LAB - MINA DRESDEN - PKIRKEBY - LOWER HAIGHT ART WALK

D-STRUCTURE - SKULLZ PRESS - 683

TWEEKIN RECORDS - LOWER HATERS - TRUNK

MICHELLE O'CONNOR - RARE DEVICE - OCTAVIA'S HAZE

Plus a Special Report from Berkeley...

ALPHONSE BERBER & LESLIE CERAMICS

(with assistance from Sandra Silvoy and DeWitt Cheng)

12.04.09

The LAB: Postcard 13.

Comment by AB: Postcard sized art that anyone can afford and all for a great cause-- The LAB. Your annual opportunity to bulk your collection for pennies on the dollar with all manner of creative curiosities and contrivances. Fun stuff; good artists; $1 - $50. And always a crowd favorite.

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Mina Dresden Gallery: Green Sight & Sound.

Artists: Amy Franceschini, Andrea Polli, Fritz Haeg, Stephen Kaltenbach, Kim Abeles, Samantha Fields, Lisa Adams, Kim Stringfellow, Ned Kahn, Nils-Udo, Roy Staab, Christopher Kennedy, Mark Andrew Gravel, Gary Brewer, Judith Selby-Lang, Vaughn Bell, Basia Irland, Besty Damon, Lea Redmond, Abigail Doan, Beverly Nadius, Shai Zakai, Lillian Ball, Robin Lasser and Adrienne Pao, Mark Brest van Kempen, John Roloff, Ed Morris and Susannah Sayler, Linda McDonald, Christy Rupp, Karen Reitzel, Philip Krohn, Jorge Bachmann, Kim Anno, Sarah Pedlow, Kathryn Miller, Aviva Rahmani, Ann Rosenthal, Therese Lahaie, Ruri.

Comment by AB: Art exhibition and silent auction of small works by over 40 environmental artists to benefit ecoartspace and Me-di-ate's 2010 Soundwave Festival, Green Sound.

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Pkirkeby Gallery: Loose Connections 2.

Artists: Rob Brodman, Scott Eggers, Paul Ferraris, Art Gimbel, Mark Gordon, Dickson A. Keyser, Jake Johnson, Matt Proehl, Adam Warmington, Sachi Cunningham, Elizabeth Pepin.

Comment by AB: "A special exhibition featuring the work of eleven photographers united by their art, their friends, and the ocean." Presented by Aqua Surf Shop. Plus extra added attraction-- burrito truck.

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Lower Haight Art Walk: Various Locations.

Review and images by Sandra Silvoy: The art walk comprises a good four blocks of auditory and visual stimulation. Women harmonize Silent Night while I bob in and out of various participating hair salons, sushi restaurants, and galleries. I also pass by Ronnie, who is repainting a mural he did ten years ago on Haight and Fillmore (not technically part of the art walk but fun to watch all the same). Some businesses could have made it a bit more obvious that they were participating in the art walk. One place has the map in the window and offers cookies but lacks the one essential component, ahem, the art.

D-Structure features "Forgotten Yet Adored" by Matt Tuteur. Interiors of abandoned and dilapidated buildings of Chicago take on an elegant yet haunting quality in Tuteur's photography. A majority of the sites Tuteur has documented in the past five years have since been demolished. A brief history lesson accompanies selected photos in the exhibit, so go get a brain full of old Chicago's furniture stores, asylums for the incurably insane, hospitals, and the like.

At Skullz Press, showing Mike Kershnar and Mike Giant, fans are tightly packed to view this fine collabo. Kershnar takes inspiration for his animalia concentrated, geometrically segmented works from Northwest Coast Native American art.

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Alphonse Berber Gallery: New Images of Man and Woman.

Review and images by DeWitt Cheng: In 1959, the art historian and curator Peter Selz (who would later found the Berkeley Art Museum) curated a show at the Museum of Modern Art featuring an all-star roster of artists dealing with the human condition in the age of American consumerism, godless commies, the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Says Selz, "This show and its catalogue have become iconic for their recognition that even in an age in which abstraction was the dominant style, the human image continued to be of great concern to artists who reaffirmed its persistent presence even after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In addition to presenting the work of leading figurative artists: Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon and painters Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, who turned to figuration at the time, I was able to introduce Europeans including Karl Appel, Cesar, Germaine Richier and Eduardo Paolozzi to the American public as well as Americans, little known in New York at that time, such as Leon Golub, H. C. Westermann, Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira. Now, fifty years later, after Pop Art and Op Art, Conceptual Art, Video, Happenings and Performance Art, Earth Art and Land Art made their mark, painters and sculptors continue to create images of human beings, because, as Leonard Baskin affirmed fifty years ago, 'Our human frame, our gutted mansion, our enveloping sack of beef and ash is yet a glory. Glorious in defining sodality and glorious in defining utter uniqueness.'"

Curated by Selz and Alphonse Berber Gallery's Cameron Jackson, this exhibit features the recent work of three renowned Bay Area figurative artists Theophilus Brown, Stephen DeStaebler and Nathan Oliveira, along with work by five younger artists-- Matianne Kolb, Frances Lerner, Michel Ryan Noble, Ursula O'Farrell, and Ryoko Tajiri-- who are exploring the uncertain human condition in our brave new world of economic meltdown, fanatical imams, the War on Terror, and the threat of nuclear-biochemical attack (it's always something, as Gilda Radner said). A catalogue with essays by Selz, Jackson, John Handley, Jeremy Graves, Jessica Cox, Anthony Torres, Brenda Hilman, Steven Lance, and Paul J, Karlstrom is available at the gallery.

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Leslie Ceramic Supply: Ceramic Arts of Berkeley.

Review and images by DeWitt Cheng: Over fifty mudpersons (we are unfailingly PC on this website), from Robert Abrams to ShuHui Yang, show their wares at Leslie Ceramics' large warehouse, which is heated by propane and decorated with balloons for the evening. Fun scene, but I can't stay long because the whiff is getting to me. First-rate name labels, CAB!

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Addendum:

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