Posts archive: May 2005

Kick off your Memorial Day weekend in style by honoring noted Bay Area collector Rene di Rosa this Friday, May 27 at the ArtSFest 2005 Arts Expo Gala at the San Francisco Design Center. di Rosa, who has a wonderful habit of frequenting non-profit spaces and collecting emerging artists for his fantastic and fantastical preserve, will receive a lifetime achievement award. Aiming to bring together the Bay Area’s emerging visual and performing artists, ArtSFest will also present emerging arts awards to one Bay Area musician, performer, visual artist, filmmaker and an arts organization tonight in an event featuring over 40 visual artists and performances and an arts resource expo.

Now in its second year, ArtSFest showcases arts opportunities across the board, and across the Bay. http://www.artsfestsf.org">ArtSFest 2005 runs May 5 - 30.

- amy berk [Friday, May 27th, 2005]

An investigation by KGO channel 7 found that the plastinate bodies are leaking! Further troubling are unanswered questions about the origins of the bodies in the exhibit. San Francisco city officials are threatening to shut the show down if they don’t get answers from the show promoters by tomorrow.

- David Lawrence [Friday, May 27th, 2005]

mostly within sipping distance of cultural hub Mama Buzz Cafe, scene of last night’s planning meeting for upcoming Bayennale. Even while Darren Jenkins & Sarah Lockhart are still hard at work renovating their new 21 Grand space at 416-25th Street near Broadway, they are keeping up their usual crazy pace of event presenting. They just deinstalled Absencescape, a nice show of sweet & dark, young & mature paintings by Kelly Correll, Manuel Angeja & Elizabeth Malaska. A couple blocks away, Rock, Paper, Scissors collective opened their corner storefront space at 2778 with a fun show & sale. They feature an art/commerce mix of zines, fine art, comix, clothes, etc. And 33 Grand [actually at 33 Grand] offers paintings by Dave Urban & Marc Apablaza, through June 26th. Apablaza’s meat/organ/engine paintings are disconcerting in a good way, but their heavy copper frames overwhelm & distract.

- [Thursday, May 26th, 2005]

whose Board suddenly voted last week to radically revamp the organization’s management structure, replacing the Executive Director position with three Co-Director positions that I’m told will initially be filled by former Board Secretary Alex Burke, intern Sherrie Koyama and current Associate Director Kristen Chappa. Former Executive Director Elisabeth Beaird, who was vacationing on the East Coast when the Board met and voted to dissolve her position, is now the Director of the upcoming Bay Area international arts festival, BAYENNALE, which is slated to run July 22 to Aug 7, 2005.

- [Wednesday, May 25th, 2005]

is the best one we have seen in years. The level of energy is up along with the quality of work in general. At the opening reception with only enough time to see the downstairs work, standouts there include Elizabeth Cook, Scott Oliver, Shawn Smith, and Charles Beronio. Looking forward to the upstairs work too—the exhibit is viewable only through May 21.
http://www.cca.edu/about/press/view/2005/gradexhibition.php

- Cheryl Meeker [Thursday, May 19th, 2005]

Gregory Crewdson is showing new work simultaneously at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York, White Cube in London, and Gagosian in L.A. This international “blockbuster” release is perfect for Crewdson’s new work as its vapidity mirrors the bulk of mainstream films. As his production values have gotten more complicated, his work has become melodramatic and boring. Crewdson’s early suburban pictures used the conventions of cinema to signify narrative, while harnessing the ambiguity of the single frame. Although they were sometimes overwrought, there was subtlety to the storylines. In nearly all of the new work his characters have a blank look on their face that seems to signify “I am having a profound and tortured moment.” It is utterly unconvincing. There were murmurs for a long time that Crewdson was going to go the whole nine yards and make a film. At this point it seems cowardly not to, as his photography has become a pale imitation of cinema. He seems afraid to take the leap and make these pictures into a real narrative, because it will become clear he has nothing to say.

- Asha Schechter [Tuesday, May 17th, 2005]

Deep inside the Lagan Weir, the massive structure that regulates the tides along Belfast’s Lagan River, six video works make up an exhibition entitled “Flow” which take advantage of the cavernous concrete spaces found within it. Fiona Larkin’s “Everybody is out of Step” shows two pairs of nervously tap dancing feet that are resonated to cacophonous proportions, Kerry Plummer’s “Impending” conjures up an occasionally-passing train that seems to materialize out of nowhere to produce a brief vertigo, and Sihobhan Mullen’s “Singing Kettle” features an evocative gathering of starlings underneath one of the Lagan bridges accompanied by an occasionally sounding tea kettle.

A few blocks away and safely above the waterline at Catalyst Arts, Cahal McGlaughlin’s “Inside Stories” provides three different perspectives on Long Kesh Prison (commonly known as the Maze), the place held many of the prisoners on both sides of the Troubles. In physically separated video sequences, McLaughlin goes through the Maze accompanied by a loyalist, a republican, and a prison guard, each of whom had spent extended periods there. As the stories unfold, their matter-of-fact narratives illuminate the space of the prison, drawing out conditions of daily life there that are shaped as much by the outside political situation as much as they are by the architecture.

- Ed Osborn [Tuesday, May 10th, 2005]

San Francisco painter Tom Fowler passed away Saturday morning from a sudden and unexpected illness. Fowler’s recent work, a series of colorful, abstract landscapes drawn from memories of long drives between SF and LA, capture in his words: “blurry plays of light and shadow, a peripheral vision of land and sky through the mind’s eye, car lights and fading sunlight merging together…” A memorial service is being held at The Melting Point Gallery, 1340 Bryant Street, SF, Sunday, May 15, at 2:00PM.

- David Lawrence [Monday, May 9th, 2005]

From the editors