- New World Boredom
- Published: Jul 22, 2009
If these paintings could talk, I'm pretty sure they'd tell me to piss off. But after that, I bet they'd hand me a stapled 'zine, black and white all retro style circa 1993, and invite me to a show in a warehouse for that night.
- Lineage: Matchmaking in the Archive
- Published: Jun 30, 2009
A perfect match is an exciting idea, but an elusive reality. The majority of us are more familiar with matchlessness -- stuck with lone socks the dryer can't explain and dating Web sites full of thumbnail portraits looking for their mates.
- Becoming Non Object & Just Because There are Questions...
- Published: Jun 21, 2009
Our grammar instructs us to be actors, not acted upon, subjects not subjected to. But two current East Bay art shows, Just Because There Are Questions Doesn't Mean There Are Answers at Blankspace Gallery and Becoming Non Object at Hatch Gallery, think differently.
- Squeak Carnwath: Painting is No Ordinary Object
- Published: Jun 15, 2009
A friend asked: "Is the Squeak Carnwath exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California 'feminist art'?" I just stood there. I couldn't answer.
- CCA's MFA show 2009
- Published: May 12, 2009
Every year, the CCA MFA Exhibition celebrates and shows off the work of the graduating class. And every year it's kind of the same and kind of different.
- Enter, Exit
- Published: Mar 23, 2009
Do I need to be saved? Urban offers of salvation are everywhere if you look for them. Berkeley artist Jake Watling knows this.
- The Fountain of Giant Teardrops
- Published: Feb 22, 2009
I thought I was too old for bedtime stories. For enchanted forests and little boys who tell tales no one believes. But then I heard such a story, last month, in a quiet San Francisco art gallery, in a white walled room covered with paintings of gnarled wood and golden fountains.
- Legend: Myth and Memory at Creativity Explored
- Published: Feb 14, 2009
The suggestion of a long-suppressed narrative coming to light pulled me in, but it isn't the reason I stayed. I stuck around for the juxtapositions -- disturbing, pleasing, absurd -- between text and pictures.
- Jake Longstreth: All It Is
- Published: Jan 27, 2009
While Longstreth's images of vacant construction sites and tennis courts once read as dispatches from an ever expanding suburban sprawl, they now appear as glimpses of a ruinous future.
- Retractions
- Published: Jan 17, 2009
What does an absence look like? It looks like what's left behind: a person leaning toward the ground because a shoulder has been withdrawn. How does one visually represent loss? It is the space around the missing, the still-present elements that highlight what has gone.
- Stolen Land
- Published: Dec 18, 2008
I want to be a hobo. To ride the rails over the High Plains, campfires and tin cans and burlap sacks for sheets.
- Hallway Bathroom Gallery
- Published: Nov 23, 2008
Forget euphemisms. Brion Nuda Rosch calls his gallery what it is. The Hallway Bathroom Gallery is the hallway and bathroom of his modest Mission District apartment.
- Lydia Nakashima Degarrod: Geographies of the Imagination
- Published: Nov 16, 2008
It is less scary to walk through a dark house when you can name the pieces of furniture you bump into. The same rationale applies to geography as a whole.
- Lauren Davies: Dog Models
- Published: Nov 08, 2008
Imagine "cute" as a place. It would be populated by kittens and puppies that never age, bunnies that hide brightly colored eggs, and impossibly chubby cheeked infants who never soil their diapers or cry all night long.
- tomorrow is for those who can hear it coming
- Published: Oct 14, 2008
We are constantly negotiating between the past and the future, stumbling through the moments that connect old versions of our world with emerging ones, revising our memories to reflect then-future events. Julio Cesar Morales' current exhibit at New Langton Arts takes this relationship -- between history and what's to come -- as its subject.
- Timothy Horn at the de Young
- Published: Oct 04, 2008
It was my first time at the remodeled de Young Museum and it was a circus. No, really. The Gregangelo and Velocity Circus was there as part of the Friday Nights at the de Young event series.
- Vocabularies of Metaphor: More Stories
- Published: Sep 30, 2008
Joan Didion said it so well: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." We take our messy lives and we insert opening scenes and arcing plots and eventual morals. We organize facts and occurrences and impressions into narratives, which we tell and retell, amend, edit, and tell again.
- On The Wall
- Published: Sep 13, 2008
The mural, which covers every inch of the gallery's walls, was created by four artists from the Trust Your Struggle collective over a weeklong period. When the show ends September 26, 2008 it will disappear.
- Jon Stich at the Mixing Bowl
- Published: Sep 08, 2008
Stich realistically depicts surreal situations: a woman surrounded by swirling fish, a park bench populated by people whose heads have turned into cameras, a barely clothed figure with the body of a man and the head of a lizard.
- 888 Pieces of We
- Published: Aug 23, 2008
Artist Keba Konte, whose exhibit 888 Pieces of We is currently up at the Oakland Art Gallery, describes the work on display as an expression of his journey, a reflection of his life.
- Insider/Outsider
- Published: Jul 25, 2008
My friend can't figure out where he belongs -- there or here. He grew up on the East Coast, but now lives on the west one. Sometimes he asks me, "Which is home?"
- Tammy Rae Carland: An Archive of Feelings
- Published: Jul 10, 2008
We often cling to heirlooms left behind by a past relationship or loved one, aware but unfazed by their failure to fully recapture the experience or person they represent. Our sentimental attachment and its inevitable failure is the subject of An Archive of Feelings, photographer Tammy Rae Carland's current exhibit at the Silverman Gallery.
- Trevor Paglen: The Other Night Sky
- Published: Jul 09, 2008
As teenagers we would lie on our backs in East Bay parks and wait for the meteor shower to begin. Other summer nights we sat in suburban backyards, trying to pinpoint the Pleiades with our fingertips. Trevor Paglen's The Other Night Sky, reflects both of these impulses -- the urge to wonder and the urge to know.
- These Canyons: 08 UC Berkeley MFA Exhibition
- Published: Jun 06, 2008
She took three years of drawings, held in scholastic white and black speckled notebooks whose empty covers now lean on a gallery shelf. She mulched and recycled the work to create lumpy sheaths of paper.
