85 wpm

Dec. 13, 2009

I’ve been busy with a pretty good mix of volunteer and paid work lately. I’m involved with the editing of a new Bay Area arts Web site, Art Practical. The site is an outgrowth of Shotgun Reviews, which allowed users to post their own reviews of art exhibitions. Art Practical builds on Shotgun by curating and facilitating this process. Reviewers are invited to contribute; their reviews are edited and those of us working “behind the scenes” communicate with the writers to improve clarity and consistency.

In addition, Patricia Maloney, who spearheaded the project, is editing a features section that includes longer pieces written by artists. These features are intended to be more comprehensive investigations that either critique some aspect of contemporary visual culture or function as a component of the artists’ practices. Unlike some web publications that update every day or inconsistently, Art Practical debuts a new issue every two weeks.  I’m really excited about the way it’s corraling disparate Bay Area artists into one project, providing an outlet and a focus for such folks.

I’m also working with Chuck Mobley and others at SF Camerawork on the gallery’s upcoming show, The Future Lasts Forever. My job is to contact some of the artists participating in the show and assist them with developing their statements. I’m also editing the text panels for all the artists in the show.

Lastly, I’ve started writing visual arts articles for the 96 Hours section of the San Francisco Chronicle. So far I’ve done two and I have three more articles scheduled in the upcoming months.

I think that’s everything. I feel really busy. I’m making felt basset hounds, but mostly just for gifts this year, not for profit. Although some profits couldn’t hurt. I still have my hopes set on a basset hound manger scene, but time is running out.

Oh, and I also got a new freelance gig copy editing for a local magazine.

Dec. 13, 2009

The Mills MFA open studios were yesterday. I love Mills, partly because I went there for a year before transferring to Mt. Holyoke (oh 1996, how I don’t miss you), and partly because I think it’s an underused resource in the Bay Area visual arts community. And also because it’s really, really close to my house. I was so excited to realize such a fertile arts community is just three freeway exits away!

Today, I visited about 10 artist studios. One thing I like about open-studio events is the glimpse into the artist’s process they allow. I love seeing the evolution of an artist’s work, and trying to understand how it relates to what ends up in the “official” exhibition. I also approach the work differently than I do when it’s in an exhibition. When the artist is sitting beside their work, their person and their process is on display, as well as their “product.” I find I’m less judgmental and more curious.

Three artists’ work stuck in my head today: Monica Lundy’s; that of an artist working in photography whose name I can’t remember (sorry!); and Doug Williams’.

The former two artists (Lundy and the artist whose name I wish I remembered) make work rooted in photography. Specifically, their work relates to the instability of identity as understood through photographs. Williams makes funny video-based work that is also smart and critical—a great combination.

In her studio, Lundy displayed her sensual and slightly messy watercolor re-creations of mug shots. The works are done in various tones of a single shade—brown, black, or blue. Their inky quality is reminiscent of fingerprints, an identifying document similar in spirit to the mug shot. By rendering these portraits in such an ambiguous and loose manner, the artist questions and subverts their authority. Through her materials, she suggests a mug shot can’t fully represent the sitter’s true character, despite the government’s claims of just that.

In another piece, this one of clay, Lundy introduced further doubt into formal portraits’ claims on identity. She re-created a group portrait by applying clay to a studio wall, essentially drawing the photograph this way. Bits of the material fell off onto the ground. The overall effect was one of instability, as filtered through the artist’s materials.

By translating photographs into messier, less precise (also more organic) materials such as watercolor and clay, the artist questions photography’s supposed (and long challenged) ability to define and fix one’s identity. Lovely.

The mystery artist worked with some similar ideas, although she favored using found snapshots of daily life rather than formal sittings. In her studio, she displayed blurry black-and-white photographs. In their foregrounds, it was clear a figure or shape had been cut out. A ghostly white absence, devoid of visual information, remained. I asked the artist about her process, and she explained its multiple steps.

First, she reproduced found photographs in small, almost contact-sheet sized, prints. She then cut the people out of the photographs, and put a white sheet of paper behind the photograph, so the cut-out portion appeared as a solid white shape. She then affixed the photograph to a small stand and lit a votive candle behind it. Finally, she photographed this candle-lit photograph, printing it in a large size. She hung the resulting images on her studio walls.

I appreciated this work for its acknowledgment of photography’s sentimental associations and its  limitations. Within a familial context, we often cling to generations-old photographs of relatives, believing somehow that the beloved’s character and life are encapsulated by that image. What we actually possess, however, is a ghost of that person, an idea of them filtered through the photograph, that may or may not be accurate. If anything, the photograph reminds us of the absence of the person in the present. This artist’s photograph-sculptures, candle-lit and small, were altars to those lost identities. I liked that.

And, finally, Doug Williams’ work. His was the first studio I visited and it was a welcoming and humorous experience. Williams’ video-based work doesn’t deal with photography and its historical meanings. Instead, it pivots on humor and cleverness. The artist seems to have found a good balance between these two qualities. The humor is a product of the cleverness, not a superficial veneer applied after the fact. Belly laughs, not chuckles.

For instance, in one piece, a glowing orb seems to move between two ping-pong paddles. As the camera pulls out, we see the artist holding the two paddles above his head, moving them quickly, almost frantically, from side to side, framing the moon between their surfaces.

So smart for so many reasons: It comments on our collective desire to control or manipulate things beyond our control and the absurd lengths we will go to in our attempts. It also speaks of appearances versus actuality; the frenzied activity that exists behind the scenes to produce a certain effect, and the potential for duplicity. Finally, it implicates video technology in this duplicity.

Another one of Williams’ pieces I particularly liked was a faux infomercial. Unlike infomercials that promote another product, this segment was self-referential. It was an infomercial promoting itself. This quality of self-reference permeated the video’s appearance and content.

Against a background of receding televisions, one set giving birth to the next (a television screen of a television screen of a television screen, etc.), Williams stands having a conversation with himself. The artist and his “twin,” each wearing different 1980s windbreakers, carry on a conversation about the video they are simultaneously creating and promoting. In his pitch, Williams mentions video’s potential for reproducibility and the resulting lack of value, as well as artists’ attempts to control this reproduction in order to create the illusion of rarity. Very nice.

October 14, 2009

So many events!

Thursday, Oct. 15, 7 to 9 p.m.: Mark Dion speaking at CCA’s Timken Auditorium, SF.

Monday, Oct. 19 at 7:3o p.m.: Allan Sekula at SFAI, 800 Chestnut St., SF.

Tuesday, Oct. 20 at 7 to 9 p.m..: Donna Haraway, CCA SF.

Wednesday, Oct. 21 at 7:30 p.m.: Uta Barth at Mills College, Oakland.

October 12, 2009

On October 2, I heard artist Pae White speak at Mills College. She delivered a retrospective of her work, via PowerPoint–images of her Vera Bradley handkerchief collection and graphic collages that appeared in art magazines in the 1990s. What I had come to see and hear about, though, was the work included in “In Between the Inside-Out,” previously on view at New Langton Arts, and up at the Mills College Art Museum through October 18. White produced the work during a residency at the For-Site Foundation, located in Nevada City, California.

I have a growing fascination with Nevada City. I imagine it as a town full of renegades in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The residents started as 49ers and when the gold ran out they began to grow green plants they could trade in for dollar signs. There’s an excellent article about the marijuana-growing industry in and around Nevada City in the October issue of Harper’s. It is the home of water pooled in granite rocks along the Yuba River, and a mysterious community along San Juan Ridge started by poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder. I once met a woman in a dog park in Oakland who told me she lived there in the ’80s.

During her lecture, White described the projects she undertook at For Site. But I got more out of looking at the work in the museum, and even more out of thinking and writing about it afterwards, than I did from hearing about it. What is immediately, and perhaps obviously, striking about the work is the artist’s use of technology and artificial materials to create an immersive and realistic version of “nature.”  There is something unsentimental and convincing about White’s simulations of natural elements. The work repeatedly and cogently addresses human’s uncertain position within and relationship to the outdoors.

The work consisted of two primary components: four canopies consisting of interconnected screens and piles of “gutter leaves,” as White called them in her talk, crafted from clay, fabric, wire, and recycled paper. The shelters function as caves or camping tents missing one wall, the latter association referencing human’s ambivalent relationship to the outdoors. We want to be in it and we want to be ”inside,” away from it, too. Projected onto the screens are impressions of particular trees and natural elements. White gathered the images using some sort of  technical device (I can’t remember the name!) that scans a physical object and records its dimensions and contours. The result is an intimate representation of, say, a manzanita grove or an old growth tree, that White gathered without ever physically touching the object.

October 10, 2009

Public organizing

Shows I want to see before they close:

Improvised Branches at Art @ theOakbook in Jack London Square through October 25, 2009.

The Museum of Historical Makeovers at Swarm Gallery through October 25, 2009.

September 13, 2009

So smart! So good! In the December 2008 issue of The Believer, Eula Biss writes about the dangers of claiming already populated neighborhoods and the troubling legacy of the American pioneer in an essay called “No Man’s Land.”

A quote:

“The word pioneer betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West—the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited. To imagine oneself as a pioneer in a place as densely populated as Chicago is either to deny the existence of your neighbors or to cast them as natives who must be displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy.”

September 8, 2009

I read on Sunday as part of Home Is Something I Carry With Me, an alternative art exhibition curated by Adrienne Skye Roberts.

From the release: “Home Is Something I Carry With Me features over forty local artists whose work interrogates the concept of home. For one weekend, two homes in San Francisco’s Mission District will transform into exhibition spaces and the backyard of a third home will be used for an outdoor film screening. By reinventing three homes as art venues and opening them to the public, Home is something I carry with me exercises the rights of renters to use private residences for what we deem public good; an action that can be considered a resistance to the current housing crisis and the lack of economic sustainability for artists. Individual rooms within the homes will act as galleries organizing the work around themes of shelter, migrations, domestic space and memory, mapping, borders and neighborhoods.”

Mike Goodier’s film about Lafayette screened on Friday night, and on Sunday, three of us read. To introduce my piece, I talked about how claiming one’s suburban roots can be related to gentrification, about the tendency of socially mobile, upper middle class, mostly white kids to claim other neighborhoods–places like West Oakland or the Mission District–as home because those places feel more authentic than the suburbs.

It’s easy to dismiss one’s suburban upbringing–to feel like you’re from nowhere because suburbs can feel so interchangeable and transitory. But to be from the suburbs is to be from somewhere. Most significantly, it is to be from a place a privilege, a place some people were allowed to live and some people were not.  I think it’s important to recognize that many of the people who are really from West Oakland or the Mission District, whose families have lived there for generations and have developed a community there, have done so in part because they were often not welcome in or explicitly prohibited from moving to the suburbs. To not be bound by one’s place of upbringing, to be able to cast off one’s roots, to be from nowhere, is a kind of privilege.

This mini-diatribe was related to the overall idea of writing about the suburbs–I think it was my own way of legitimizing my subject matter and relating it to some of the other topics addressed in the show. The actual work I read considered the ways that a physical location exists in both the past and the present, and how the time periods and layers of experience graft onto a place.