Jim Hodges

Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to share the following review of Jim Hodges’s exhibition, on view through 25 April 2014.    Another last-minute viewing opportunity By Kenneth Baker San Francisco Chronicle 22 April 2014 Installation shot showing “Toward Great Becoming (blue/blue)” and “Toward Great Becoming (orange/pink)”, both 2014, by Jim Hodges [photo: Keith Petersen] Here is the latter half of last Saturday’s unpublished (don’t ask) review column: Jim Hodges: Wall works in mirrored panel. Through April 25. Anthony Meier Fine Arts, 1969 California St., S.F. (415) 351-1400, www.anthonymeierfinearts.com. The five new works by New Yorker Jim Hodges at Anthony Meier’s have an almost formalistic bent for someone who made his name using materials such as silk flowers, gossamer scrim, gold leaf and cast glass. Hodges came to prominence during the grief-clouded aftermath of the AIDS crisis’ first decade, working in a key avowedly elegiac, even sentimental. But the sentimentality in Hodges’ work, like the irony-free sweetness in that of his friend Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996), stood not for false feeling but for the inescapability of feeling, against which synthetic emotions and their triggers serve as futile defenses. Hodges began using the sort of mirror mosaics that adorn disco balls years ago. When he blankets flat forms with them, as in the works at Meier, the faceted surfaces suggest flayed, flattened disco balls, evoking an end, perhaps a fatal end, of festivity. The disco reference has subsided in the new work, and with it the key of mourning associated with club scene erotic reverie vanquished by a plague. “Toward Great Becoming (blue/blue)” (2014), like several other pieces here, consists of irregular polygons tessellated with tiny mirrors, meeting at the corner of a room so that their overall shapes reflect and distort one another. The adjoining panels in three works here differ in color and the reflections they pick up multiply those differences. Often in Hodges’ past uses of mirrors, he has confronted viewers with themselves — atomized. The huge “Untitled (grey ellipse)” (2013) offers something of this experience. Its shimmering grey darkness can suggest a portal to some magical elsewhere or merely, as gang slang would have it, “getting smoked.” The corner polygons might symbolize the crippled symmetry of people who try to discern themselves reflected in one another. Might that be the best we can hope to do? The intricate designs and shatter patterns of Hodges’ surfaces reprise his use of spider web imagery, but they also recall the more abstract interest in surface geometry of much older artists such as Robert Mangold and Dorothea Rockburne, who have long used ingrown composition to figure forth the integrity of a self.   To read the full text, please visit SF Chronicle's website.

Sigmar Polke "Alibis" 1963-2010 at the MUSEUM of MODERN ART Part I

WRONG IS WHAT I DO BEST

Here is an exhibit with some really great work opening at the Art Institute next month:

Wrong is What I do Best features Tanyth Berkeley, Ashley Bickerton, Club Paint, Liz Cohen, Wim Delvoye, Samara Golden, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Brad Kahlhamer, Nikki S. Lee, Jonathan Meese, Laurel Nakadate, Dana Schutz, Aaron Storck, Marianne Vitale, and Kara Walker.

Opening Reception » Saturday, April 26 | 7–10 pm

San Francisco Art Institute

800 Chestnut Street

San Francisco,

CA

google map »

“A diamond is a diamond, and a stone is a stone, but no man is all good or all bad.” –Johnny Cash, quoting a Roy Orbison lyric, to introduce David Allan Coe

Wrong’s What I Do Best takes its title from what was originally a George Jones anthem, and later a catchall for a generation of Hard Country performers. Jones and his outlaw brothers—Johnny Paycheck, David Allan Coe, Hank Williams—were known equally for their crafted stage personas and unhinged private lives. These sincerely deluded, tragicomic figures inhabited characters of their own making, to personal peril and kindling for public legend.

"…desire is everywhere present in my paintings. I’m interested in the liberating aspect of being totally untethered, let loose in the worst possible environments. My favorite artists are always women that do things that are so wrong… I like things to be seven kinds of wrong. If they are seven kinds of wrong, sometimes the wrongs neutralize themselves, and the whole thing becomes…” –Ashley Bickerton

Wrong’s What I Do Best gathers the self-searing impulses of artists and musicians playing the role of one’s self as someone else. Working against both correctness and failure, Wrong’s What I Do Best revels in repeated derailments to present the work of artists who prod the edges of our world. Some unearth scorched histories or upset “natural” order, while others fling themselves headlong into the coming apocalypse. Collectively, their low-irony tilt toward social, political, and personal fault lines might be characterized by illicit unrestraint, yet their lack of critical judgment occludes the artists’ true selves. In the torrid gap between the artist-person, and the artist-persona we are reminded that one shouldn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Matt Lipps

Matt Lipps at Jessica Silverman Gallery-- Opening: Friday, March 21!

THIS PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW IS PACKED WITH SOME BAY AREA GREATS AND I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU SEE IT!

Local Treasures: Bay Area Photography

March 15 – May 11, 2014
Artist Reception: Saturday, March 22, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Berkeley Art Center
1275 Walnut Street
Berkeley, CA, 94709
P: 510.644.6893 phone
F: 510.644.0343
info@berkeleyartcenter.org
Local Treasures is a bi-annual exhibition series that features artists who have made a significant impact on the development of artistic practice in the Bay Area. This year, the focus of Local Treasures is photography. The exhibition is curated by Anne Veh, and includes work by Linda Connor, Hiroyo Kaneko, Klea McKenna, J. John Priola, Unai San Martin and Richard Whittaker.
These artists have contributed to the strength of contemporary photography in the Bay Area by producing work that is fearless of constraints and explores image making through both traditional and non-traditional techniques.

Download Press Release

About the artists:

Linda Connor, a beloved instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute for more than forty years, is well known for her large-format images from her extensive travels to faraway places including, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Peru, Tibet, Turkey, and as well as sojourns closer to home, Hawaii and the East Coast.

With her large format camera, Connor is drawn to the austere grandeur of the mountains and alluvial plains of the Himalayas. Her photographs communicate a wisdom and force held within Nature, but it is a view of Nature that is coupled with Connor's other artistic subject.... the human cultural and spiritual response to place. Ladakh, sometimes called the Little Tibet, was remote to the outside world until the late Sixties, and fortunately unlike Tibet, its Buddhist Monasteries were not decimated by a "Cultural Revolution."

With a passion for the outdoors and the physicality of creating artwork in relationship to the natural world, Klea McKenna delights in the unexpected.  As a photographer, she prefers to work with several analog photographic mediums: gelatin silver and chromogenic photographs and photograms made outdoors in the forests at night. McKenna notes, "This experimental approach means paring down to the simplest ingredients –light and paper- and making images that refer to location only through elemental form and color. I use a variety of crude strategies; hand-made cameras, outdoor photograms, and methods of folding film and paper to create sculptural images. The flawed material sometimes becomes as visible as the image it has captured. Light, both the science and magic of it, is at the center of all this." Her recent series, Rain Studies are mesmerizing images of water dancing on paper made outdoors in the forests of Hawaii under a night sky.

Hiroyo Kaneko’s foundation for her practice is her connection to her homeland and family in Aomori Japan. She speaks of the clear light, which allows for the luminous quality in her chromogenic prints, and the presence of nature, which is beloved and honored in the countryside of her hometown. Her images speak to the intimate relationship and nourishment we gain from nature. Her recent body of work, Appearance, is inspired by her feelings of alienation and separation, as experienced after arriving in the United States eleven years ago. Keneko states, "Children have their own physicality when singing. They seem to be standing at the threshold of self-expression and self-consciousness. The act of singing is both personal and social; my role as photographer is to catch that moment when both aspects intersect."

Unai San Martin speaks with a passion and intimate understanding of the medium of photogravure. San Martin notes, "I like working with my hands. Photogravures are made by hand, from polishing the copper plate to pulling a print from the etching press. It is a time consuming and unforgiving process, but I favor a slower approach to image making. As in cooking, it is a way of putting my soul into what I do." It is a medium for the fine art photographer. Of Basque heritage, San Martin was raised in a family of craftsmen. His father, an engraver, often took his son on sojourns through the Basque countryside to visit masters of the trade. Blessed with a temperament that honors patience and process, he has spent decades nurturing a relationship with the medium and mastering the technique. The result are images of exquisite beauty; they are of real places, yet carry a sensibility of a mythic landscape. Whether cityscape, landscape, or abstraction, each work expresses an emotional truth; the presence of the artist is felt.

One experiences J. John Priola’s black and white gelatin silver prints as one would a good poem. There is an elegance to the ordering and space within each picture frame, and an invitation to read beyond the ordinary. Consistently, his work awakens all the senses to experience an inner and outer reflection. By focusing the camera on what’s not there, he allows the invisible to become visible. In his Farmhouse series, made collectively over a six-year period, Priola found himself in locations across the country where he could stay with friends. With his 4 X 5 camera, he would spend time with the land making pictures of the space left by farmhouses, defined by the remaining trees.

For more than thirty-five years, the camera has been a constant companion for Richard Whittaker on road trips to the desert and national parks. Coupled with an innate curiosity, Whittaker finds himself in strange lands where anthropomorphic rock formations invite allegorical ruminations. Through the eyes of the artist, one is transported to a land laden with stories. Using a 35 mm, a digital, and at times a point and shoot camera, he is able to dramatic compositions. Light, a quiet force in Whittaker's landscapes, has an otherworldly pull.

Wangechi Mutu This You Call Civilization

HASSAN HAJJAJat TAYMOUR GRAHNE GALLERY

Check out this great photography exhibition of work by the Moroccan-born, UK-based artist, Hassan Hajjaj at Taymour Grahne Gallery. His photography conflates a lot of different genres and cultures to create a pop-art pastiche.  Using the aesthetic of branding and fashion photography, his photos upend stereotypes of women and Arab culture.

Here is what Roberta Smith said of the exhibit in Art in Review in the New York Times, February 28, 2014:

"Hassan Hajjaj, who was born in Morocco and is based in London, is a master of several design genres, including furniture, fashion, interiors and record-album covers. Over the past decade, he has synthesized them, and more, into dazzling photo-portraits that are dynamic transcultural documents. The images depict a distinctive subculture of young Moroccan women who work as henna tattoo artists and traverse the city of Marrakesh on motorbikes. They pose against brightly colored, sometimes patterned backgrounds, straddling or lounging on their bikes with evident pride and ease, wearing veils and abayas of an unusually lively sort (that are either of the tattoo artists’ own or Mr. Hajjaj’s design).

These ensembles are insouciant mixes of old and new, East and West, global and local, foreign and familiar. They combine, say, polka dots and camouflage with slippers that use trademark Gucci fabrics or the occasional Nike swoosh. Other fabrics are printed with Arabic script, flowers or spiky leaves. They bring to mind the women in Mughal painting, but also exotic action figures.

Adding to the visual richness are frames whose small niches hold cans of tomatoes, Spam, car wax or soda, all labeled in Arabic. Items that the women might buy, these local variations on familiar commodities contribute additional colors and patterns to the proceedings. Mr. Hajjaj’s images belong to a history of studio photography that stretches from the medium’s beginnings to the present, while building on the works of sub-Saharan  photographers like Malick Sidibé, who also placed his subjects before signifying backdrops. They riff on Matisse’s odalisques, Jeff Koons’s basketball ads and fashion photography as well, all filtered through the lens of a different, indisputably contemporary culture."