Descending into Et al. gallery’s Chinatown location is always a thrilling process of discovery. Without a street-facing window (or usually any windows at all), knowledge of the particular layout of an Et al. exhibition or its contents remains unknown for the entire journey down a narrow hallway and a flight of wooden stairs. Anticipation builds in inverse proportion to the distance remaining before the big reveal.
Happily, in Wyoming-based artist Andy Kincaid’s current solo exhibition A Minute Description of the Route, the process of discovery doesn’t stop at the last wooden step. Scattered across the gallery floor and walls are objects tangentially related to journeys — historic, mythologized and contemporary — across the American continent. With the image list in hand, stepping through a maze of cast resin rattlesnakes, pieces of petrified wood, stacked chairs, inkjet prints and other detritus feels a bit like a three-dimensional I Spy exercise. Kincaid rewards diligent looking with the oddest of treats, including a disembodied mannequin head and the artist’s own varicose leg vein.
![Andy Kincaid, Detail of 'To organize a meeting or to play Oregon Trail / understanding pathways,' 2016-17.](https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/01/route26_12detail_1200.jpg)
The installation, lit from one small window cut into the gallery’s back wall and illuminated from behind by warm yellow spotlights, sits in a perpetual golden hour. There is a beige sameness to the objects, a combination of their natural hues and the spectrum of light making them visible. A record player on the floor adds to the ambiance by looping Sounds of Nature Series – Prairie Spring; crickets chirp.
The most contained representation of the exhibition’s themes comes from a piece titled Trail Guide / 1950 California Trail miles / 2179 Appalachian Trail miles / 2170 Oregon Trail miles / understanding pathways / for Grandma Gatewood. (Be forewarned, this is not the longest title in the exhibition.) A waist-high metal rack, originally made to support blueprints, clips together enlarged reproductions of pages from the 1858 book The National Wagon Road Guide with torn-out pages from a 2010 copy of The Thru-hiker’s Handbook, a guide to the Appalachian Trail.