Summer's "Sunny" Side?

Aug 13, 2007 at 4:47 PM
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Before I took in these venues Summer was looking pretty bad. Thankfully four summer exhibitions make a solid impression and well worth a repeat look. Bring a BART pass and comfortable shoes so you can check them all out.

Assuming you start downtown head to “Ominous Atmosphere” on the 2^nd Floor of 77 Geary. Since its inception Heather Marx gallery has been showing work with great presence and this is no exception. The moment you walk in you are greeted by what looks like a photo of a kid crying. The combination of the expressed emotions in large format and beautiful lighting alchemically formulate a feeling of sublime dread that buttresses the exhibition's chosen title. This image by Jill Greenberg is a good compliment to Anthony Goicolea’s work but is more cinemagraphic. Giocolea in early 2000 created images of childlike pathos in several eerie series like “You and What Army” where there are many clones of himself as a stereotypical finishing school kid. While Giocolea uses himself Greenberg seems to use other kids as subjects. After absorbing this for a while the rest of the show takes palpable form.
Al Farrow who has created sculptures using bullets and guns in the shape of grand reliquaries and houses of worship has made small "pocket accessories" that are a big hit (ie: sold out). Vibrators in the shape of large bullets or small artillery rounds illustrate the usual sex/power interplay in a playful if corny association. Given the overall inventive seriousness of Farrow’s work these are welcomed, darkly humourous pieces.

The gun theme is extended by cuban conceptualist Jeanette Chávez who abstracts the anonomous homicide of a firing squad with gun barrels pointing out of the wall where the wall obscures the identity of the shooters. In a firing squad line soldiers stand further apart than the barrels are spaced so ejecting shell don’t hit the adjacent person in the firing line but you get the idea. Other than Farrow another Catherine Clark artist, Christoph Draeger’s is featured in here. His single-channel (in other words one-screen) video plays a loop of a Hungarian propaganda film with subtitles from President GW Bush's “freedom” speech.

The war theme continues with a “yummy” painting by greek artist Antonios Kosmadakis. I’ve never seen this work before but the painting in the show features characters who are “blind of reason”. It demonstrates allegorical and technical mastery that makes a brilliant piece. If you love painting you will enjoy spending time looking at the remains of this artist's painterly render. At the same time though you may be deflected by his imagery. Utterly fabulous and creepy!

Trevor Paglen who takes pictures of military installations is one of those artists I like to think of as an art & science "fusionary". Silly as the word may be his work combines social, historical, geographic and political elements into an artistic process that is as interesting for the viewer as it is to the artist. This work explores the world as an unseen object. Very apt as Internet zones begin to close in about western civilization. Paglen attempts to recover our disappearing physical reality and what may be hidden within "plain" sight.

Rounding out the anti-warm and fuzzy mood are "apocalyptic", "catastrophic" landscapes by Bradley Castellanos and Susan Graham. That is all I will say for now since this is the last week you should be having look rather than reading this.

In case you’ve been away this summer you might have wondered where Catherine Clark’s gallery went to. If you don’t want to web search the old info try Minna street behind SFMOMA and the St Regis. The new space is really great and accommodates video in a better booth. (hey, no curtain any more). Inside the video booth is a sumptuously colored single-channel piece about what you might think is time but actually gravity. David Phelps and Paul Rowley have created multi-framed representations of a cuckoo clock using a video transition mapped to a vertically falling flap. The upclose view of the clock is shifted slightly over. It's like a moving version of a portrait Tom Friedman once did. Set to motion the image is divided into different smaller views of minutely shifted positions on the image of the clock which all then shift in sync with a sweet clocklike musical sound. This is mixed with larger images of the clock and a mechanical image of the wooden bird tirelessly lurching from the clock like a spastic yet rigid Ryden automaton. It is beautiful and can drive you nuts at the same time - kind of like a pretty girlfriend.
In the front room sculptures by Walter Robinson amount to three dimensional silhouettes of leapords and horses with arrows sticking out of them. Cai Guo-qiang did something similar a couple years back with taxidermed tigers but these flattened silhouettes entitled "Hunter-gathers" suggest cave paintings instead of hunted animals in agony. This may seem non-sequiter but the horse reminded of a "Chipaway" toy sold years ago where you could chisel a horse from a block of softer material then paint it. Since this is a more decorated representation of predation it kind of made sense to me. There are images of skulls with logos printed on the top with rhinestones no doubt less expensive than Hirst’s diamond encrusted head bones and a perverted Disney Mouse tableu sitting atop a slab covered in a thick layer of idealized plasticene jizz.

Anyway..., Andy Diaz’s work with photos, acrylic and empty gel-pill containers are popping more than before. Rather than cut up a photo into little squares and reconstruct it which is what he seemed to be doing. It now looks like he’s overlapping imagery of a sort of video game graphic with photorealistic elements creating more depth. Alot of people I know is on some sort of medication either because they leached all the seratonin from their bodies, just poisoned by the environment or smoking weed. In that sense Diaz's work can hit home but he isn't paving new ground really. Art that use medication as media like Fred Tomaselli's pill paintings have made more immediate use of drugs but here the capsule shell is used as a method of pixellation and is consequently less dangerous as an art object. Still, they look cool.

Before going to Queens Nails Annex I assumed the greatest Mexican Rock Band had been the Dug Dugs from Durango. Now I know that a generation later Paco Gruexxo made his mark on Mexican pop-culture enough to inspire Juan Luna-Avin to devote a whole installation in tribute to him. There isn’t much written information available but apparently this guy was the Judas Priest of his time. The exhibit includes primitive graphic drawings, wall mural-graffitti and sculptures that are bursting with color. Alot of drawings are rendered in a flat primitive style that imitate decoration on school-notebooks or some lesser Henry Darger. Others imagery call up memories of a less caricatured Jim Nutt style making it a great room!

In the rest of the gallery John Dwyer pastiches his own pop-cultural references and dream sequences. This grouping ends up looking like a Donkey-Kong-Scooby-Doo nightmare to positive effect. The scat drawing styles of both of these shows seems to be all the rage and color is definitely the answer when giving these more pop. Rendering this style seems so restrictive that color ultimately sets it free from its povera universe. The final trick is to give it enough volume and life that it doesn’t get ignored as graffitti outside of the installation setting. Since our cultural mentality is bombarded by advertising and graffiti ids images using these forms risk being ignored. Pulling this work away from a street or installation environment can disperse it's impact and meaning as an art object to others. The installation aspect is key to further consideration of this work so how then can the elements stand alone?

...Yes. Pulling drawing from the supporting contexts of graffitti and installation and expecting them to stand on their own can be a risky proposition. This feat is successfully accomplished by Mat O'Brien at Eleanor Harwood’s place. This exhibition of more bedroom pop-art creates visual music similar to the way Matmos makes sound as the Soft Pink Truth. Each piece stands on it’s own and integrates elements in collage, drawings, and lifted images that employ a chaotic but orchestrated rhythm. Squiggled adolescent lines combine seamlessly with tracings and source materials. The implementation and subjects may be jarring but the context is spelled out and paved with a great directness. Some of the best vignettes are the most dissolute where the voice of each part morphs the voice of its adjacent component. Favorites include “Bethany” and “Totally”. Least successful is the the Frank Zappa tribute “Every town must have a Place”. It seems like this reference could have been developed with something more than a portrait since O’Brien is emulating his approach to composing and perhaps could take that further than a portrait. Personally I find myself tuning Zappa out these days but something more here is welcome. Another musical reference materializes in another portrait with the eyes cut out from what appears to be Tupac Shakur in “Mother’s Day”. In the tradition of the great San Francisco collage artist Jess Collins this show is a vibrant elaboration with fun extras.