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Luggage Store Gallery: Writing Letters - Work by Joe Amhrein, Tauba Auerbach, Steve Powers (aka ESPO).

Comment: New York artist Steve Powers incorporates pop culture catchwords and images into his "modern day cave paintings," using those words and images to reflect on core human emotions and experiences like love, hate, jealousy, and trying to understand art. He's there at the opening, gas mask and all, painting away, so we can see how he does it. New York artist Joe Amhrein makes art out of words co-opted from critical art writing, and his background as a sign painter allows him to do this exceptionally well. (Myself, I'd rather abduct critical art words and rocket 'em off to planet Zork-- permanently-- except mine, of course.) Tauba Auerbach's statement is so impeccably abstruse I can't extract a shred of sense out of it. Tauba-- suggestion-- if you make a claim like "various languages we use to encode our world in order to systematize it and make it manageable, consistently take on lives of their own and we often end up at 'their' mercy," give an example of such a language, how we encode it, and how we end up at its mercy. Make it fast, keep it simple, and we all lived happily ever after.

Abstrusities aside, this is another entertainingly thought-thick show courtesy of one of my favorite San Francisco galleres, The Luggage Store. By the way, I'm not sure who made this piece, but as I get to the top of the stairs and step into the gallery, the first thing I see is a large inflated distorted limousine scrunched angular into the back end of the gallery, reminding me of how pathetically little it takes to boost the self-esteem of the overwhelming majority of the American populace.