PSHAW

Bass&Reiner co-director Clea and I visited Malena Lopez Maggi in her studio at Mills College on Monday. She talked about “the magic” of making these rocks, when in the clay, faces or other recognizable forms appear. Then there are other times she is clearly referencing a recognizable form…one of these rocks looks a lot like a major bay area artist institution… 

We’re pretty excited to work with her on a show which will be opening very soon!

Lisa Jonas Taylor, "Exterior Space Simulation"

City Limits (300 Jefferson St, Oakland)

September 26-October 18, 2014

My conceptions, and really understanding of photography has changed immensely in the last six to eight months. What I used to see as a dead and boring medium, is starting to look more like an underutilized vast landscape where potentials are endless, but theory and criticism are short.  Alvarez-Perez is constantly referencing the history of photography, and uses a memorized archive of photos he has seen again and again to make his own creations, allowing himself to take the photos he has already seen in the same way that a young painter in the renaissance would copy the masters before him, learning their style, while slowly making moves towards their own original strokes. This is exactly what you see in Nando's photography, images you have seen before, though frequently in bright rich colors that allow you an immense pleasure as a viewer, and then, here and there, an image that you haven't seen before, which blows your mind, and reminds you of what it feels like to see something completely new.

The work on his tumblr is older, but you can get a real Nando Alvarez-Perez mind experience at his website, which is sort of a bottomless pit of clicking through photos in interesting ways. 

(via Bringing Back a Lost Museum)

In 1945, workers at Brown University’s biology department were clearing out storage space when they stumbled on a giant trove of natural and ethnographic specimens and artifacts. The collection had belonged to the Jenks Museum of Natural History and Anthropology, founded at the school in 1871 and dismantled in 1915 to make way for new classrooms. Inexplicably, the workers drove 92 truckloads worth of the carefully curated objects to the banks of the Seekonk River, where they unloaded them into a common dump.

“L.A. is where I learned about art and where all my obsessive crushes took place, where I developed friendships, learned how to work with others, smoked a lot of weed, became a junkie, met Mr. Snuggles, committed crimes and went to prison (though prison wasn’t in L.A., that was in Chowchilla), got sober, fell in love with myself, and started The Revolution. For me, L.A. is where I came to know myself and continue to grow and expand. It is part of my psyche.”