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Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Jim Hodges
![Installation shot showing "Toward Great Becoming (blue/blue)" and "Toward Great Becoming (orange/pink)", both 2014, by Jim Hodges [photo: Keith Petersen]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhbpWo7pKu49VAeoJvWbRC0Fw47DHPKywErXeE1lOojzVWYAZSQIN2VumCyztDMgeZxGNiyxdHtgkXwjb3gtm2eH20cHpXidR41uwLMtrfzsG106vLju1cnvFJCT7yihpHHjv4r1HUlMpQHSiKnNyfmtrpHvzPC6ZflJzRPMznUldSIV9PtgguP2XTyFfdJZXUNGb8s-qQLj23rShyWEuyq58i0STkDL7IGxU3a=s0-d-e1-ft)
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Thursday, March 27, 2014
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.
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
“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.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Local Treasures: Bay Area Photography
THIS PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW IS PACKED WITH SOME BAY AREA GREATS AND I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU SEE IT!
March 15 – May 11, 2014
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.
Local Treasures: Bay Area Photography
March 15 – May 11, 2014
Artist Reception: Saturday, March 22, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Berkeley Art Center1275 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.
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.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Saturday, March 1, 2014
HASSAN HAJJAJat TAYMOUR GRAHNE GALLERY
"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."
Thursday, February 27, 2014
QUESTIONS POSTED TO THE SKOWHEGAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING AND SCULPUTRE BY DAVID SMITH (1957)
1. Do you make art first - does it occupy every moment: before sleep and the first waking vision?
2. Do all the things that you make and do amplify the process of art vision and art making?
3. Are you a balanced person with many interests and diversions?
4. Do you seek the culture of many aspects with tthe middle class aspiration of being well-rounded and informed?
5. How do you spend your time - more talking about art than making it?
6. How muchof the work day or the work week do you devote to your profession - that profession that you have chosen to occupy you and represent you for the rest of your life?
7. Will you be an amateur artist, a professional, or is it the total life?
8. Do you think that the artist has any obligation to any artist other than himself?
9. Do you think that his contemporary position is unique or traditional?
10. Do you think that art can be something that was before?
11. Have you examined the echoes of childhood and first learning which may have once given you the first solution? Are any of these expectations still operating in your choices?
12. Do you hold with these/Have you recognized them? Contradicted them? Made metaphoric transpositions?
13. Or do the useful ideas which place themselves in your working consciousness often go off unheard?
15. Do you think that you woe your teachers anything? Or Picasso? Or Matisse, Brancusi, Mondrian, Kandinski?
16. Do you think your work to be aggressive? Do you think this to be an attribute? Can it be developed?
17. Do you think that your work should hold with traditions?
17. Do you think that your own time - and the now - to be the greatest time in the history of art? Or do you excuse your own lack of holy motion with the half belief that some other time would have been better for you to make art?
19. Do yu recognize any points of attainment? Do they change? I there a final goal?
20. In the secret dreams of attainment, have you faced each dream for its value on your own basis or do you harbor inhereted aspiration fof the bourgeoisie or those of false history or those of critics?
21. Why do you hesitate when you cannot draw objects as freely as you can write their names or speak words about them?
22. What has caused this mental block? If you can name dreams, recall visions, why can't you draw them?Is the conscious art of drawing that which is acting in your unconscious?
23. In the conceptural direction are you aiming for the successful work (and to define success, I mean the culminating point of any efforts?
24. Do you aim for a style with a direct recognizable visual vocabulary?
25. Do you add ingratiating elements beynd the raw aesthetic?
26. Do you polish up the work beyond its bare aesthetic elements?
27. If you add ingratiatin elements, where is the line which keeps the work from being your own?
28. Are you afraid of rawness (for the rawness and harshness are a part of our basic nature - especially U.S. nature - and origins are both as raw and vulgar as our primal creation)?
29. Will you understand and accept yourself as the subject for creative work or will your efforts grow towards adopting your expression to verbal philosophies by "now" artists? If you could, would you throw over the present values of harmony and tradition?
30.Do you trust your first response, or do you go back and equivocate consciously? Do you believe that the freshness of the first response can be developed and sustained as a working habit?
31. Are you saddled with nature propaganda?
32. Are you afraid to exercise vigor, seek surprise?
33. When you accept the identification of artist, do you acknowledge that you are issuing a world challenge in your own time?
34. Are you afraid to work from your own experience without leaning on the crutches of subject and rationale?
35. Do you think that you are unworthy or that your life has not been dramatic enough - or your understanding not classic enough, that art comes from Mt. Parnassus, France, or an elite level beyond you?
36. Do you assert yourself or work in sizes comparable to your physical size or to your aesthetc challenge or own imagination?
2. Do all the things that you make and do amplify the process of art vision and art making?
3. Are you a balanced person with many interests and diversions?
4. Do you seek the culture of many aspects with tthe middle class aspiration of being well-rounded and informed?
5. How do you spend your time - more talking about art than making it?
6. How muchof the work day or the work week do you devote to your profession - that profession that you have chosen to occupy you and represent you for the rest of your life?
7. Will you be an amateur artist, a professional, or is it the total life?
8. Do you think that the artist has any obligation to any artist other than himself?
9. Do you think that his contemporary position is unique or traditional?
10. Do you think that art can be something that was before?
11. Have you examined the echoes of childhood and first learning which may have once given you the first solution? Are any of these expectations still operating in your choices?
12. Do you hold with these/Have you recognized them? Contradicted them? Made metaphoric transpositions?
13. Or do the useful ideas which place themselves in your working consciousness often go off unheard?
15. Do you think that you woe your teachers anything? Or Picasso? Or Matisse, Brancusi, Mondrian, Kandinski?
16. Do you think your work to be aggressive? Do you think this to be an attribute? Can it be developed?
17. Do you think that your work should hold with traditions?
17. Do you think that your own time - and the now - to be the greatest time in the history of art? Or do you excuse your own lack of holy motion with the half belief that some other time would have been better for you to make art?
19. Do yu recognize any points of attainment? Do they change? I there a final goal?
20. In the secret dreams of attainment, have you faced each dream for its value on your own basis or do you harbor inhereted aspiration fof the bourgeoisie or those of false history or those of critics?
21. Why do you hesitate when you cannot draw objects as freely as you can write their names or speak words about them?
22. What has caused this mental block? If you can name dreams, recall visions, why can't you draw them?Is the conscious art of drawing that which is acting in your unconscious?
23. In the conceptural direction are you aiming for the successful work (and to define success, I mean the culminating point of any efforts?
24. Do you aim for a style with a direct recognizable visual vocabulary?
25. Do you add ingratiating elements beynd the raw aesthetic?
26. Do you polish up the work beyond its bare aesthetic elements?
27. If you add ingratiatin elements, where is the line which keeps the work from being your own?
28. Are you afraid of rawness (for the rawness and harshness are a part of our basic nature - especially U.S. nature - and origins are both as raw and vulgar as our primal creation)?
29. Will you understand and accept yourself as the subject for creative work or will your efforts grow towards adopting your expression to verbal philosophies by "now" artists? If you could, would you throw over the present values of harmony and tradition?
30.Do you trust your first response, or do you go back and equivocate consciously? Do you believe that the freshness of the first response can be developed and sustained as a working habit?
31. Are you saddled with nature propaganda?
32. Are you afraid to exercise vigor, seek surprise?
33. When you accept the identification of artist, do you acknowledge that you are issuing a world challenge in your own time?
34. Are you afraid to work from your own experience without leaning on the crutches of subject and rationale?
35. Do you think that you are unworthy or that your life has not been dramatic enough - or your understanding not classic enough, that art comes from Mt. Parnassus, France, or an elite level beyond you?
36. Do you assert yourself or work in sizes comparable to your physical size or to your aesthetc challenge or own imagination?
PRESENTATION ASSIGNMENT
Create a presentation of visual objects, patterns, art and non-art elements, historical ephemera, etc. that you relate to. In your sketchbook, make an outline of lists of things that come to mind. Make notes on what they mean to you and why. Use your sketchbook as a receptiacle to keep a visual catalogue. Take jpegs of your findings and collection for us to see. You can also cull images from the internet or your personal history.
Please bring your images on a flash drive (do not give the presentation from the internet). The presentation should be no more than 10 minutes. Do several practice runs before you come to class so that you know you can go through your talk and images in 10 minutes!
Please bring your images on a flash drive (do not give the presentation from the internet). The presentation should be no more than 10 minutes. Do several practice runs before you come to class so that you know you can go through your talk and images in 10 minutes!
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