Congratulations, San Francisco — you’ve finally reached summer! Time to frolic in the great outdoors and enjoy the sunshine. Apparently, it’s been a long winter for everyone, because there are (count ’em) four different art shows up right now dealing with landscape, and another on its way: The Invisible Method in Adobe Books’ Backroom Gallery, Matt Bryans and Michael Garlington at SF Camerawork, the painting-cum-sculpture of castaneda/reiman at Baer Ridgway, Here at Pier 24, and (opening in July) Scott Yeskel’s Mapping California at Jack Fischer.
While casual observers might take this trend as a subconscious cry of frustration over being shackled to running a gallery while your peers are slurping down Bi-Rite ice cream cones in Dolores Park on a Saturday afternoon, my assumption as I started my tour was an art market oversaturated with MFAs who have all somehow just discovered that representations of landscape involve the (potentially) insidious notion of point-of-view. Another way of putting it: every painting or photograph of a mountain has been selected, framed, and constructed so that your viewing eyes see it a particular way (minus the indigenous Americans living at its base, for example).

While I know this to be true, I often find its manifestation in the contemporary art world tired and played out. Thankfully, only one of the shows I visited, Adobe’s The Invisible Method, falls into this trap. The “invisible” method referred to — framing — is now so far from invisible that the work in the show is just a bad cliché. Giant c-prints of natural features, or man-made paths and viewpoints, cropped, framed, and redisplayed no longer make my heart go pitter-patter. What is also curious: Adobe lists six artists on their website, but it’s difficult to separate out the voices when one is in the space.

Charlie Castaneda and Brody Reiman
Baer Ridgway’s Still Life Landscape by castaneda/reiman will be the darling of the contemporary art crowd. Artists Charlie Castaneda and Brody Reiman create what amounts to a large “composite landscape:” an installation that combines archival inkjet prints, painting, and sculpture, all based around a collection of landscape paintings from a variety of sources, including thrift stores. A photo of some of the collection leaning against an unfinished gallery wall greets the visitor; in the lower gallery one finds the actual installation, or what appears to be the paintings themselves.