Monthly Archives: February 2012

To Do List: March

Posted on by Kerri

San Francisco has a long standing history of artist-run non-profit art spaces.  This month we recommend checking out a few of the most established ones that foster the emerging art scene.   

Through March 10th, Adriane Colburn’s Of Darkness at The Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market Street.    Twenty-five years ago The Luggage Store, also known as the 509 Cultural Center, started as a volunteer collective.  Today they continue to organize exhibitions, performing arts events, arts education and public art programs.  For their current media installation, artist Adriane Colburn uses her travels with scientists who study climate change in remote terrains to create elaborate cut-paper pieces, wood sculpture, digital images and video. The works in Of Darkness are part map, part science fiction and part psychedelic jungle.  Adriane’s video piece can been seen March 1 – 8th as part of the Luggage Store Projection Space:  International Women’s Day along with videos by artists Fatemah Abdoolcarim, Taraneh Hemami and Mail Order Brides/M.O.B.

part of Adriane Colburn's "Of Darkness" installation. source: www.luggagestoregallery.org

views of Adriane Colburn's paper cut pieces. source: www.artbusiness.com

 

Saturday March 31st, Silver Era, Southern Exposure’s Annual Art Auction, 6-11pm, 3030 20th Street.  Southern Exposure is a non profit visual arts organization that supports emerging artists and youth in a dynamic environment in which they can develop and present new work and ideas.  For almost 40 years this organization has been exhibiting emerging artists, and their annual art auction is a great way to support their programming.

Ongoing to October 2012, Manifest Destiny!, Hotel Des Arts, 447 Bush Street.  Next time you’re walking down Bush Street by Le Central, be sure to look 40 feet up in the air to see a new public art project sponsored by Southern Exposure’s Off-Site program.  The project is a temporary rustic cabin that has been attached to the side of Hotel Des Arts, directly above the restaurant Le Central.  Built in a 19th Century architectural style with reclaimed 100 year-old barn boards, the dwelling is meant to be an homage to the romantic spirit of the western myth.  For more photos of the construction and installation of the piece visit www.designboom.com.

SoEx Off-Site public art project Manifest Destiny! by Mark Reigelman and Jenny Chapman. Photo by Cesar Rubio Photography

Evening view of Manifest Destiny! Photo by Cesar Rubio Photography

 

Ongoing to March 24, In Other Words exhibition at Intersection for the Arts, 925 Mission Street.  For almost 50 years, Intersection for the Arts has initiated ground-breaking programming by presenting new work in the performing, literary, visual and interdisciplinary arts in the Bay Area.  This group exhibition looks at language and its capacity to clarify and confuse, convene and separate, inspire and discourage.  In conjunction with the exhibit they are sponsoring a word game night In Other Words:  Balderdash on March 21st and they will close the exhibit with an Artist Talk on March 24th at 2pm.

Meryl Pataky's shadow instalation. Photo source: www.artbusiness.com

 

Annie Vought's cut paper piece. Photo source: www.artbusiness.com

 

Pieces by Emanuela Harris-Sintamarian. Photo source: www.artbusiness.com

 

New York Art Fairs, March 7 -11.  Next week will be the opening of several art fairs in New York.  If you plan to be there visit The Armory Show, ADAA: The Art Show, Scope Art Show, and Volta Art Fair among others.  Artsource will be there all week, so let us know if you need more information or passes.

 

The Memory is in the Materials

Posted on by Jody

Mark Bradford in conversation with Christopher Bedford of the Wexner Center and Betti-Sue Hertz of YBCA

It’s both entertaining and eye opening to listen to Mark Bradford talk about his life and work.  At a small gathering at the home of a San Francisco collector, Mark Bradford talked about this experience as an artist, what shapes his thinking, and  how he works. Having grown up in South Central LA, the son of a hair salon owner, at nearly seven feet tall, this MacArthur Genius Award winning artist, is in so many ways, not what society tells us to expect.  To experience his work is to understand his voice.

Mark Bradford, Mithra, 2008 (Image: huffingtonpost.com)

“The memory is in the material“, Bradford said specifically referencing his monumental work, Mithra, 2008, often referred to as The Ark, on view now at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  Made from found and rotting plywood covered with layers of posters, fliers and other remnants of destroyed businesses left in the Lower Ninth Ward in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Bradford’s monumental work has a moving and powerful presence.  I highly recommend a visit.  You can learn more about Mithra and its origins here at Prospect 1.

Mark Bradford, discussing his painting Scorched Earth at the Wexner Center press preview, Scorched Earth: Collection of Dennis and Debra Scholl, (image: museumpublicity.com)

“My art practice goes back to my childhood, but it’s not an art background.  It’s a making background.  I’ve always been a creator.  My mother was a creator; my grandmother was a creator”. – (Art 21 Politics, Process & Postmodernism.  Interview with Mark Bradford).  Bradford completed his BFA and MFA at California Institute of the Arts, one of the most conceptual art schools in the country.  I asked him about his experience as a student there, and he responded this way… “I just wanted to get out and make something“.

Mark Bradford, Strawberry, 2002 (Image: Sikkema Jenkins)

And across the street  at SFMOMA is Bradford’s first major museum survey – a thought provoking installation of paintings, sculpture, and multi-media work. One of the most compelling for me was the multi-media installation, Pinocchio Is on Fire – as I sat in the room, walls collaged with darkly colored and rhythmically patterned paper, and the soulful voice of Nancy Wilson singing “Telling the Truth”, I felt as if I was at once in Mark Bradford’s brain and inside his painting.  I began to understand Mark Bradford’s truth.

No photos, sorry…you have experience it in person.

Bradford talks about it here: “Pinocchio Is on Fire is a mythological character that I created to talk about black culture in South LA at a time of flux and fluidity in the late 1980s when it was changing from an older narrative of family toward a “Boyz in the Hood” hip hop moment. And now the ground is shaking again, hip hop is receding and immigration has changed the landscape. The work is a sound piece using my voice and music. It came very naturally to me.”

 

At Artsource, we always talk about how contemporary artists show us a different way of looking at ourselves. Bradford’s unique voice communicates a complex and deeply layered view of our shared culture. This is a show not to miss.

Learn more about Mark Bradford at Pinnochioisonfire.org

JBK

 

Notes from Sundance…

Posted on by Jody

The convergence of art and film at Sundance was alive and well this year.  The New Frontier (projects that push the boundaries of storytelling and film) section of the Festival includes both films and an exhibition space.  Focus on contemporary art continued in the acclaimed documentaries selections with two films about the lives of artists: Marina Abramovic The Artist is Present and the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize winning film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry - a revealing look into the life and work of the Chinese artist/political activist.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry  TEASER from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

The screening of Eve Sussman’s whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir in a film festival setting as opposed to a gallery clearly highlighted the difference between art and film. whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir is an algorithmically generated edit of a complex and futuristic story set in Kazakhstan. Because each screening of the film relies on combinations of image, voice over and music as selected by the algorithm, no viewing is the ever same…at times the edits are clumsy and others, poetic.

The audience seemed uncomfortable with this concept; most viewers couldn’t understand why the artist wouldn’t take the best edit possible and fix it there.  My favorite moment in the Q & A was when Sussman explained that she was inspired by the possibility of the ‘random’ edits…further explaining that the algorithm made edits she could never have thought of herself; is about discovery for her.  How brave is that?

source: http://www.rufuscorporation.com photo: Eve Sussman

From the Sundance Film Guide:  …Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation… designed a kind of filmmaking robot—a custom, programmed computer dubbed the “Serendipity Machine” that uses key words to select seamlessly from 3,000 film clips shot in central Asia, 80 voice-overs, and 150 pieces of music to create an ethereal narrative that follows a geophysicist named Holz (Jeff Wood). Holz is stuck in a 1970s-looking metropolis called City-A, whose citizenry are subject to various unusual restrictions. Through voice-over dialogues, wire-tapped telephone conversations, and snippets of Holz’s job interview with his employer, a mysterious woman referred to simply as Dispatch, it becomes evident that Holz is controlled by the factory and city where he works, just as his fate is dictated by the machine editing the film.

 

In the New Frontier exhibtion space…

Marco Brambilla
Evolution (Megaplex), 2010
3-D High Definition disc
Color, sound
03:04 min., loop

Still from Evolution (Megaplex) source: marcobrambilla.com

Brambilla’s first work to be executed in stereoscopic 3D Evolution (Megaplex) is a 3 minute side-scrolling video collage that tells the story of human history – yes, for real… through Hollywood blockbuster clips.  Through some technological feat, Brambilla weaves moments from films such as “Ghandi”, “The Ten Commandments”, “A Clockwork Orange” and “King Kong” into one seamless and apocalyptic moving, mural-like image…in 3D to boot.  Fantastic!

 

Hank Willis Thomas and Chris Johnson in collaboration with Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair
Question Bridge: Black Males
An innovative video installation created by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Chris Johnson in collaboration with Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair after traveling around the country interviewing 150 Black men in eleven cities. They created 1,500 videos of conversations with men representing a range of geographic, generational, economic, and educational levels. They then wove the conversations together to simulate a stream-of-consciousness dialogue, allowing important themes and issues to emerge, including family, love, interracial relationships, community, education, violence, and the past, present, and future of Black men in American society. – Oakland Museum of California

Trailer 2 from Question Bridge on Vimeo.

From the Sundance Film Guide:

Dissolving the distinction among subject, audience, and author, the visionary transmedia project, Question Bridge: Black Males, creates a uniquely vulnerable and intimate dialogue among black men nationwide, initiating a new kind of social network. In Question Bridge: Black Males, black men go to a safe space and record their questions, which are then answered by other men who may live miles away. The footage is evocatively presented in various ways, ranging from beautiful sculptural environments to Web forums and geolocative hotspots across the country.

Also on view at Oakland Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Salt Lake City Arts Center.

 

- JBK