ON THE ROAD WITH DEWITT CHENG:

UC BERKELEY EXTENSION - SANCHEZ ART CENTER

02.24-25.11



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UC Berkeley Extension: Amber Crabbe, Vertigo of Maintenance.

Review and images by DeWitt Cheng: Amber Crabbe shows twenty medium-format color photos depicting, among other things, the private grooming rituals (assisted by time-saving appliances) by which we prepare ourselves for public display. The artist poses and shoots herself, lending the works a possible feminist reading, but we all do maintenance and upkeep. Perhaps a wider theme might be social conformity. Surrealism, performance and conceptualism combine in these wry commentaries on the human condition, conditioning, and conditioners.

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Sanchez Art Center, Pacifica: Robert Hudson, New Work.

Review and images by DeWitt Cheng: The Sanchez Center in Pacifica has been hosting some very high-profile artists lately, its current show featuring a small but nicely curated and installed show by Funk artist Robert Hudson, a member of that amazing Bay Area generation that came of age in the 1970s (including Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, Roy DeForest, Manuel Neri and William Wiley). Hudson's welded steel assemblages derive from the abstract expressionism in which he was trained in the 1950s, but he overlays those powerful structures with odd objects and idiosyncratic humor. Kenneth Baker dubbed his work "antic assemblage," while Frank Lloyd praised its competing qualities of rusticity and eclecticism. Hudson is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco.

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