SAN FRANCISCO ART GALLERIES OPENINGS
FIRST THURSDAY; 05.07.09
PART III
(with assistance from Jennifer Jeffrey,
Lynnore Goldfarb, Alan Kaufman and RWM)

General comment by AB: That's right-- all good things must come to an end. So last but certainly not least, kindly allow me to introduce Part III...

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Electric Works: Enrique Chagoya - 2012, Super-Bato Saves the World.  

Review and images by Lynnore Goldfarb: Jackpot! I mean it; there are slot machines painted and reworked by the artist, so anyone can play with customized tokens and instead of "winner," the wheels have different words and images that correlate with the exhibit, covering every detail. Next to the three full-size machines are Campbell's soup cans stacked in a pyramid. I like the witty soup names on the cans, but the recipes on the back are even better, revealing how much thought the artist puts into his work.

The exhibition is an eclectic mix of of small paintings, large paintings, mixed media pieces on paper and canvas, prints, fold out books on paper, reworked iconographic art pieces like the slot machines, built conceptual pieces like the campbell soup cans, and t-shirts with the Super-Bato logo on them for sale. Each medium by the artist can have its own show, but all together I get the sense of what he experiences throughout his life. It's like Enrique Chagoya uses himself to funnel such outside forces as religion, canned soup, Warhol, gambling, Mayan icons and super heroes, and then mixes them all up and throws them out there with a little bit of himself in the art he creates. With this show we are all winners or should I say, Super-Bato Saves the World!

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SomArts Gallery in conjunction with the 12th Annual United States of Asian America Festival: Just Chinese Enough & EPIC - Visualizing Heroes Within.

Artists: Lenore Chinn, Bob Hsiang, Freddie Niem, dannydan, Grace Duenas, Wei Wei Lo, Alberto Vajrabukka, Jonathon Yap, Phillip Hua, Kek Tee Lim, David Yun, Rico Reyes.  

Review and images by Lynnore Goldfarb: "Just Chinese Enough" features the work of Lenore Chinn & Bob Hsiang. As far as I am concerned, you cannot go wrong if your name is Lenore, and I don't care how you spell it. The beautifully hung and well thought out show, curated by Nancy Hom, is in the gallery area to the right of the back entrance at SOMArts. The exhibition is a study of growing up in America, being of Chinese descent, via large colorful paintings and photographs of people and scenes. Bob Hsiang's photographs complement Lenore Chinn's pieces with captured moments at actual events spanning decades. Lenore's painting style is realistic with saturated color, which works in making the subjects seem familiar and approachable. Her photographs are in sets telling stories. Through this exhibit toward the fire exit on the other side of the far wall is a Temple for everyone to enter.

"Visualizing Heroes Within" is a group show comprised of paintings, sculpture, photographs, and a video installation, located in the front gallery of the SomArts building.

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Arterra: Georgianne Fastaia - The Floating City Of New Orleans.

Review and images by Lynnore Goldfarb: I am buzzed in by the door man of "San Francisco's first LEED-certified green high rise community," Arterra, to attend the art opening. I am delighted to find out that this high-rise community (their words) uses one of the hallways as an art gallery. As I walk through the ultra-stylized lobby, perfectly laid out with recycled plastic carpet and reclaimed wood, past the mailbox area with polished wood slab benches (to die for) up the elevator and through the hallway lined with Georgianne Fastaia's haunting, dreamlike paintings, I want to contact HGTV immediately with an idea I have for a new TV show. Arterra is a well designed building and Georgianne Fastaia's paintings compliment the decor, not by blending in, but looking like they belong there. The paintings' blurred lines and emotional evocation warm up the streamline modern design of the new building, turning the high-rise community into a home.

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California College of the Arts: MFA Exhibition . 

Artists: Anna Adair, Zina Al-Shukri, Elisheva Biernoff, Ellen Black, James Bradley, Sung Hee Chang, Crow Cianciola, Pablo Cristi, Torreya Cummings, Kamil Dawson, Jennifer Di Marco, Alicia Escott, Joshua Ferris, Patrick Gillespie, Julia Goodman, Matthew Gordon, Katie Gray, Jason Hanasik, Queena Hernandez, Patrick Hillman, Justin Hurty, Amy Keefer, Dustin Kelly, Cameron Kelly, Christine Kesler, Ace Lehner, Forrest Lewinger, Liesa Lietzke, Elyse Mallouk, Anthony Marcellini, Joshua Martinez, Rebekah May, Klea McKenna, Annie McKnight, Moses Nornberg, Raphael Noz, Brandon Olsen, Piero Passacantando, Hilary Pecis, Matthew Rana, Conrad Ruiz, Maja Ruznic, Laura Sackett, Anna Simson, Patricia Soriano, Brindalyn Webster, Imin Yeh.

Review and images by Lynnore Goldfarb: I am instantly overwhelmed by the thought of having to navigate through hundreds of people to look at a staggering amount of art by many many artists, but my angst instantly dissipates when I look at the first piece. I don't get the name of it or the artist, but it is a conceptual installation which includes a confederate flag and the word America in the center of it. Imin Yeh's exhibit "Power Animals" is a type of Chinese calendar (I think she created) with a legend, intended to look like a placemat from a Chinese restaurant, that connects a birth year to a power animal. Each animal is depicted in an original print hung on the walls. I am an Urban Street Pigeon...NO COMMENT.

Note: Imin Yeh has an installation in a window in Chinatown at 710 Kearny Street, presently.

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Fifty24SF Gallery: Shinganist - Book Release and Group Show.

Artists: Usugrow, Mozyskey, Toshikazu Nozaka, Bene, Jun Kaneko. Curated by Usugrow.

Comment by AB: Five artists born and raised in Japan make art that's heavily influenced by aspects of European and American urban lifestyle including punk rock, hip-hop, club music, skateboard, graffiti and tattoo, yet is firmly rooted in Japanese culture. Their East-meets-West perspectives on life are readily apparent, entirely gratifying, and superbly rendered. Good art. Worth a visit.

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Oxenrose Salon: Tahiti Pehrson - Scala Naturae. Curated by Nico Lopez.

Comment by AB: Tahiti Pehrson's impressively intricate cut paper dioramas range from patterns to portraits to figural works. Plain white paper has never looked better. In related news, Pehrson has also created album art for Devendra Banhart (covers of White Reggae Troll and Lover), several t-shirts for friend Joanna Newsom, portraits for XL recording artists (M.I.A., Peaches, and Dizzee Rascal, among others), and designed for a variety of skateboarding companies including Toy Machine, Blood Wizard and Familia. Great stuff; have a gander.

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Cafe Royale: D Young V (David Young V) - Neighborhood Watch.

Review by Alan Kaufman: D Young V's one man show, 'Neighborhood Watch', now up at the Cafe Royale, heralds the emergence of a new school of San Francisco visual artists which I call the Downtown School. D Young V is one of a number of visual artists who know each other, sometimes collaborate or exhibit together and who inhabit an area bounded in the South by Eddy Street, in the North by Pine Street, and that runs roughly from Polk Street to Taylor Street-- what D Young V once described to me as D-Town or Downtown.

It's not exactly the Tenderloin or Polk Gulch or the Theater/Gallery District but a raw art turf of gloomy buildings and tired-looking cafes and bars frequented by advanced visual artists like D Young V as well as by art students from the various nearby schools and academies. Among the group that I've cached as Downtown artists are the likes of Christopher Burch, C3, David Ball who curated Young's show, and the brilliant photographer and filmmaker, Shaun Roberts, who has documented many of these artists. At the hub lies Cafe Royale, a smokey-flavored bar with shoulder to shoulder art crowds that remind of New York's famed Cedar Tavern, birthplace of the New York School. Royale plays host to a series of one-person art shows curated by painter David Ball, a close colleague and collaborator of D Young V's.

Some of the downtown artists have been associated with The Shooting Gallery, Hang Gallery, Space Gallery or Upper Playground. Many met through the by-now legendary bookstore Babylon Falling, which is about to close its doors and where some of these aritsts hung in one man shows. Under the brilliant stewardship of Sean Stewart, Babylon Falling injected Downtown with a level of intellectual and esthetic descernment quite rare for San Francisco. It's no exaggeration to say that Stewart's ultra-urbane and finely-honed political and esthetic sensibility helped to transform D-town into an area ripe for a cultural moment-- the birth of the Downtown School.

D Young V's works are hand-drawn on large sheets of archival paper, massive ink-black renderings of military vehicles and armed vigilante troopers summoned from a futuristic dystopia. At first glance, they may remind one of Emory Douglas's propaganda visuals for the Black Panther Party newspaper (Douglas has shown his work at Babylon Falling and will hang with D Young V in a retrospective group show to mark the closing of the bookstore's doors). There, though, all resemblance to Douglas ends. D Young V's crisp black stencil-like panels serve as chilling semaphores of a futuristic narrative that he outlines in a large hand-drawn Star War's-style introduction to the show: "In the last years of the United States, San Francisco is under martial law...faced with mounting chaos fueled by gang warfare and ...splinters into fortified camps of independent neighborhoods linked by uneasy truces."

In the best guerilla style, D Young V has absconded from sci-fi media with an iconic handful of tread-clanking tank-like land vehicles and parking patrol scooters armour-plated like armadilloes. These visual futurepunk flash fictions of apocalyptic strife, a cross between Homer and Mad Max, seem strangely afloat despite that they portray massive killing machines, and here is where D Young V visits the realms of Pop and neo-Pop, Roy Lichtenstein and Keith Haring, though without staying there. Like them, D Young V combines tongue-in-cheek gravity-defying play and harsh dystopic agitprop that both warn and wink, grave apocolyptic forecast as comic book-style martial law decor.

But though film is his prime reference source, his floating stencilography subverts the genre it evokes, for there are no jump cuts, or special effects, no hyper-sensual sensurround explosions, or that awful soul-curdling stench of rancid popcorn butter that permeates the Cineplex. There is only stillness and waiting. Like Matisse in his Fauve period, Helen Frankenthaler's late works in color field, or even Barnett Newman's Zip anticipations of minimalism, Young detaches the object from the ground, makes them equal and in so doing brings the entire electronic visual culture to a crashing halt at his sneakered feet.

His austere war machines, stenciled as reductive essence, are cybernetic cave paintings, a street Morse code imaging of coming cataclysm drawn with urbanity and wit. But no less important is the plain construction paper-colored ground in which they float-- a terrifying, maw-like, premonitory of a future that no one can ever really see into until it's too late. D Young V is, of course, a dark artist, as so many of the Downtown School are-- unafraid to embody contradictions as he pursues his risky themes, and most of all, unwilling to compromise his hard-won integrity. As such, D Young V is a quintessential downtown artist and harbinger of a new development in the emerging 21st Century Downtown art scene.

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111 Minna Gallery: Berliner Unkraut.

Artists: Mateo, Johan Potma, Evol, Pisa 73 and Tina Zellmer.

Comment by AB: Five of Germany's top lowbrow/pop-surrealism/urban/street artists strut their stuff. And it's good stuff too.

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The Vortex Room: Mr. Lucky (aka Pierre Merkl III).

Comment by AB: What better place to close out the First Thursday experience than at the hipper-than-hip cooler-than-cool Vortex Room, tonight surveying the life and work of that renowned multi-talent, Mr. Lucky. A living breathing anachronism, straight out of the hard-boiled 1940's, Mr. Lucky is a one-man entertainment machine-- acting, singing, and painting-- all of which are right here, right now for our visual and auditory enjoyment. Excellent. Shall we?

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Yoo Hoo!

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First Thursday - April 2, 2009

First Thursday - March 5, 2009

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