing to See Here Folks?

While I was standing at the SFMOMA book shop a week back I heard a woman talking to her friend how draining a trip to the oakland galleries can be.  Saying she goes over there with some hope of seeing but never achieving that goal. Consequently this anonymous person told her friend she never goes over there anymore.  I've heard this from others but hey you never know what you'll find if you look right?
Not to be confounded by naysayers in the world as well as the voices in my head I rode over to the Telegraph and Grand area to see what was shaking.  Having learned my lesson at the last Murmur I avoided everything on Grand Street armed with my new rule - sorry Mercury 20.  Never go to see art in bars or gift shops.  Despite those challenges one show stood out on this non-murmur Friday trip.

At the Johansson Projects two different approaches to sculpture by Nathan Lynch and Michael Meyers as well as drawings by Amanda Hughen fill the space.  Nathan Lynch a ceramacists teaching at Mills attempts to subvert expressions of social and psychological power by creating a trophy room of abtracted waterfowl.   The artist's bullshit aside he successfully recreates the lameness of duck decoys, trophy rooms and taxidermed prey.  If you've ever been to one of those naturalist art shows featuring pictures of people fly fishing, sculptures of bears and wooden fowl the feeling can be demoralizing.  The intention isn't completely realized until you see the big moose head in the back.

Meyers' sculptures reach in a similar conceptual direction but towards the aim of creating abstracted readymade forms.  With plaster, wood and chords they look alot like the ends toothpaste tubes out of which solid yet sensual looking blobs of hardened plaster (molded in a balloons) ooze forth.
Drawings by Amanda Hughen round out this grouping.  These pair with Meyers' constructions as either organic or fantastically technological but in more of a pointless abstract finished way.  Flurries of honeycombs, dots and rays form a kaliedescope of plankton or diatomic forms that are both intricate and colorful.  The sheer assault of line work while ambiguous results finally like the sculpture in very active decorative form.   

Other highlights of my trip to Oakland?...  none. 

Accept... Ego Park which sported a locked door and an inanely patronizing artist statement by Miriam Wolodarski and
Jeff Stratford which out of my own personal frustration yielded these words of commentary...

(Mind you This is an unedited spew about a show statement so it is a rant - I feel it's justified since the gallery wasn't open when it should be though.  ...And if you're going to run a gallery, keep it open for fuck sake so people can come in from out of town and have look when they expect it will be open...  sheeesh! - ok here goes...)

The show I didn't see is about the "adaptability and grace of birds."  What the hell does that mean really?
Its moments like these where it makes sense that any venue looking to show art vets artists' work by asking for a statement.  Not sure why this one passed jury.   It suggests in some half-assed Whitman flourish that
birds are more honorable creatures than primates. "BIRDS!!  Where did they come from, in a blink of the universal eye?"  Asking these obtuse questions doesn't help your art monologue.  Especially when someone has come out to see the work and the gallery door is locked.  More to the point though this is obtuse reasoning.
Why??? Well because if an artist statement exists as a form of discourse isn't it unnecessary for it to ask naive questions without any indication that some other discourse (science) has attempted to answer it?  Frankly it's patronizing and stupid.  What is more graceful about birds than humans?  They're basically the runty feathered remains of the great Dinosaur race which carry mites and harbor a similar reserve of ferocious aggressiveness as humans just smaller.  The rest of the statement spews a holistic jumble of ideas that wants to go everywhere but can't even get the birds idea off the ground.  Guess it would have shed more light if I got to see the show.  You think?

I am curious to see how a show "wonders about photorealism, addition"... (sic???) ", ambition, the irreversibility of time, the disappearing Artic, the beginning of the creation of God, memory of existential adventure, looking as a moral act, absolute aesthetocracy, spontaneous structural evolution, and women"  Without seeing this show I can imagine there will be a bunch of different shit on the walls and floor leaving me to sort out the flim flam being thrown my way. 
As I finished scanning this bogus handbill a very stressed guy walked by complaining into the empty lot and my ears that he was an outcast in the place he grew up and that the people taking away his home and community should leave.  I gladly obliged and headed back to San Francisco.

To be fair I did return the following week to have a look at the show.  It included a couple references to the conflicts in the middle east.  An image painted on the wall depicted a woman crying over here husband's lifeless head.  On the baseboard paper hearts were dropped.  Facing that was another Abu Ghraib reference whose depiction included pencil scrawlings of the memetically expanding icon that spilled out from the wall in repetition.  Sort of like a dot matrix printer spewing the same image - commentary on the continuous render of the image?  In the window dollhouse-small folders sit in tiny boxes with writing on them.  Other highlights include almost featureless grayish paintings measuring about an inch by 3/4 inch.  These go for $200 and might appeal as a decorative element.  Other similar paintings adorn the walls of slightly larger size.  Further back are more colorful and denser drawings including figurative and abstract references.  Not a whole lot of birds are referred to imagistically nor is there any relationship made between the pedestrian war imagery and the intricate book illustrations in the back.  ???

The only conclusions I can draw here is that Oakland art galleries like the part of town it is in is still a work in progress.

Johansson Projects is on 2300 Telegraph Road in Oakland California

Ego Park is a couple doors down on 23rd street