@@ART

The first Thursday of every month is one of my favorite events in the city—San Francisco First Thursdays art walk. The art walks in the Tenderloin and downtown area have changed a lot over the years, but the current incarnation makes me feel most at home in my neighborhood.

Low Key

For the July round of First Thursdays, I started over at Low Key Skate shop (and art gallery) on 679 Geary Street. I’m constantly telling people about this little gem off Geary and Leavenworth. It’s impossible to miss—all their openings have a great group of people hanging out front and skating. Their show that is up through this month is titled “Friends we made along the way”, and does this show contain some fantastic paintings!

Mary Claire Amable’s “Welcome Home” series are some carefully crafted watercolor paintings. “Welcome Home 2” is a miniature wall menu which hangs in the Tenderloin treasure Saigon Sandwich. (You can’t go wrong with any of their sandwiches, I personally usually get the Combo with extra peppers). The use of color is fantastic, the small blemishes on the sign really pull you into the shop.

A little further down the wall is one of my personal favorites of the night by Streetchilli, who also curated the show at Low Key. The painting is titled “Stressed out”, after Houston pioneer DJ Screw’s tape. (you can listen to it for free here. The red rug flows into the green and purple brick wall, with a portrait of someone pulling the skin off their face to reveal the muscles underneath in a way that reminds me a bit of Edvard Munch. On the coffee table rests the DJ Screw tape in it’s 2019 vinyl release form, and I really love how this was simplified for the painting by Streetchilli. Looks like someone is getting a call from the yellow comic-like exclamation points rising from the cell on the table; my ash tray is never that clean.

Speaking of Hip Hop legends, how about this piece by Misael Marin, “Dice of Life”, a reference to a song by San Francisco native Andre Nickatina on his album Conversation with a Devil. This was one of the first songs and the first albums I had heard from Andre Nickatina. “This for the ones that hate that I'm high, when you see me, it's no surprise, tap your brain and blow your mind.” In a lot of ways this painting, and this song, speaks across the room to the painting by Streetchilli and the music of DJ Screw. “Dice of Life” ends with a sample that says “This life of ours, this is a wonderful life. If you can get through life like this and get away with it, hey that's great, but it's very, unpredictable. There are so many ways you can screw it up.”

Soft Times

Next up and around the corner is Soft Times Gallery. Walk up 2 blocks from Geary and Leavenworth to Sutter and you’re there! 905 Sutter St. “Rare Candy” is the name of the exhibition, and as always Soft Times has put together some really fun sculptural works mixed with paintings. AND THE COLOR!

First up is work by Reniel Del Rosario: ceramic sculptures of glass bottles, cigarettes, lighters, cigars, fingers, blunt wraps, vapes, joints, lighters, and shot glasses, laid out like the aftermath of a party. The bottles have names like “A good Nights Rest”, “Flappy”, “Reliever”, “Renny’s Rasberry Razzle Dazzle”, and “Big Boy”. The painting above by Kyle Dunn is titled “Tailspin" and is a linear barage of color, like a glitched TV abstraction.

Across the room is a mysterious magical painting by Neddie Bakula titled “Casting Spells” featuring descending or ascending figures in a desert divided by a never ending wall, witches with hovering orbs, the moon, the sun peaking off behind the horizon, a beautiful bright pink hue popping up throughout the piece.

At the other end next to the windows is a mixed media on foam piece by Raen Barnsley called “Moss and bits and fluff”, which gives me a very 80’s / 90’s aesthetic mixed with contemporary sculpture practices. The texture of the foam really does look like moss, with an icing like little rectangle with squigglies on top. Next to it is a glowing sunset feeling textile piece by Jessy Lu, “Soft Screen I”.

Moth Belly

Last stop of the night—my favorite gallery in the Tenderloin, a place that feels like my home away from home, Moth Belly Gallery, located at 912 Larkin (Larkin and Geary). If you haven’t been to Moth Belly yet, come on down and say hello! They also run an exceptional publication “Moth Belly Media” that has been doing a lot of interviews recently.

The exhibition this month at Moth Belly is simply titled “7”, featuring 7 artists.

When walking in you’re immediately greeted by some stencil paintings of someone you may recognize if you spend a little time walking through the Tenderloin—Looksnatcher. With another Texas shout out in the center, Luanne from King of the Hill! Next to that is another one of my favorite paintings of the night titled “Papa Cannibal” which feels like both a nod to Bacon’s “Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X” as well as Goya (and Rubens) “Saturn Devouring His Son”. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the trippy and wonderful three headed tribute to Dolly Parton. There’s also another great shout out hidden in here, but I’ll let you come to the gallery to learn more about it yourself.

There is some work on scratchboard in the back by Natalie McKean that completely blew me away. If you’re not familiar with scratchboard, while it looks like a drawing on a black background, the image is actually scratched into the surface with sharp tools, carving out the light. The piece “Knowing Your Demons” features a person being watched through a magic orb surrounded by salivating demons that look like a mix between Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Hellraiser”. The detail is just, I mean, well, look at it!

Before starting my journey out to the Mission on Friday night, I had to acquire some cheese. Well, some weed that was named "cheese" by the now infamous provocateur and comic artist Ricky Rat. I've had the delight of meeting Ricky on a number of occasions, and he is just an all around super nice guy that wants to keep the creative juices in this city flowing.

There's only one place in the city you can nibble on this delicious bud, and that's at Berner's on Haight. I had never been here before since I live in the Tenderloin and what weed smoker wants to travel half of the city to get grass when you can cut some in your back yard? The dispensary is an open style, with large tables that you can walk around which display weed. It honestly feels more like an upscale grocery store than it does a dispensary. I scurried into the line and got myself an eight of Ricky's cheese. It came with a cute little one panel comic on the inside, with listed "cheese facts". My cheese fact? "All orange cheese is artificially colored." I seriously just thought this was a backhanded reference to Cheetos until I looked it up and sure enough, there is a long history of cheese makers coloring their cheese. The weed itself is pretty good, 26.7% THC, with its "total" listing of 29.6%. It packs a pretty punch and if I were to guess is a hybrid flower, because I get a nice head and body high when smoking or vaping it.

Next up on the list, my friend and fellow artist Jack Downs let me know about a new gallery that's opened up in the Mission, off of Valencia and 19th, called Rossi, and they were showing some of the artist MQ. The walk from the Tenderloin to the Mission takes around thirty minutes to an hour, so I rolled up some of that cheese and threw a hundred stickers into my pocket to put up while meandering towards Rossi.

The Mission is alive and well. With the new parklets in front of all of the restaurants, and the city closing Valencia on every other block, it's very inviting and there were swarms of people out enjoying the beautiful night.

First thing about Rossi is I love the way this space is set up—it feels intimate but not too crowded. MQ's work was all over the walls. Decks, signs, canvas maybe, sculpture, stickers, rings, pins. There was a LOT of MQ's around. How would I describe MQ's work? Deceptively simple, abundant, sometimes overwhelming, considered. You can tell that MQ has put thousands of hours perfecting the craft. Among my favorites were the hand painted skateboard decks and this ball completely covered in slaps.

Linda Geary and May Wilson — Some other sense of time and space | @@ Interface Gallery  

Some days I lose track of time becoming engulfed by art thoughts, and I ask myself "what direction is painting headed?" I'm not going to pretend or attempt to answer such a broad question, but I believe Some other sense of time and space is where I want painting to move towards.

Inside the intimate Interface Gallery, May Wilson's sculpture, "Holding each," stands diagonally across from a large painting by Linda Geary. The sculpture is a piece of punchy purple plastic vinyl strapped down with peachy industrial felt, which rests atop a white curvy armature. Wilson's sculpture pops against the old brick backdrop on which Geary's painting hangs. It looks like it was somehow printed from the computer screen's current net art scene, but is organic and sincere. Each fabric has its own texture and, in places, it sags under the weight of itself.

Linda Geary's painting "Flying Red" is other-worldly. I mean, I think she may have opened up a multi-dimensional portal to another reality, and that is where she paints. Chalkie and transparent swatches of paint clash against hard edges and lines. Drips are seen and disappear. It doesn't try to hide the fact that it's a painting, which I find a lot of abstraction tries to do all too often these days. Its marks are a journey that gives a glimpse into Linda Geary's artistic practice, and maybe in this sense it references painting during 60s and 70s, but it is very much the product of today.

To further understand the relationship between the work and the exhibition title, Some other sense of time and space, I researched a few interpretations of time and space. In his book A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, John Brinckerhoff Jackson describes a sense of place as "something that we ourselves create in the course of time. It is the result of habit or custom.... A sense of place is reinforced by what might be called a sense of recurring events.” Sociologist David Hummon discusses it as, “Sense of place is inevitably dual in nature, involving both an interpretive perspective on the environment and an emotional reaction to the environment.... Sense of place involves a personal orientation toward place, in which ones’ understanding of place and one’s feelings about place become fused in the context of environmental meaning.” (1)

The show's title is taken from the brochure of an exhibition of Jane Kauffman’s work, held at the Whitney, and written by Marcia Tucker. (2) Tucker explains that, "Trying to describe one of Jane Kauffman's paintings is like trying to describe a piece of sky; each seems to be a time and space held in the mind but not remembered, unbordered, infused with changing light and distance, colors that cannot be named, but sensed." They are about feelings and thought. I believe this is the commonality between Kauffman's work and what's presented in Some other sense of time and space—that they exist in that dualistic part of the world Hummon's describes, which is not easy to define, and sometimes impossible.

You can fall into these works; become immersed by their visual language; that's how to enter some other sense of time and space.

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(1) Cross, Jennifer E. "What Is Sense of Place?" Department of Sociology Colorado State University. November 2, 2001. Accessed November 14, 2015. http://western.edu/sites/default/files/documents/cross_headwatersXII.pdf

(2) Kaufman, Jane. "Jane Kaufman, Recent Paintings. 1938- : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive." Internet Archive. November 23, 1971. Accessed November 14, 2015. https://archive.org/details/janekaufman00kauf

Jim Hodges — Give More Than You Take @@ Dallas Museum of Art

Jim Hodges has said a lot in the past 25 years. “Give More Than You Take,” is a collection of some of those statements, spanning numerous forms of media and installation.  With a focus on individual voice, it’s no wonder this collection incorporates such a varied cast of characters.  Chains, flowers, nerve-racking expanses of space, and pieces of mirror on canvas are just a few recurring components that crop up regularly.  The thing that really makes it, though, isn't the number or range of voices – but their unmistakable clarity despite the extraordinary volume of their projection.

The webs of chains ensnare you, from charm necklaces to the kind of thing you’d use to pull a car.  Linked silk flowers and hand-stitched denims form walls of texture as big as a house.  Light, rebounding off the countless deconstructed disco balls, through the chains, past the aperture of spikes, that pierces your perspective.  You’re going to need to move around a little bit for this exhibit – you’re going to need to be moved.  Inside the dimly lit room inside the pitch black room, past double doors a-la a spaghetti western saloon, past the sign warning “DANGER: SHARP OBJECTS” – this is the perfect place to reflect on the rest of it. Know that you aren’t alone, though – and peek around back before you leave.

Hodges currently has a couple of video pieces on his website (1), which make an excellent aperitif to “Give More Than You Take” – as well as a couple of permanent outdoor installations in the northeast U.S. if you happen to find yourself in that neck of the woods.  “Don’t Be Afraid” at Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. (2) and “Look and See” at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo NY (3) – both adopt similar strategies to “Give More Than You Take” in discussing personal issues, and both adopt not-so-quiet voices to do so.

Jim Hodges:  Give More Than You Take

October 6, 2013 to January 12, 2014 @ DMA

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(1) Jim Hodges - http://jimhodges.com/

(2) Wikipedia - Jim Hodges  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Hodges_(artist)

(3) Albright-Knox Gallery: Look And See http://www.albrightknox.org/collection/collection-highlights/piece:look-and-see/

Hudson

I was fortunate enough to be able to meet Hudson at his gallery, Feature Inc.,during the summer of 2012 with Linda Geary's California College of the Arts New York course.

He was one of the twelve artists we visited that June, along with B. Wurtz and others who knew him well. He was an incredibly generous individual who taught me what it was to be a passive viewer, to let the body absorb the visual cues around you on an unconscious level. Art was not something to be fact-driven and explained, but something to look at and investigate, a place to find your own path to meaning. This past Sunday at 63 Hudson unexpectedly died of natural causes.

Hudson thought it was a compliment when a person stayed with a work, scrutinizing over details. In an interview with artist Dike Blair with The Thing, Hudson tells a story of critics reviewing a work, “I once overheard two critics chatting about an artist, and the more noted critic mentioned that he loved the work being discussed, yet he would not write about it, as he found it too difficult to explain!” Hudson remarked, “To me, that seems all the more reason to write about it, or in my case, to exhibit the work.”

A lot of work in Feature Inc., he told us, relies on the artist’s touch. At the time he was showing Todd Chilton’s hard edge abstractions and Alan Wiener’s organic stacked sculptures. I remember he admired in Chilton’s paintings how all the weak points in the painting were also the strongest, and loved and appreciated how Wiener’s sculptures developed over the years he followed the work. In a Rack Room interview on ArtSlant.com with Nicholas Weist, Hudson talked about finding failure, success, and one’s identity within the work.

The art is, or should be, the measure. Sometimes good ideas that look bad are worth looking at, enjoying, and/or owning. Sometimes good ideas that look bad can be very good. The appearance of bad has been important to the contemporary art world for at least half a century. There is something interesting in confronting bad: just why exactly is it bad? Some artists are able to make good ideas, that look bad at one time, be seen as good ideas that look good at another time. But someone with an open mind will see and appreciate the good in the bad or whatever before the silly art world recognizes it.

Nicholas Weist later asked, “Speaking of other times, you recently announced the imminent demise of Feature in 2018... What excites you about death?” Hudson replied:

This will be the last Feature I have in this lifetime so I want to be especially certain to use all that I have learned and experienced to structure the gallery so I enjoy it thoroughly and get all that I want to do done before I retire to a more contemplative and leisurely life. The last few years I've been watching my parents and a few friends accelerate in age and die. Engaging process. It's not so cut and dried. Life and death are inextricably mixed, and it's very unsettling when one actually witnesses them both being acted out at the same time in the same person. I've been wondering about those "golden years" that are often alluded to. What does one have to do to allow that to occur? I've decided to act out that investigation through Feature, and be rather strict about enjoying the art and the business as much as possible. It's sort of a challenge to myself, to keep it vital and alive while the end is in sight: more reason to push it and live fully.

"Let it come to you," he told our small class of about 10 people, filling the space at Feature Inc., "perception is key." After visiting his gallery that day we all walked together in a kind of euphoric daze and we meandered on over to the New Museum chatting about the things we heard and saw all around us, taking in all the over-zealous drivers laying on their horns and dirty pigeons attempting to bathe in leftover rain on the sidewalk. I realized how much in life there is to look forward to after hearing how much he was able to accomplish with determination and an open mind.

William Emmert — A lot of People Do This @@ Guerrero Gallery

By Eric Dyer

Organize; cherish. Sentimental value; utility. There are small objects in studio shelves on the walls housing VHS tapes (1), packaging tape, two used foam brushes, a notebook, sticky Post-It’s notes (2), a battery charger for a Walkie, among other things. On the floor in the corner sits a used or in use paint tray. In the middle of the room, a wooden pallet, covered by a hand sewn moving blanket. Paintings hang on the wall, reading, “This Is Stupid” “I Know It Is” another “I’m not good at this” (3).

After slowing down, upon further inspection of the Project room at the Guerrero Gallery (4), things are not what they seem. What appear to be common items, ones artists use every day (5), turn out to be paper recreations. Objects meticulously crafted and painted to further their realism, but also lifting the objects weight of their previous lives.

What items that have been chosen are just as important as how they have been transformed. David Foster Wallace once said, “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, this is just a banal platitude. The fact is that in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.” When I look at these paper sculptures, I no longer see the things they once were, but how the artist willed them to become.

William Emmert

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(1) E.T., Metro, something from Blockbuster, and The Land Before Time. I love The Land Before Time.

(2) With the number for Purple Heart Patient Center.

(3) Emmert beating people to the punch with some self-deprecating humor or a conversation between gallery goers or no one and I’m not good at this is a diptych of two felt paintings, the one on the left looks like it had been blank until the right one was (seemingly) haphazardly sliced from its home then delicately sewn onto the left. It’s pretty clear that he’s freaking great at this.    

(4) 2700 19th Street. San Francisco, CA 94110. The show ran from August 10, 2013 — September 07, 2013.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

By E Dyer

I met with Mia Christopher on Monday, June 8th, at her studio near Franklin Square. I hadn’t sat down and talked to her since last summer when we had taken a New York Studio class with Linda Geary. Since then she’s been up to a lot —  awesome work, a solo show opens Saturday October 12th , titled “Maybe Forever” coming up at Littlebigspace in Albany, CA that, has had a line of clothes in Anthropologie, making bomb temporary tattoos and selling stuff on Etsy.

What I found in her studio was a dense and incredible collection of materials organized in their own unique chaos by Mia. The studio is rife with experimentation; through this exploration, Christopher is attempting to understand her own decision making process as well as see where her ideas wander. She finds many of her materials on daily walks around the city (her apartment is close by and it’s nice to have the air.) One of my favorite items she allowed me to see was a jar of dust and remnants from late projects and floor-scraps she keeps. It reminds me of sedimentary layers; layers of the past; an insight to what goes on when no one is watching.

Reading previous interviews with Mia, I became aware of her fascination in keeping numbered notebooks, similar to my own. I had the opportunity to meander about a few and they were such a treat! The books are ordered and organized but littered with found tape, glitter, colorful objects of the streets. They seem to serve as a catalog of immediate experiences and thoughts. One of her sketchbooks contains a dirty old piece of colored tape she found outside on a walk. In an interview with Make-Space, Christopher states her sketchbooks are an important and significant part of her practice, which allow accidents to happen, exploration to take place, and different methods of recording to be used. Sketchbooks allow her to think quickly and become inspired by forgotten scribbles and color relationships.

Currently Christopher is prepping for her upcoming show which will consists mostly of paintings with sculptural elements, mini photo-zines of collected images that she has taken over the past year (Things on the sidewalk, things on the grass, funny face things found in outlets and street signs. The enjoyment of strange text things and ice cream cones.)

After talking for a while Mia gave me a manicure with her unending collection of nail polish, along with one of her sick temporary tattoos. I brought Mia stickers, because I know she’s been forming a huge collection. I don’t know if the one’s I brought  were as fabulous as hers, but they reminded me of my childhood putting school supply orange dot stickers on paper while waiting for my parents to finish work. You should check out one of her sticker iPhone case designs! A wild box appears. Mia pulls it out of her stacked organizer and this one contains scraps of old dried paint chips all different colors and sizes. I asked Mia how she went from her more figurative work to what she is doing now, and she told me it has been a natural progression. The ideas of her more figurative work are still there, they’re just shown in a different way. There is less of an emphasis on narrative and more of focus on color relations, orientation of shapes, and openness to new ideas, which can be seen in works such as The Misfortune Of Knowing How Your Brain Works (2013), Brief Nudity (2013), and Maybe He Can Read My Mind After All (2012). In her studio space, Mia is making work that feels intuitive and focused, operating on both a conscious and unconscious level.  

During an interview with mintdesignblog Christopher notes a couple artists that have influenced her work, Monique Prieto and Leah Rosenberg. Prieto’s big shape paintings tell a story that is not revealed to the viewer. Prieto is interested in how the shapes represent themselves and interact with one another. While this hidden narrative isn’t what Mia is necessarily aiming at, the time she spends collecting and gathering materials I feel inserts her own stories within the work that many viewers may not notice. In the article Mia also mentioned Leah Rosenberg’s “gorgeous paint confetti and stacks of acrylic paint peels” and I can see how she is drawn to these paintings with their similar choices and pairings of color.

Christopher’s process also shares similarities with Tony Feher. Her work reveals a certain attention to perception and its role in our daily lives.

You do have to pay attention, calm down, and look. You have to be willing to find that sparkle of color. An early piece I made of different-size jars with different fluids I called Look See. And the point is, I think people are looking all the time, but I don’t think they’re seeing anything. And I think that’s true not just with a piece of art that’s in front of them, but in a larger cultural sense. Our lives are shrouded in myths and superstition and prejudice. If you can accept a soda bottle with condensation on the inside as a work of art, then maybe that’s a way of seeing a broader picture, or of seeing the world from a different point of view (1).

— Tony Feher

Mia Christopher also has a wonderful Instagram documenting interesting, sometimes perplexing objects and happenings around San Francisco; I couldn’t help but think of this David Foster Wallace quote from The Pale King after viewing it.

It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it’s a choice … I think that deep down I knew that there was more to my life and to myself than just the ordinary psychological impulses for pleasure and vanity that I let drive me. That there were depths to me that were not bullshit or childish but profound, and were not abstract but actually much realer than my clothes or self-image, and that blazed in an almost sacred way—I’m being serious; I’m not just trying to make it sound more dramatic than it was—and that these realest, most profound parts of me involved not drives or appetites but simple attention, awareness.

Interestingly enough in her interview with Make Space, Christopher said something very similar.

For me, work and life are not separate. Everything informs everything else. Constantly working brings me the most pleasure; I would rather be working in the studio than doing almost anything else. Making is the most exciting experience for me.

Christopher’s work is the minute to the whole — which is why the many aspects of her practice seem unseparated. It seems as if she is attempting to see the world for the first time every morning and she enjoys being busy. I asked her what strategies she uses, or maybe what approach other people could use, to help slow things down and to pay closer attention to their day-to-day surroundings. Her response reflects the practice of meditation, and Jon Kabat-Zinn said, “The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.” Feel like you’re stuck in a technology loop (2)? Christopher would take a moment to find something beautiful or funny around her, directly in her sight of vision. It’s not a surprise to find she also practices yoga, which reminds her to focus on her breathing. She told me, “Ever since I was a very small child I have been very observant. Finding beautiful or ugly or funny things as you go through your daily routine makes life more interesting and stimulates your brain to make connections. I stare at the sidewalk a lot when I walk so sometimes I have to tell myself to actively look up. I like to look for cats in windows (I consider them to be good luck), and what kinds of shadows the sun is leaving on buildings. There is so much to see, everywhere, all of the time.”

Glitter and neon, pools of paint glisten; nail polish flashes and life sits and listens. People promenade and follow internet memes. These are a few of my favorite things.

http://www.miachristopher.com/

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(1) Arning, Bill, Amada Cruz , John Lindell, and Adam Weinberg. Tony Feher. New York: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, pp 49-50. 2001.

Post Communiqué

By Alex Redmon

The whole thing seemed like a “need-to-know” operation, something out of the alley between too-far-gone and not-too-far-gone-enough.  Merely getting your hands on it was a feat alone given the hours they kept.  Like a wrong turn on a road trip to nowhere that made the whole affair worthwhile - the kind of idea that’s been romanticized for long enough that it immediately dissolves dispersion.

 One night, I approached - edgy but ready.  The whole mess was roped off - but seemingly not closed.  More than once, I’d seen it closed with someone “cleaning” it before, something I can assure you was really “them” at work.  This time though, there was a crowd gathered at the ropes.  Immediately, immutable: meat.

 "They" were gathered around the table, eating.  The only thing you could think about was the smell.  Some sort of wretched roast, carved and confined to this room, every way you turned.  Still, people walked up to the ropes, mused at the cubby-hole rooms shrouded in darkness behind the table, and walked away.

 That’s just how these things go.  Countless scraps of paper jotted on to be promptly discarded - an enormous edifice in the sand burned at the end of the weekend.  Drunkenly engage, actively and intelligently engage. Just engage.  Feel like you’re not just reading the messages, but somehow actively contributing.  Watch the wall of T.V.s.  Imbibe the distraction, because you control it.

 What, in this context, can you believe?  The messages, however tongue-in-cheek, seem empowering - until it’s apparent that you’re not changing anything in this miniature world.  It’s a board game gone awry that hits damned close to home.

There’s so much to interact with - it always feels more at home to be filmed, that shouldn’t inhibit much.  So many people punched in on the time clock, red hotline phone pulsing, absolutely nothing in the “DO NOT OPEN” envelope.  Never forget that you’re being followed by the people in the pictures at every turn - it was, after all, “them” that set it all up.

 This place felt like a film, but played like a choose-your-own-adventure, something dynamic each time.  Something like a weekend bender.  Whether you’re a supporting actor or an extra is never entirely clear - just don’t expect to be handed a speaking line.  You’d already seen the headshots of the stars - they were taken like mugshots.  8x10s on the table, enormous prints on the wall.  You were told who to look for.

So then, am I to believe, that all of these other faces are just happenstance?  Unlikely.  This whole scene was corroborated by a corrupt collective - it goes deep.  They’ve laid out their recruitment material, the propaganda and weapons that they’re leveraging.  You might drive away if the car parked in the hall wasn’t full of books, or if the cafe racer at the end of the hall wasn’t made of glass.

Post Communique was part of the “Available Space” component of DMA’s “DallasSITES” exhibit - http://www.dallasmuseumofart.org/PressRoom/dma_528370

It borders on the edge of nothing, but even nothing is about something! By E Dyer

I met with Em Meine back in July of this year outside of Velo Rouge Cafe for some coffee and art talk. She had recently sent me her thesis A Pigeon Passing As A Duck, which is also available on her website. It is a hilarious piece of art theory that I see critically examining Meine’s own practice while discussing why artists make things at all in the first place, and the tactics used by them to create an “original work of art”. While we sat down, we discussed her thesis, her work, what life after grad school had been like and will be like and where we all go from here.

 In her thesis Meine discusses the reasons some artists generate work, the value ascribed to what was created, and the validation of the community which supports work. Her goal? To poke the “art world”, to laugh in the face of the toiled-over artistic genius, to be able to reflect on these things that she sees in herself and in the world around her, and to make light of it all. The idea of it reminds me of the title of David Foster Wallace’s collections of essays, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” To me, both imply a separation from the world in order to understand it. Not so much an unwilling participant trapped and trained to make, and read, and be, but attempting to understand and view the world from a dual perspective — one that you are a part of and one you are apart of. You’re in someone’s studio. There are a lot of things but none of them have context, a reason. The artist is standing there looking at you. Are they real, are they an egotistical asshole? Do they believe they have something “meaningful and constructive to contribute to the contemporary discourse surrounding art” (1)? Do they grasp something you can not? Through the looking glass we go.

Many of Meine’s works give the appearance of simplicity. Take for example, Suggestion Box. In an ingenuous move, Meine hangs an electric paper shredder on a wall, fabricates a wooden box to hold it, adds the writing “Suggestions for the artist”, and leaves some pencils and paper for people to fill out. Of course, these suggestions are never read since they are put into the hole in the top of the box, feeding it through the shredder to a pile of lovely bits of suggestions no one but the author will ever read.

 One day I walked to her studio, only to find out her floor had been raised 3.5 inches and almost tripped over it. I wasn’t used to the elevation of her practice.

 If you give a mouse a cookie it will inevitably ask for a lot more, but I’m still staring at the talking mouse. It is about strings of questions which lead to other questions. She writes with sumi ink on paper — “If you give a mouse a cookie, it will want to sleep with you so please keep your hands above the waist.” This relates to much of her practice; not the sleeping with mice part, but the string of never ending questions.With Things I’ve Done Instead Of Working That I’ve Called “Thinking”, Meine continues to wrestle with “what it means to be an artist” and what the stereotypical imagining of an artist could be. If you give a mouse the means to procrastinate… Yet still, it is relatable. Everyone has those days, or weeks, or forevers. Questions upon questions, copies of copies. These works inspect the expectations of people, whether realistic or unrealistic.

It was about that time, while we were sitting outside of the Arguello Super Market, that we saw what I could only describe as a strange but small skirmish taking place inside the market. A man pushes another man into a stack of food. It fell. The man attempts to leave, but fails. People stare. We don’t know what’s going on but there is a lot of commotion and hubub. We are distracted by nothing — well it’s not nothing, to someone else, but we have no idea what has transpired in the interior of the complex until the police arrive. Then a man and a woman are pulled out of the market, sat down on the stoop outside, and handcuffed. Em and I continue our conversation. A huge bird lands on the trashcan next to us. Nothing can not distract us (2).

 You could have an Em Meine sitting on your coffee table. She made a book full of “congratulatory” remarks for her MFA show at California College of the Arts. A person leaving a comment would flip to a random page, be presented with a comment, and sign their name. The things she wrote in that book are so absurd that none will appear in this article (3).

Eight and a half minute video in which nothing happens, aptly describes what is (or isn’t) happening in the video. It cuts to different shots of Meine, close up on her face, different angles, further away — all the the dead air silence white noise buzzing in your ear, with an occasional sigh or breath let out by the artist. If one video of nothing wasn’t enough for you, there are more here! This brings up an interesting point made in Meine’s thesis, “If an artist is making work about work, or work about ‘nothing,’ or work about the work not being important or the artist being average or decidedly un-genius or whatever, does the work (‘work’) then in an attempt to contradict a myth actually bolster it” (4)? I don’t think this question is supposed to have an answer, only thoughts either which way. It’s a conundrum that I believe the artist is unable to answer, but viewers can form opinions. The author can be dead, the author can be alive, or we could not give two shits about anything Roland Barthes said. It’s up to you!

Meine says, “Many of my works ask the audience to make an inconvenient and often excruciating time commitment before I allow them in on the joke.” The next Screening will begin in 15 minutes the plaque on the wall reads — so you sit there for 15 minutes and wait for the curtain to open. You distract yourself in many ways while waiting (5) till that 900th second goes by and the curtains finally open, the moment we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived! We can now read that the next screening will most certainly begin in 15 minutes. You can read this for about 15 seconds and the curtains close; the show is over.

Where is there a line? Does there have to be a line?

http://emmeine.com/

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(1) P. 5. Meine, Em. A Pigeon Passing As A Duck. MFA., California College of the Arts, 2013. http://emmeine.com/files/thesis.pdf.

(2) The Nothing Pitch

(3) Truthfully it’s because I don’t have a copy of my own. But someone did, since they borrowed the book during the opening, only to return it later. Just a random fact.

(4) P. 25. Meine, Em. A Pigeon Passing As A Duck. MFA., California College of the Arts, 2013. http://emmeine.com/files/thesis.pdf.

Em Meine — Nothing Happens I

Phillip Maisel — STACK @@ Right Window

By E Dyer

There are photographs of stacks hanging on the walls. A physical stack rests on a raised platform as a window display.  Paper, wood, plexiglass, MDF board, siding, mirrors and glass - all collapsed - pushed back against the wall space; flat. Image on image; heaps of photographs:  stacks on stacks on stacks, racks on racks on racks. Some abstract data type, push and pop operations on the collection are the addition or removal of an entity.

Right Window is a small gallery on Valencia Street that exhibits art film, performances, and has an installation space which you can see outside through the front shop window (1). Upon entering there are old theater chairs, a blank screen, and through a small doorway is the exhibition space at roughly 10 feet by 5 feet or something, which it seems Maisel managed to fit a compendium of ideas into.

Maisel’s work turns itself inside out like a wormhole, destroying space and obscuring time. Or maybe it’s not that extreme. Through reiterating and repeating the material compositions, changing minute aspects of the wall-leaning piles, Maisel’s work contrasts the wall surrounding the photograph, the physical area where the photographs took place, and the flattened space created through his process. A pile; a heap; a group of things. He lives around the material that everyone experiences in passing, generally thought of as mundane objects combined and amassed to create our cut out homes and paper towns. Maisel says his process feels intuitive and there is a lot of play involved in setting up the works. He chooses the material based on qualities like reflection, appearance, and texture; he’s interested in “how they are transformed through the photographic process into something else.”

Looking at a restored black leather notebook (2) in one of the photographs, I wonder if some of these stacked objects, among the repetition and commonality of materials, subsume some sort of sentimental significance. Some items seem more important than others. There are funny objects with left over text, “This side faces artwork, score opposite side.” Some items seem easily replaceable, but are still being used. Maisel stated in an interview with Apartment Therapy in 2008,  “I like old things. I’ve always lived in old houses. I like the wear on the hardwood floors, I like seeing the layers of paint at the chipped edges of window frames. I love the architectural flourishes you get with older homes” (3).

The large installation in the front window appears to be an unphotographed stack. It becomes a mirror, a replacement of what the photos accomplish in a two dimensional form. It allows the viewer different possibilities — the entire sculpture can be seen, not cropped by Maisel’s eye (4). The limitations that are applied to the photographic format unfold, but new limitations are created since the viewer can still only see what the architectural space allows them to view. The things you know you know versus the things you know you don’t.

Maisel’s work seems to be in conversation with the history of photography. Like James Welling, his work is both simultaneously representational and abstract. In an interview with Bombsite, Welling stated that, “The object existed when you photographed it, it exists into the future, it exists out of time. But we can’t help but view it in our own time and think of it in terms of where we’re standing now. Which is so key in your work: Where am I standing now?” (5). I believe this concept reflects aspects of Maisel’s practice, and also reveals some questions he may be posing while shooting the repeating materials, structures, and forms he creates; in the show at Right Window, Maisel’s installation furthers this prodding of time by allowing the viewer a glimpse of past through the present material. His work also relates to the process of Miriam Böhm, where what is in the background and foreground are issues generated through the process of photographing an object, photographing that photograph that is now an object, photographing that photograph, etc. While Maisel’s process is not a replica of Böhm’s, the result is similar in its disorientation of space through a different kind of repetition — instead of repeatedly taking photographs of the same photograph, he repeatedly takes photographs of the same “stack” of materials, and through this repetition, distorts proportion, distance, and space. The end result requires the viewer to engage in the process of deconstructing the pictorial plane to understand what is real and what is created through manipulation of space; what has changed and what has stayed the same.

Maisel’s interest is in, “the sequence of time between the images, the abstraction of formal elements, and the confusion of dimensional space." The photograph, with all of its precision and exactitude, is deceptive. Maisel believes these attributes can be misconstrued for indubitable evidence, however he aspires toward a degree of ambiguity.  Anaïs Nin stated, “It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see.” Ultimately, Maisel shows us it’s not what you know, but what you’re willing to know you don’t.

http://www.phillipmaisel.com/

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(1) Right Window is collaboratively run by Katie Bush, Craig Goodman, Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Kevin Killian, John Koch, Anne McGuire, Karla Milosevich, Paula Pereira, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Steven Seidenberg, Claudia Schleyer, Wayne Smith, and David Van Der Voort. Past members have included Dodie Bellamy, Samaki Dorsey, Cheryl Meeker, Chuck Mobley, Marina Moreno, and Cassie Riger. Right Window is in the ATA building at 992 Valencia Street.

(2) organized but worn; used and stained.

(3) Han, Sarah. House Tour: Phillip’s Lower Haight Shared Arrangement, “Apartment Therapy." Last modified 8 26, 2008. http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/house-tour-san-francisco-59773.

(4) But then again, it was created by Maisel, so who’s to say this piece hasn’t already been placed to reposition the viewers idea of what the photographs could be, and what repetition can be seen in the full sculpture itself?

By Alex Redmon

The initial approach to Wunder-Block hits you in the face with space. Walking down the stairs at the Nasher, Katharina Grosse’s latest Dallas installation has you feeling like you’re about to step into a full page Spaceman Spiff spread.  Downstairs, you queue outside the glass wall enclosing the exhibit, donning scrubs-teal polyester scrunchie-socks over your shoes.  Your transformation into an interstellar traveler has begun.

 Before you begin your walk, you naturally have to undergo what any space weathered astronaut will tell you they've seen plenty of – training.  Fortunately I’d come stocked with a notepad, and managed to inscribe the entire lecture down verbatim – “Stay on the path.”

There’s something to art that you can stand on, and walking the thin beaten trail through Technicolor mounds of rock and dirt afford you plenty of moments to stop and crane around from your somewhat unique 360 view of silent color topography. Though initially the giant white boards drizzled with the hues of the floor and leaned against the walls almost seem weak compared to the rest of the piece, the redemption they receive once you reach the right angle to see the shadows they've kept harboring depth and secrets in makes you wonder why you ever second guessed them in the first place.

Once you've turned in your blue booties and gone out to the garden, you’ll find out that Wunder-Block has been following you.  Giant, colorful, and mostly abstract but slightly insect in nature, these works feel in form like a film negative reversal of the room you've just left. Out in the fresh air, one lurking under the trees and one half inside and half outside the gallery, they make for an excellent component to the art du jor.

A response to the work of Renzo Piano, it’s no surprise that this showing is both large and outside the ordinary while not breaking entirely from existing concepts. Nemo Science Centre’s angles and texture waterside and the post-modern façade of the NYT building are broken into fungible hunks of pigment – Grosse is clearly playing Piano’s themes to her tune.  Wunder-Block is aware of temporality – it’s why you have to keep on the path.  Given the nature of the primary exhibit, every step disturbs the paint-capped dust underneath the viewer, instilling yet another element of individuality into each viewing as the colors smudge and dissipate.

There is no telling what. What?

By Eric Dyer

Gregory Ito had three pieces on display at the Truesilver Gallery in San Francisco, created during a month long residency spent in the Villyards’ home, for the show There is no telling what (1) (2). During this time, Ito was able to excavate and delve through the couple’s personal belongings, using the objects he found to create his work. (3)

It seemed I arrived a little early and Ito was sitting on the floor setting up She’s Gifted, which appears to be the deconstruction of a well wrapped present — a Tiffany’s box elevated on high teetering on top of a similarly-colored long piece of wood,  and anchored by a small glass jar of cherries. The wrapping paper hanging on the wall seems ready to envelop the individual items. The title, like many of Ito’s work, is a clever and humorous play on words; a talented person may get an interesting present.

Resting on the floor in the center of the space is Bed Bath and Beyond, a nod to the store which sells generic comfort items, although their glassware is still in need of a “bong section.”

There is this bong, with ice melting and water in it, ready to go, hopefully stable enough to sit on this yoga mat and not tip and crack. Some people wonder if the ice is real or not (4). On the other end of the mat sat a hand-held massager, waiting to be turned on, but if left going could be the demise of the bong. The three objects seem prepared for a daily routine and even in their state of usefulness they seem the most stable and balanced of the three works in the show (5). The ice and water adds another layer of interest to the work for me as they were the only natural elements in the piece. In my opinion, the ice and water in this bong made the piece whole. They are both the key items which show that this is already prepared, essentially waiting to be loaded and used, but also activate both the yoga mat and the hand-held massager as ready to be used items.

:o (JENGA!) consists of a regular table, a Jenga tower, set up ready to play, and a ball. This table has a quirky little top that somewhat mimics the pattern of the Jenga stack (6). Under one leg of the table is a ball. This ball sets the table off balance and causes the Jenga stack to look as if it’s sliding off and if there was an earthquake this game would easily end in one move. The straining lean makes me fearful, and I put an invisible barrier between me and the work.  I feel like I’m being taunted, and I want to begin the game.

The work could be interpreted as an idea of the homeowners (a portrait), or a reflection of the artist (their personality, their aesthetic), however I think there are more revealing stories hidden within these objects than the connection they hold with their owner. They may be items from their home, but their commonality makes them relatable to a wider audience. The revealing part of these objects is the connections they make with other people in their general use. Gifts are a way of showing affection; smoking can bring people together, just like giving a massage or joining a room in an intense hour of stretching, much like crushing your friends and enemies in a game of Jenga. For me these objects are about us, but I guess there is no telling what.

There is no telling what was open from March 9th to April 28th 2013 at the Truesilver Gallery.

http://gregoryito.com/

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  (1) Truesilver Gallery is a store front gallery in the home of Charlie and Heather Holt Villyard. The gallery is approximately 1200 square feet and its mission is to “bring new opportunities and audiences for emerging artists while engaging the residents of Noe Valley in contemporary art.”

(2) Charlie Villyard does some pretty awesome web design and event photography. Heather Holt Villyard is currently the director of ArtSpan and serves as the Chair of the SECA 50th Anniversary on the SECA Council at SFMOMA. She sometimes makes art as well!

(3) I believe there is no telling what these objects histories are. They are common enough to be in anyone’s house — so the viewer is able to project their own identity and relationship with the object onto their histories. However the objects are already owned, and we are unable to tell what sentimental value they may hold to their owners, unless we know them personally we can only project what we believe.

(4) This made me question why people were focusing on whether or not the ice was artificial, instead of the objects and the overall composition. 

Interestingly enough in an interview with Art-Rated, Ito said, during an opening of his work at the Eleanor Harwood Gallery, that someone asked if his work A Bed Time Tale, which had a nightstand with a glass of water on it, did indeed have water in the glass or if it was done in resin. Ito responded “It is water. I didn't feel obligated to imitate the water. It is more charged when it is in its true form.  I want people to connect with the collaboration of the elements within the piece.” 

Also, in full disclosure I was guilty of being one of those people wondering if the ice was real or not, but discovered it was indeed H2O slowly moving from 273.15K to 293K after staring at it for a while and probably asking Greg after drinking a few beers. I think it’s remarkable that we are beginning to expect artificial objects to replace natural ones.

(5) Order of use: Yoga, Bong, Massage IMO.

By E Dyer “You were sick, now we’re both sick” a  phrase I've come to always think of when looking at work by Jonathan Tyler Skeleton Wallraven, an artist living in San Francisco (from Tennessee). Why is everyone becoming ill, we may never know, but the plague is spreading fast and hopefully soon the world will be full of these beautiful sumi-ink lines. I'm not sure if I became infected after viewing Wallraven's creation or if the work itself is imbued with a magic beyond comprehension (1).

On Saturday, February 23, 2013 Chinatown in San Francisco held its famous New Year parade; on the same day, the Chinese Culture Center Gallery opened Moment for Ink (2). Included in the show are four wall installations titled, I want to Hurt you and Not in a Good way But Also in a Good Way. They are all done in Sumi-Ink. The name itself racks my mind with questions of it’s absurdity; it reminds me of Gedi Sibony’s title My arms are tied behind my other arms, or George Costanza and Jerry Seinfeld’s rants about nothing. 

Many of Wallraven’s works are distorted by the projector and transparencies that are used during the installation process. The work in Moment for Ink has a graphic, clean, comic quality (3). It looks as if he created a huge wood cut print and stamped the wall with it. 

In his self-portrait, an eye peers through the artist’s hands which cover his face — I wonder if he is trying to hide from us or if he is trying to hide himself from some disturbing event. The portraits around him look like they could either be shielding their gaze from terror or involved in a fun game of peekaboo (4). 

I see Jonathan’s work as the contorted connections we attempt to make with other individuals. We never know who they are, but we long to know them better. We simplify their stories and chronologize them — that way they are easier to understand. However, there is always another perspective you can’t see...

 http://jonathanwallraven.com/

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  (1) The Truth Is Out There. A town where everyone knows everyone and nothing is what it seems.

(2) located on the third floor of the Hilton in San Francisco’s Financial District

(3) That’s not to say his older work doesn't hold some of these attributes. The Spiral, which can be seen here, contains similar elements to the work shown at the Chinese Cultural Center. The Spiral contains more drips, physical distortions, and doesn’t have as much variety in the line weight.