Jamil Hellu “Untitled (Odyssey)” 2023, digital pigment print. Image courtesy of Rebecca Camacho Presents.
November 4 to December 16 – Jamil Hellu: Odyssey at Rebecca Camacho Presents: The sumptuous, vibrant photographs in Jamil Hellu’s Odyssey inhabit multiple realms at once, capturing moments fixed in time but hardly fixed in their meaning. At first glance, these candy-toned compositions seem abstract: swaths of brightly colored fabric, foam, paper, and in one case, reflective mylar, enrobe a figure, only identifiable as such through the occasional glimpse of feet, legs, a hand or a forearm. Exuberantly, extravagantly concealed, the subject (also the artist) poses against a seamless solid-colored backdrop that Hellu describes as “an ephemeral space…neither here nor there.” Opening Reception: Saturday, November 4, 5–7pm.
Top: Rose B. Simpson “Altar Piece” 2023, ceramic wood, grout, shell brass acrylic. Bottom: Tanya Goel “Mechanism 18” 2023, mica, crushed glass, paper, silk, and acrylic pigment on canvas. Images courtesy of Jessica Silverman Gallery.
November 9 to December 23 – Rose B. Simpson: Skeena and Tanya Goel: Octaves at Jessica Silverman Gallery: Simpson grew up in Santa Clara Pueblo, a Tewa tribal community next to the Latinxtown of Española, New Mexico. “Skeena” is Latino slang for the people in my corner or those who’ve got my back. In Simpson’s exhibition of new sculptural works, Skeena is a down-to-earth and otherworldly exploration of community, which ultimately asks us to imagine how we all could be better ancestors. Octaves, is an exhibition exploring ground and materiality by Delhi-based artist Tanya Goel. The artist’s first solo show with the gallery will present a selection of watercolor and hand-made pigment works from her signature “Mechanisms” and “Botanical studies” series. Deeply connected to her home and the histories of India, Goel investigates the foundation, complexity, and integrity of urban sprawl. At demolition sites, she collects materials like mica and glass directly from the ground. After “grounding the ground” she meditatively organizes these pigments into highly geometric abstractions of color. The resulting large-scale and multidimensional paintings echo the conflicting histories of nature and urbanization within India’s capital.
Javiera Estrada from “Back to the Future: Life in Technicolor”. Image courtesy Jonathan Carver Moore.
November 2 to January 6 – Back to the Future: Life in Technicolor a solo exhibition from Javiera Estrada at Jonathan Carver Moore: Multi-media artist, Javiera Estrada, was born in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1981 and emigrated to the United States in 1989. Javiera’s broad scope of work, which includes photography, mixed media, photograms, film, and textiles, is influenced by her memories of growing up in Acapulco—a tropical paradise of vibrant colors, steeped in spiritual ritual and magical realism. The works in this exhibition exalt nature and primordial traditions, using saturated, surreal, and vivid hues to evoke the hyper-pigmented virtual worlds that captivate our attention in the digital age. Opening Reception, Thursday, November 2 from 6–8pm.
Charles Lee, from the “Sweat + Dirt” series. Image courtesy of SF Camerawork.
November 7 to February 3 – Charles Lee: Sweat + Dirt at SF Camerawork: sweat + dirt is a document and investigation of contemporary Black rodeo culture and cowfolk in the United States. The show consists of traditional black-and-white photographs, larger-than-life mural prints, and two photo-based installations. The works and images in sweat + dirt were made in Louisiana, California’s Southern and Central Valley, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Through Lee’s project, we are presented with contemporary evidence by which we can trace the multi-racial history and widespread geographic reach of country life, and the role of Black people in the development of U.S. western culture. Opening Reception, Friday, November 10 from 6–8pm.
Hiba Kallache “Sonic Campaigns” 2023, acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of Altman Siegel.
November 2 to December 22 – Hiba Kalache: Belliphonic at Altman Siegel: Hiba Kalache lives and works between San Francisco, CA and Beirut, Lebanon. Within her multidisciplinary practice encompassing drawing, painting and sculptural installation, Kalache addresses the geopolitics of the middle east from the perspective of a female body. On four separate occasions throughout the course of her life, Kalache has left her family home in Beirut behind. Uprooted from her heritage, the abstract idea of translation has been a literal fact of her daily existence and a recurring theme in her work. Her canvases, layered with soft washes of acrylic ink and passionate, intuitive bursts of color, are rooted in a sense of landscape, but the artist’s fragmented and instinctive gestures recall the splintering of memories over the passage of time, leaving traces of emotion untethered to concrete imagery or place. The resulting works, surreal and imagined, exist outside of time and place, referencing the abjectness of the physical body and its experiences.
Scott Hewicker “Time, a Mirror of Time” 2023, fabric dye on canvas. Image courtesy of Et al. etc.
Ongoing to November 25 – A Pattern of Window Frames at Et al.etc.: A group show curated by Saif Azzuz including: Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Rachel Marino, Ocean Escalanti, Victor Saucedo, Malcolm Kenter, Alicia McCarthy, Colby Claycomb, Nick Makanna, Maryam Yousif, Laura Rokas, Mitsu Okubo, Jeffrey Cheung, Paige Valentine, Willy Reed, Erik Bender, Cathy Lu, Humberto Ramirez, Alexis Reiko, Lulu Thrower, Olivia Nevins-Carbins, Reniel Del Rosario, Chris Duncan, Oliver Hawk Holden, Bailey Anders, Kate Laster, Alex Rohrig, Haley Summerfield, Gregory Groff.
Duane Linklater “an the circle be unbroken 3” (left), “can the circle be unbroken 5″ (right), 2019; digital print on linen with black-walnut and iron-red and black-walnut dyes, cypress-yellow ochre, black tea, and charcoal. Image courtesy of BAMPFA.
Ongoing to February 25 – Duane Linklater: mymotherside at BAMPFA: For more than a decade, Duane Linklater (b. 1976; lives and works in North Bay, Ontario) has been making art that interrogates the construct of museums, their conventions, and their historical exclusion of Indigenous people and content. Working across a range of media, including painting, sculpture, and video, he addresses the contradictions of contemporary Indigenous life within and beyond settler systems of knowledge, representation, and value. Exhibitions tours are led on selected Wednesdays at 12:15 PM and Sundays at 2 PM.