Artweek

MARCH 2005

Each month, Artweek Previews Editor Debra Koppman highlights selected exhibitions from venues listed in the Artweek Exhibition Calendar.

Jaye Lawrence and Les Lawrence

Both Jaye Lawrence and Les Lawrence will be showing a range of ceramic sculptures at the Hyde Art Gallery at Grossmont College. The work of Jaye Lawrence has been particularly informed by such diverse influences as classical figurative sculpture and whimsical southern folk art. Her Small Seated Figure is an aesthetically charming play between solid form and open structure, but the content is strange and melancholic, even heartbreaking. The female figure, made of white pottery, is literally broken up, and barely held together by what look to be entwined branches and twigs, which also form the seat upon which she sits. The head is completely open at the top, with a pointy, open, spiral form, creating a frame resembling a dunce cap. The arms are also completely broken off, while the legs remain partially intact.

Les Lawrence’s personal narrative emerges through an exploration of innovative fired print techniques embedded in the clay. His Teapot is not functional, but it apparently has a very good time playing at being a teapot. It does have a handle, and it does have a spout, and it even has a little top to release the steam, but the elongated shape is closer to the function of an iron than a teapot. Made also of white ceramic, with various images and text printed and fired onto the surface in black, the piece appears to be telling a non-linear story made up of disparate and seemingly unrelated elements. The surface of the handle-edge of the teapot features an old-style printed circuit board, with black looping lines. This literally linear image overlays a close-up photo of one large eye and eyebrow, heavily caked in eye makeup. The center panel of the teapot displays a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, framed by a black-and-white checkered border. Underneath this image is the word, “parallel,” written twice. The spout has a very magnified view of winged bugs about to walk right off the back of the teapot. The little triangular top, resembling the metal exhaust vent on a chimney looks like it’s about to blow right off. The Lawrences bring new form and less function to an ancient medium.

Jaye Lawrence and Les Lawrence: Artwork will be on view April 4–22 at Hyde Art Gallery, Grossmont College, 8800 Grossmont College Dr., El Cajon.

‘Abstraction: Spirit and Space’

Three contemporary Bay Area artists whose work manifests something of a Buddhist bent will be exhibiting their work in Abstraction: Spirit and Space. Pauletta Chanco, Thekla Hammond and Joseph Hughes share an interest in art as a pathway toward spiritual reflection.

Chanco finds inspiration in a variety of archaeological sites and contemporary disasters, both of which offer clues about the past. Early cities of Mexico’s Yucatan as well as the remains of the Oakland hills fire inform her work. The frequent use of encaustic, an ancient technique that employs melted beeswax, adds to the luminosity and layering central to her paintings. Chanco sees creativity itself as inherently linked to the soul, and is particularly interested in exploring ideas about movement between spaces sacred and profane. The work is abstract, a direct result of looking at the world abstractly, and in the hopes that it will provide a way to go deeper than surface and appearance. Oval forms, inspired by actual rocks in the natural world, appear often and are intended to function as stepping stones between the spiritual and the secular. For this exhibition, Chanco plans an installation into which people can enter. Specifically inspired by her childhood in the Philippines, the piece will focus on aspects of deceit in human interactions.

Hughes creates monochrome abstractions, largely by pouring acrylic paint over stretched canvas. Lighter hues are poured over darker grounds, guided while still liquid with small brushes. The technique leaves a surface thatched with striations of subtle differences, creating a field of color that appears to rain down. The paint hangs somewhat suspended, stopped in mid-action, so that one senses both motion and pause at the same time. Hughes believes that paint and color have psychological and spiritual content in addition to their physical reality, and hopes to connect with divine energy through his paintings.

Hammond has worked in the past with themes of meditation, time passing and impermanence. In addition to five large paintings and several related monotypes, Hammond will include Impermanence, an enormous piece of non-stretched canvas attached to the wall, measuring eight feet tall and fifteen feet wide. Forty-eight-foot high Plexiglas panels with images of leaves and branches painted on them hang in front of the canvas and rotate constantly. The panels reflect light and forms off of each other, and onto the canvas, creating a work which is constantly shifting. The panels also reflect the people passing inside and outside the space, inviting another level of interaction and change. With abstraction as their bridge, these three artists use their craft, medium and imagery to move between the sensory and spiritual worlds.

Abstraction: Spirit and Space will be on view March 20 through April 24 at Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary’s College of California, 1928 Saint Mary’s Rd., Moraga.

‘Wild Women 3: Lost & Found’

The third in the series of Wild Women exhibitions, Lost & Found will feature the work of seven artists. Sohyung Choi, Cheri Ibes, Via Keller, Seema Mahboob, Atiba Thomas, Pearl Jones Tranter and Kim Vanderheiden work in the realm of assemblage, collage and found object art. Interested in the concepts of alchemy and transmutation, curator Celeste Smeland brought together works reconstructed from a variety of ordinary and disparate materials, offering transcendence from the ordinary and the possibility for new life and meaning.

Choi transforms common tape cassettes into luminous and lyrical wall sculptures, while Thomas’s assemblage sculptures are infused with personalities and tell life stories through the use of simple cast-off materials such as pieces of wood, junk trinkets and metal scraps. Mahboob blends abstract and representational imagery to create complex two-dimensional collages, and Vanderheiden combines numerous printing techniques and other materials in her three-dimensional works. Tranter has developed a multi-phased process involving the construction of assemblages, which are then photographed and manipulated using Photoshop.

Ibes deconstructs common everyday materials, such as plastic cups and garden pipes, and reuses them such that they evoke organic things like bones and shells. Sitting elegantly on a glass tabletop, Amore #1 consists of one tall, svelte, silver vase; a decapitated red rose sits slightly behind the vase, while next to it stands a strange, silver jewelry case made up of one heart standing on top of another, tiered like a layer cake. The top layer looks to be made of lots and lots of toy soldiers, their tiny, intertwined bodies unromantically resembling a pile of spaghetti. Perched on the very top is a toy helicopter, whose propeller also serves as a handle.

Keller creates densely detailed collages, often using digital images and parts of previous works. Under a Tangled Sky is jam-packed with detail, color and pattern, formed from bits of stained glass, fabrics, shells, beads, jewels and puzzle pieces that interact and intertwine to form the image of a heavily made-up woman lying on her back in a field of flowers, jewels and mirrors. Small Gustav Klimt-like figures of sleeping women accompany her. Keller, and all of the artists here, have created unified works that offer new experiences and metaphors to lost objects and viewers alike.

Wild Women 3: Lost & Found will be on view March 26 through May 7 at Fetterly Gallery, Vallejo Community Arts Foundation, 3467 Sonoma Blvd., #10, Vallejo.

‘Detours’

This multimedia exhibition will focus on the work of several artist collectives. On March 12, in addition to one-time only performances, a panel discussion will illuminate the purposes, motivations and methods of artist collectives. The participating artists use public space and public action to create unexpected “in the moment” experiences that are geared towards social change. Projects by artist collectives SRL (Survival Research Laboratories), Finishing School and The Center for Tactical Magic will be highlighted.

The Center for Tactical Magic plans to show Rise Up—Message in the Skies, a mixed-media installation piece, featuring cartoon figures on a shore, surrounded by blue waves, blue sky and a smiling sun. The figures are flying kites and peace signs, with one big black balloon carrying a message “Rise Up!” while the trailing banner reads “All Power to the People.” The Center for Tactical Magic is dedicated to addressing issues of power and to working toward positive social transformation through “community-based projects, daily interdiction, and the activation of latent energies.”

Finishing School also works with social commentary, but with a grimmer view. Their large-scale digital prints are hazy, black-and-white images that are blurred and hard to decipher. As though looking through Venetian blinds, one struggles to read partially visible words: “… Bioterror Blunder.” Finishing School projects “attempt to demystify cultural production and redefine viewers as active participants engaged in a learning process.”

Survival Research Laboratories will be exhibiting videos and documentation of their mechanized performances created using robots, special effects devices and other machines. Interested in developing new ways of creating social commentary and political satire, SRL thinks of themselves as “an organization of creative technicians dedicated to redirecting the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product, or warfare.” SRL does not present humans in their performances, and they are present only as audience or operators. Each in their unique way, these three artist collectives are agents for change.

Detours will be on view March 12 through April 10 at Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St., Huntington Beach.

‘5th Anniversary Exhibition’

In honor of their fifth anniversary, Artseal Gallery will be exhibiting a wide selection of their vintage and contemporary photographs, including works by Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Consuelo Kanaga, Dorothea Lange, Edmund Teske, Horace Bristol, Hugh Holland, Wayne Schoenfeld, Clifford Baker, John Patrick Salisbury and Stefan Kirkeby. For this exhibition, an emphasis will be placed on “figurative, portraiture and coming-of-age imagery,” that captures ordinary people in daily life.

In a work by Cunningham, we see a young woman in profile wearing a striped rebozo, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail. A man with dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses was caught unaware by Lange’s lens. Teske brings us another man, young and bearded, who looks dazed inside of a strange, cave-like space. Bristol confronts us with a man simply scratching his nose. And, yet another man, dressed very casually with his overshirt unbuttoned, sits in a living room; Kanaga reveals her subject from the unexpected angle of the floor, evidence that 5th Anniversary offers new light and unique perspectives on everyday people.

5th Anniversary Exhibition will be on view April 5 through June 30 at Artseal Gallery, 1847 Larkin St., San Francisco.

‘MELT 2005’

The Art Explosion Studios’s Fourth Annual Spring Open Studios Art Show, MELT 2005, will feature a variety of work by more than 100 artists located in San Francisco. The public will have a chance to meet artists in the 36,000-square-foot studio space, and to experience live performances. Painting, photography, jewelry, ceramics, fabric art, sculpture, installations, video and mixed-media will be on view. Alejandra Rassvetaieff’s large painting of a wide-eyed, pleasant-looking young woman, is set off against a bright, flower-patterned background. Geoff Wolfe creates playful, abstracted, but recognizable San Francisco landscapes. Also focusing on cityscapes, Jennifer Wasson’s pensive and meticulously rendered works like Cesar Chavez #1 are atmospheric interpretations which manage to create a space of quiet reflection in the midst of an urban hub.

Susan Peterson works with ceramic sculpture, creating functional and not-so-functional forms. Her most recent series comes directly out of environmental concerns and features hanging birds, with strange appendages. The pieces strike one immediately as visually interesting, but almost as quickly one realizes something is clearly amiss. The birds, chosen as a symbol of fragile life, and functioning as barometers for the health of the planet, have mutated and armored themselves to survive the toxicity they are forced to endure.

Susan Garry-Lorica works primarily with the human figure as theme. Her carved wooden figures have completely emerged from their original pieces of wood, yet the rows of figures still emerging out of essentially two-dimensional frames to form low relief figure-gatherings. Still to go are the hanging wire figures, visible alone and in groups, some simply wire, and others wrapped in cloth.

Wendi Spiers claims to be making lighthearted work to counteract our very serious times. Her small-scale anthropomorphic sculptures feature human figures with various animal heads. Horse Woman, Birdhead, Deer Man are slightly elongated mythological figures. From mythological to abstract to functional to representational, MELT 2005 will be a melting pot of ideas and mediums.

MELT 2005 will be on view April 22 through May 14 at Art Explosion Studios, 2425 17th St., and 744 Alabama St., San Francisco. The exhibition will continue with Open Studios on Saturday and Sunday, April 23-24, 12-5 p.m.

Jil Weinstock

At first glance, Jil Weinstock’s work appears to closely reference the striped color field paintings of Barnett Newman, Morris Louis and Gene Davis. As you approach the pieces exhibited on the walls and on the floor of Yardage, you notice something different about the surfaces. At very close range, you can see that all of the pieces in the show are constructed of things made of and related to clothing. Zippers, stockings and nightgowns are pieced together to weave a not-clearly outlined narrative in which various art historical movements, personal history, feminism and humor all have parts to play.

Black Cherry, an elongated, horizontal sixteen-foot panel that commands the space, is made of hundreds of zippers organized in color groups to form vertical columns of colorful stripes. Suggesting paint strokes, the closed zippers are actually embedded and suspended in an amber-colored rubber. The palette, which also includes bits of olive green, is dominated by the color of the rubber, including tans, browns, earth reds and oranges.

Nighties, a series of small, fifteen-inch cast-rubber hexagons, hangs on another wall in a kind of staggered grid, four rows high. The color palette is similar to Black Cherry, but greatly muted, including pale tans and peaches. The nightgowns, which were carefully arranged, folded and tucked before being immortalized in the rubber casts, belonged to the artist’s mother and grandmother. The effect of putting these intimate garments on display turns them into historical artifacts similar in function to family photographs. They invoke a strong sense of nostalgia and speak of a strong desire to hold on to the inherently ephemeral details of an ordinary life.

Jet Black is a tactile floor installation of large-scale, black rubber squares filled with black nylon stockings. Intended as both a direct homage to and a critique of Carl Andre’s tessellated metal sculptures, this piece is meant to be walked on. You are invited to be seen in public, barefoot, walking on a sculpture consisting of discarded intimate female apparel—the entire exhibition is an invitation to experience art as simultaneously visual, tactile and mnemonic.

Jil Weinstock: Yardage will be on view through April 2 at Davidson Galleries, 313 Occidental Ave. S., Seattle.

‘Shimmer’

Steel Gallery celebrates the beginning of a new year with Shimmer, featuring work by John Bostock, Christiane Lazard and Chuck Price. These three gallery artists share a similar tendency to combine materials in unusual ways to create painting and sculpture. They are all interested in surface quality as a key element, juggling polished and matte finishes with smooth and textured visual and tactile effects. And all of their works have a playful quality, a result of their experimental approach.

Bostock prides himself on his “West Coast aptitude for fun.” Using bold colors and gestures, he applies oil, gold leaf and metallic paints to mostly large-scale canvases. The resulting abstracted images are alive with an exuberance of application, moderated slightly by a touch of Asian-influenced composition. Fun is a mid-sized square canvas, into which barely fits a large, vibrating, not-completely solid circular form, humming with zips of bright colors and gold leaf. Fruit Flys features abstractly and loosely painted forms resembling bananas, apples and pears, flying in an open field of bright orange.
Though more formal, Lazard’s sculpture is also playful. Informed largely by modern constructivism, the work is composed of basic geometric elements, made of combinations of painted and polished metals such as bronze, aluminum and steel. Movement is frequently an aspect of the work, lightening its spirit.

Price uses a shift in scale, context and material to transform common forms into uncommon and whimsical sculptures. Cast bronze beans, aluminum thunderbolts, steel stars and painted wishbones force us to reconsider the ordinary. Shimmer is filled with new takes on well-known shapes and objects, a reminder that perspective is everything.

Shimmer will be on view through March 26 at Steel Gallery, 3524 Sacramento St., San Francisco.

Piet Ogata

Piet Ogata will be showing a series of new, large-format paintings, featuring loosely painted horses. A horse trainer by trade, Ogata intends to honor a specific animal through each of the paintings exhibited. The works show a great deal of attention to composition, color fields and color planes, but are not painted with the level of detail that would turn them into horse portraits. The animals are painted with enough attention to anatomy so as to identify them as horses, but there is practically no detail in either the ground or the figure. Each painting features one horse, which so completely fills the space that it almost pokes out of either end, giving the impression that it is poking out of its stall, pushing gently to escape the confines of an enclosed space.

The non-specificity of the paintings, along with the strong compositions and sense of color-planes recall the spirit of Franz Marc. Ogata seems also to be connected to the animal spirit of humans through the spirit of the horse, looking to them to find a space of simplicity with no pretensions. She says, “It is out of deep reverence for each individual horse that I am portraying them. I am tired of trying hard to make smart paintings, ones that say I am a well-educated person and can prove it. Six paintings of just plain horses with no hidden agenda.”

The horses are solid, strong and beautiful. They offer an aesthetic experience and a space in which to ground oneself.

Piet Ogata: Paintings will be on view through March 30 at Gallery 25, 1526 Fulton St., Fresno.

‘The Daily News’

The work of eleven artists, many from the West Coast, who have appropriated the form and content of newspapers, are featured in The Daily News. As both a reflection of and an influence on contemporary culture and politics, the daily newspaper continues to play an important social role in the United States. Functioning to inform while simultaneously shaping public opinion, newspapers operate using a visual language of great interest to many artists. Issues surrounding both the messages offered as well as the way they are filtered, edited and transmitted have offered visual artists material through which to create personal commentaries on a wide range of social issues.

Participating artists include Conrad Atkinson, Pat Boas, Derek Boshier, Bruce Campbell, Nancy Chunn, Christopher Finch, Jann Haworth, Paula Scher, Donald Sheridan, Al Souza and Xiaoze Xie. Atkinson, a California artist, appropriates the format of the front page to create paintings which are spoofs on famous artists and the art market. Boas, from Portland, Oregon, deconstructs the newspaper’s layout. In a piece called All the Heads on the Front Pages of the New York Times, Boas eliminates all text and creates her political commentary through outline drawings culled from one month’s worth of New York Times front page photographs.

Boshier, a Los Angeles artist identified with 1960s British pop art, has created a series of drawings and paintings inspired by Los Angeles Times headlines. LA Times: Clinton Acquitted, is a large-scale painting featuring a cartoon-style drawing of the front page. Accurately reproduced font suggests an actual newspaper, but the whole color of the page is a flat, deep, salmon color. Replacing actual text are black lines marked in the format of text. A painting in black, white and gray representing a somber-looking head of Bill Clinton, appears off-center above some pseudo-text and is surrounded by what appears to be a crown of thorns, with the apparent stripes of an American flag in the background.

Los Angeles-based Finch adopts the newspaper comics’ format in The Fine Arts Funnies. Haworth, of Utah, will be exhibiting a sewn canvas painting, The Hollow Man, in which she juxtaposes T. S. Eliot’s famous poem with newspaper headlines of President Bush’s war in Iraq.

The Daily News promises the opportunity for reflection, laughter and serious consideration of this ubiquitous medium.

The Daily News will be on view through May 29 at Salt Lake Art Center, 20 SW Temple, Salt Lake City.

Kathryn Metz

Kathryn Metz, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will be exhibiting large-scale painting and woodblock prints, all connected by the themes of land and light. Interested particularly in the specific effects of light and atmosphere of the Santa Cruz coast, Metz focuses her attention on the emergence of color and form as it is gradually built up through layers of paint, delicately applied in small strokes. The resulting paintings carry the mystical feeling of the fog and mist in which she lives and works.

The paintings’ large scale and shimmering bits of color and light create the sensation of a kind of middle space between land and sky, within which the viewer is invited to momentarily float. Often created directly outdoors, references to the concrete objects of rocks, land, branches and earth are generally submerged into a more generalized field of light, cloud, mist and air.

The tangible world remains secondary, a prop to express the atmosphere which appears as a veil, suggesting fuzzy photographs and faded memories.

The woodblock prints have less of an ethereal quality, but carry a similar energy generated by the vibrating rows of small horizontal marks which comprise the trees, the hills and the sky.

Land and Light: Paintings and Prints by Kathryn Metz will be on view March 23 through April 30 at Wiegand Gallery, Notre Dame de Namur University, 1500 Ralston Ave., Belmont.

Stan Welsh

Stan Welsh’s exhibition, Head’s Up, will feature a series of larger-than-life ceramic heads, described by the artist as “psychological profiles.” Each of the many heads appears as the same protagonist, designed to portray a range of emotions, including pain, sorrow, greed and denial. They wear a range of disproportionate, birthday party-style hats, so that, seen together, the heads appear as a kind of theater piece, featuring one actor trying on different personality traits. A moveable mouth, like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy, is meant to convey the idea that our speech is always, in some way, manipulated. Each persona seems on the verge of coming forth with his predetermined, scripted lines.

One piece features a bronze face, with an elongated Pinocchio nose. Another carries a dollar sign engraved into his forehead, and wears small, black, Mickey Mouse ears. The birthday party hat looks like a dunce cap when covered with a gunmetal-colored glaze, stands out absurdly when colored a rich ultramarine blue, and really shines when turned into a gold, crown-like hat, complete with elastic tie around the chin. Symbols including hands, shells and dollar signs appear variously on the foreheads, the ears, the hat, or the neck of many works. Some heads appear calm, while many are more intensely engaged, with contorted faces, or a tongue sticking out. There’s a character with a tiny, red clown nose tied on, another with a gold wishbone in his mouth, and still another carrying fairly large conch shells around on his head. Through sheer variety, inventiveness and symbolism, Welsh types and taps our emotions and our heads where they originate.

Head’s Up: Ceramic Sculpture by Stan Welsh will be on view through March 6 at the http://www.santacruzmah.org/, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz.

Ken Rosenthal

Ken Rosenthal, born and educated in Los Angeles, will be exhibiting a series of intimate, small-scale, toned gelatin silver prints inspired by and reworked from family photographs. Looking at the ways in which memories are evoked by and sometimes actually reconstructed through a combination of dreams and photographs, Rosenthal’s images appear as hazy markers of places and people just visible at the edge of consciousness.

Open fields, cargo trains, big cloudy skies, flying birds, a house at the edge of a wood, are dreamlike, as though seen in early dawn or late dusk from a moving car window. Each image has enough clarity to make identification possible. The details are left for the imagination to complete.

Some of the images also include a lone figure. Occasionally, there is a child posing for the camera; judging from the style of dress, the child stood in that field approximately eighty years ago. In another instance, a woman, her hair in a bun, dressed in black with a shawl around her neck, is seen from behind, an unlikely perspective for the family photographer.

The images are not worked digitally, but painstakingly manipulated in the darkroom using diffusion techniques during printing, and/or bleach and selective toning techniques after the work has been printed. The resulting images originated in the life of one family, but extend out to others through the evocation of family photographs and the memories that escape all of us.

Ken Rosenthal: Seen and Not Seen will be on view March 11 through April 29 at the Center for Photographic Art, Sunset Cultural Center, San Carlos and 9th sts., Carmel.