Artweek

JULY / AUGUST 2008

Each month, Artweek Previews Editor Debra Koppman highlights selected exhibitions from venues listed in the Artweek Exhibition Calendar.

Jack Zajac

The Museum of Art & History @ the McPherson Center will be featuring the work of Santa Cruz artist Jack Zajac. Both large-scale bronze sculptures as well as drawings and small oil paintings created over a long period of time will be on view at the museum’s Solari Gallery. Born in Ohio, the artist has been living and working in Santa Cruz for more than fifty years.

Zajac’s work has been most intensely influenced by his many visits to Italy, where he was first inspired to make sculpture. He arrived in Rome in 1954 thanks to his being awarded with the prestigious Rome Prize. On his second trip there, Zajac was drawn to the bound and slaughtered animals displayed at the numerous vendor booths at a Greek Easter festival. These sacrificed animals sparked the idea for Zajac’s first bronze sculptures, Sacrificial Goats.

Zajac gained international recognition during the 1960s with his ongoing Bound Goat series. These works each feature one single contorted goat or simply goat fragments, which went beyond the particularity of a specific animal to allude to sacrifice, suffering and death. Torment is suggested through the rough and pitted surfaces of the pieces, while connection to human suffering is implied in the articulations of limbs, muscles and bones.

Developed later in the 1960s, the series Falling Water provided respite and a contrasting way to explore themes of life and death. Smooth, columnar bronzes evoking the flow and movement of cascading water also connect to human form and to the experience of the fluidity, vitality and cycling of energy.

Jack Zajac will be on view September 20 through November 16 at The Museum of Art & History @ the McPherson Center, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz.

‘Apropos Appropriation’

Apropos Appropriation will be a group installation created by photographer Marion Bronson in collaboration with painters David Sutherland, Richard Whitehead, Elizabeth Kuiper and Darice McGuire. The artists came together to work collaboratively in an organic way that reflects the fluid nature of creativity. Although the project was initiated by Bronson, her original and conceptually simple idea has morphed into a fruitful exchange of artistic exploration.

Bronson, who has extensively photographed close-up images of graffiti, dilapidated buildings and decaying signs, wanted to somehow turn her photographs into abstract paintings. In her search for artists who would be willing to translate her photographs into paint, she instead found collaborators with whom she created and re-created images based on each other’s ongoing work.

Bronson became interested in photographing the other artists’ paintings, turning them into abstracted photographs, which in turn became the inspiration for additional paintings. The participating artists have coined a name for themselves, appropriationists, and for their process, which they call appropriationism. They have developed a set of very open and flexible rules for acknowledging each other’s work, with the sole intention of enjoying the experience of collaboration and free exchange of ideas.

The exhibition here will include originals and adaptations, with the intention of showing the group’s artistic process, and allowing viewers to experience something of the play between artists. Much of the work has been recycled multiple times, as for example, Whitehead paints new paintings based in photographs of his paintings made by Bronson, McGuire has painted a triptych inspired by Bronson’s close-up photographs of an urban mural, and Sutherland uses Photoshop to alter Bronson’s photographs.

The exhibition is also intended to advance the notion of artistic collaboration as a kind of antidote to competition and commercialism. The creation of a supportive and mutually beneficial space where group members operate freely provides a major part of the content of the work produced. While participating within the group, artists have no fear of the blank canvas. With a constant flow of images and ideas available to all members, each artist brings new ideas to fruition inspired by the energy and imagery of the collective.

Apropos Appropriation will be on view September 4 through October 9 at the Humanities Center Gallery, Trinity Hall 100, California State University, Chico.

John Bonick

John Bonick describes the ubiquitous, loopy lines that fill his new paintings as his “basic unit of visual vocabulary.” Referred to as “channels,” Bonick sees them as being “embodiment[s] of energy flow and exchange.” The lines can be connected to myriad other contexts, functioning visually much as fibers, arteries, vines, nerves, branches, trails and crevasses do in the natural world.

Sometimes Bonick’s lines resemble nerve bundles, layers of sediment, markings on tree trunks. The lines generally extend beyond the picture planes, giving the sense of only partially telling their stories. Bonick’s lines often bend and flow, wrapped closely next to each other like the rings around a running track or the whorls of a fingerprint. At other times his lines are stacked one on top of each other, like fine horizon lines searching for air. At other times, the lines crisscross the picture plane in layers, moving in apparently random and diverging directions.

A crucial theme of this work is connection, which does not rely on specific meanings or associations. Viewers will develop their own readings of the images, seeing in them connections to pathways, maps, organic and not-organic structures, even Aboriginal paintings. Bonick is in turn interested in exploring both the possibility of meaning, as well as the potential difficulties it can create. If connection is the point, at what point does connection become bound up and lost through direct interpretation?

For Bonick, “The channels are metaphoric of a kind of connectivity and connectedness … they pulse with the continuous flow, a flow that binds and connects all things spiritual, informational, and biological.”

John Bonick, New Paintings will be on view July 30 through August 29 at Andrea Schwartz Gallery, 525 2nd St., San Francisco.

Richard Morhous

Seattle artist Richard Morhous’s latest body of work is the New York Paintings, in which he focuses his unique color, energy and compositional style on the city landmarks and neighborhood establishments of various places in the Big Apple. The city’s diversity, vibrancy and kinetic pulse comes across through Morhous’s use of intense, saturated colors and structured, simplified forms.

In Spring, Central Park’s trees and walkways are articulated in saturated reds, greens, oranges and blues, that form an undulating, moving landscape beneath a clear blue sky. Morhous’s black outlines and the bright, flat colors connect the work both to the fauves and Matisse and also to the work of contemporary silkscreen artists. His graphic sensibility also adds to the clarity of the paintings, functioning in combination with intense, clear colors almost like stained glass. The black lines also work to keep the pieces lighthearted, giving them an implied sense of immediacy connected loosely with cartooning.

Halo is another view of Central Park in which Morhous has successfully captured the feeling of place rather than the details of landscape. The image is not at all photographic, and yet one senses the particularity of its locale surrounded simultaneously by trees, water, and looming skyscrapers.

Morhous has a unique working method through which he carefully deconstructs the elements of an scene, then creates a black and white drawing which helps him to reduce forms. Once simplified to their most essential aspects, he is free to recombine select pieces of various images, and apply color in a completely non-intellectual way. According to Morhous, “color is what enables the viewer to connect with the artist.”

Richard Morhous, New York Paintings will be on view August 7-30 at Lisa Harris Gallery, 1922 Pike Place, Seattle.

Richard Diebenkorn

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University will be presenting two connected exhibitions of the work of Richard Diebenkorn, who studied at Stanford in the 1940s, returned to Stanford as an artist-in-residence in 1963-64, and who, along with his family, donated many of his paintings, drawings and prints to the university.

Richard Diebenkorn, Artist, and Carey Stanton, Collector: Their Stanford Connection presents nearly fifty pieces that belonged to Carey Stanton, friend and fellow Stanford alumnus. The small paintings, watercolors, prints and drawings that make up this exhibition are “presented as a tribute to a deep friendship of almost half a century.” Stanton and his interest in collecting Diebenkorn’s work was most specifically related to Santa Cruz Island, the biggest private island off the continental United States, once largely owned by the Stanton family. The exhibit provides a glimpse into their time spent together on this island, and also includes Diebenkorn’s designs for the Santa Cruz Island flag, personal correspondence between the Diebenkorns and Stanton, and various bits of memorabilia in the form of historical photographs of the island and the Stanton family’s ranch.

A second exhibition, Abstractions on Paper, presents a selection of about a dozen works culled from the Cantor Art Center’s collection and several private collections that chronicle Diebenkorn’s exploration of abstraction during the 1970s and 1980s. Several large gouaches from the Ocean Park series will be on view, revealing the light and delicacy of his color and wash techniques. Also included are a sampling of prints, including monotypes and intaglios made at Crown Point Press in San Francisco, and lithographs made at Gemini in Los Angeles.

Richard Diebenkorn, Artist, and Carey Stanton, Collector: Their Stanford Connection and Richard Diebenkorn: Abstractions on Paper will be on view July 23 through November 9 at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Lomita Drive at Museum Way, Palo Alto.

‘973 Possibilities and How to Make Sense of It?’

The Institute for Social Research (ISR), a group of international artists emerging from the California College of the Arts in the Bay Area and Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, Germany, will present their collaborative art and living experiments in 973 Possibilities and How to Make Sense of It? at the Richmond Art Center. The Institute for Social Research grew out of a collaborative pedagogical experiment between artist-teachers Brian Conley and Christian Jankowski, in which the two contemporary conceptual artists sought an adventurous, art-centered life created with a group of artists living together. The name of the group evolved from a German phrase which literally translates into the “Institute of Living Art,” and became the container for a shared identity.

The group of then-art students committed to living and working together in a communal house on Ocean Beach from August to December 2007. During that time many artworks emerged: Films, songs, drawings, altars and performances. Other unconventional art projects were also created, including rules, meals, truth-tellings, adventures, parties and even a sofa-Jacuzzi. A raw group drawing, with tentative lines, appears to be some kind of a ship, a metaphor perhaps for this specific learning experience or of life in general. Words, functioning as a title, or maybe just as a reflection, run along the bottom: “To fix all together can be stressful sometimes.”

973 Possibilities and How to Make Sense of It? is curated by Erin Elder and presents documentation and artwork created by the ISR in an exhibition format that was designed in collaboration with the artists. The installation showcases the experiential narrative of the ISR while addressing related conceptual questions about the value of institution initiated self-organization and how the practices of art-making and living together might mutually inform one another. The German artists will return to the Bay Area for a reunion of the ISR and to co-create an environment within the exhibition space at the Richmond Art Center. The ISR will mount a second exhibition at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart that opens in August 2008.

The Institute for Social Research artists include Michelle Blade, Luke Butler, Donna Chung, Dina Danish, Christina Empedocles, Martina Geiger-Gerlach, Patrick W. Gillespie, Kamil Goerlich, Robert Goerlich, Tanor Hudson, Jana Jacob, Anita Kapraljevic, Byung Chul Kim, Florian Klette, Paul Kramer, Travis Joseph Meinolf, Nicholas Meyer, Helena Rempel, Rosa Rücker, Marco Schmitt, Ines Lilith Schreiner, Gareth Spor, Kestutis Svirnelis, Sara Thacher, Christoph Trendel and Pablo Wendel.

973 Possibilities and How to Make Sense of It? will be on view through July 26 at the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Bartlett Ave, Richmond.

‘Ground Us’

Curator Darlene DeAngelo has invited three California artists to create large-scale, site-specific installations at the Huntington Beach Art Center. Concerned with the phenomenon of ever-expanding urban sprawl and the concomitant spread of concrete over natural environs, Kiel Johnson of Los Angeles, Lucrecia Troncoso of Berkeley and P. Williams of Seal Beach will descend upon the art center with everyday materials including paper, wood, cardboard and sponges to imagine and construct new and improved environments.

Combining humor and fantasy along with easily accessible, otherwise throwaway items, the invited artists will engage viewers in the reevaluation and reinvention of space and home. Johnson’s previous installations made of paper and cardboard appear as elaborate, whimsical, fantasy worlds which use play to challenge viewers to see their surroundings anew. He also works with multiple machines, appliances and gadgets that use electricity and therefore must be “grounded.” Taking the title of the exhibition, Ground Us, in a somewhat literal way, Johnson will connect whimsy and utility, tool-making, and the idea of being grounded as a precursor to the proper functioning—of gadgets and humans alike—in the world.

Troncoso works primarily with sponges and other unlikely materials to create smaller wall works. The sponge itself as material and content appeals particularly to curator DeAngelo, as “Los Angeles and its environs really do absorb things like a sponge.” For Ground Us, Troncoso will conjure a hanging garden made entirely out of multicolored kitchen sponges. Bright green, colorful pink, orange and yellow sponges will be carefully crafted into elaborate plant forms both real and imaginary, intertwining together in wild abandon. Troncoso asks, “How distanced, in the comfort of our homes, are we from the natural world?” Her intention, through this piece, is to bring viewers a little closer together and make them a little more grounded.

Williams’s use of vinyl, cardboard and secret narratives of fantasy adventures have been carried out over the past eight years in a variety of installations that combine murals, billboards, cutouts and sculptures. Here, he will be creating a multimedia piece that explores “the relationship between humans and a seemingly spiteful nature.” The work will mingle tragedy and comedy, and attempt to point to the emergence of disasters as a flip side result of that which has been ignored by humans. Ground Us will be built from the ground up and promises many surprises for the open viewer.

Ground Us will be on view through August 31 at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St., Huntington Beach.

Bruce Beasley

The Peninsula Museum of Art will be helping Bay Area sculptor Bruce Beasley document and celebrate two major international commissions in Monterrey, Mexico, and in Beijing, China. Bruce Beasley: Monumental will be somewhat of a departure for the museum as it is comprised of preparatory drawings, models and maquettes for the two monumental sculptures, rather than the finished work itself. The exhibition will reveal both the artist’s creative process, and his evolution into the international arena.

Destiny, a seventy-three-foot tall, red steel, open structure made of odd-sized, varying geometric shapes stacked into an arch-like form, has been recently installed in the city of Monterrey, Mexico. Gathering of the Moons stands sixteen feet tall and sixteen feet across, and consists of simple, interlocking, rounded stainless steel forms. One of only twenty artists to be commissioned by the China Sculpture Institute to create monumental sculptures for the August 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Beasley’s piece will be permanently installed in the Beijing Olympics Sculpture Park. His first solo exhibition in China also recently opened at the Shanghai Sculpture Space. Preparatory drawings, maquettes, and photographs of both pieces will be on view.

Beasley, based in Oakland for many years, is known for developing innovative technology for casting large transparent acrylic forms, specifically at the Oakland Museum, and in front of the Capitol in Sacramento. Later he adapted aeronautical engineering computer software in order to design and create intricate geometric patterns for his cast bronze and stainless steel works.

Bruce Beasley: Monumental will be on view through August 30 at the Peninsula Museum of Art, 1219 Ralston Ave, Belmont.

‘Thinking Green’

Members of the Association of Clay and Glass Artists of California will be exhibiting work under the broad theme, Thinking Green. Juried by Bill Albright, a teacher for twenty-two years, and the chairman of Fine and Visual Arts at the College of Marin, the theme—deliberately allows for such varied interpretations as green money, green environment, green ecology, green fuels for firing clay and glass, green as a symbol for greed, and simply green.

Kathy Pallie’s Corporate Greed is a clear reference to the “green money leads to greed” interpretation. Her ten-inch tall, small-scale clay piece features two very white hands that have been dismembered. Cut off, they reach out desperately, barely able to maintain their clutch of hundred dollar bills. The hands are handcuffed, and sitting on top of what looks to be a binder of 401K pension plans. CORPORTATE GREED is stenciled in large capital letters on the hand not holding money.

Molly Schardt’s Mourning Gaia is a little bit less literal and connects to the green ecology theme. Also fairly small, and made of clay, a woman, represented by her head only, is in mourning but looks almost dead herself. Her eyes are either closed or rolled up into their sockets, her expression and posture deeply sad. The piece might have a slightly green cast, but we understand that the figure grieves the earth itself.

Kim Webster’s Just Like Peas in a Pod is literally green. In this glass and steel piece, two upright pea pods made from looping spirals, stand next to each other. The very elegant green peas are made of glass in graduated sizes. One of the pods is much taller than the other, creating the effect, along with the playful title, that we are looking at the mama pod with her baby pod. The anthropomorphizing of plant forms in this whimsical way suggests the green of new beginnings, of life, rebirth and resurrection. Everyone seems to be thinking green right now.

Other participating artists include Mimi Abers, Robin Begbie, Adi Braeman, Michele Collier, Beverly Crist, George Jercich, Nina Koepcke, Antonia (Tuppy) Lawson, Gary Marsh, Carolyn Means, Lee Middleman, Judy Bolef Miller, Natalie-Ann Morris, Alexis Moyer, Charlene Doiron Reinhart, Jan Schachter, Cynthia Siegel, Alfred P. Spivack, Celeste Welch, Greg W. Williams, Mardi Wood and Melissa Woodburn.

Thinking Green will be on view through July 25 at Art Works Downtown, 1337 Fourth St., San Rafael.

‘Right Now! GRO Members Exhibition’

West Marin’s Gallery Route One will be celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary with a summer group show. This remarkable artist-run, nonprofit exhibition space has not only managed to survive this quarter century as an artists’ resource, but has successfully integrated itself into the life of the community through education and community-based arts programs. Artist members must be juried in, and then contribute time to the gallery staffing and varied aspects of running the gallery, mounting shows and keeping multiple projects operational.

Some of their many community-based programs are ongoing and extensive. Through With the Earth; Arts and the Environment, GRO functions as an active voice for environmental responsibility in the Bay Area. By presenting art and educational programs with themes of sustainability, environmental pollution, social justice and wilderness stewardship, GRO raises public awareness and encourages responsible action. An ongoing Artist-in-Schools program has been involved, in collaboration with local park personnel, with the restoration of a local creek, encouraging salmon spawning while educating children on environmental action.

Far from Home is a yearly exhibition focused on artists who live in the U.S. but belong to another culture. Artists chosen to participate are either foreign born or descended from immigrants, and use their art to explore and expose the often difficult experience of living within and between two cultures. By presenting this exhibition, GRO engages citizens in intercultural dialogue, and helps to make the experience of all richer through understanding.

The Latino Photography Project has been a successful way that GRO has engaged the growing Latino population in West Marin, and has helped navigate cultural difficulties for all residents. Adult Latino students drawn from the Marin Literacy Project are given cameras and six to eight months of photography instruction. Each year the class produces an exhibition exploring aspects of the local community with an emphasis on how the lives of Latinos and Anglos intersect.

Current members who will be exhibiting in the twenty-fifth anniversary show include Mimi Albers, Arianne Dar, Mary Mountcastle Eubank, Paula Fava, Tim Graveson, Pauline Greenfield, Madeline Hope, Geraldine LiaBraaten, Gloria Matuszewski, Zea Morvitz, Hannah Mott, Eleanor Murray, Suzanne Parker, Stephen Pring, Andrew Romanoff, Bob Snyder, Marj Burgstahler Stone, Will Thoms, Betty Woolfolk and Vickisa.

Along with showing individual work, many of the members will be participating in a group installation that focuses on their collaborative work together. The installation will consist of a circular table 8 feet in diameter with a tall branch of madrone tree growing from its center. A screen-printed cloth of magnified mushroom mycelium, a metaphor for growing together, will cover the table with natural materials filling in underneath. Each artist will contribute a piece for the “feast of art table” and each piece will include a bit of silver in commemoration of the anniversary.

Right Now! GRO Members Exhibition will be on view through July 27 at Gallery Route One, 11101 Hwy. 1, Point Reyes Station.

‘2008 Annual Spring Show’

The work of recent BFA and MFA graduates in painting, printmaking and sculpture from the School of Fine Art will be highlighted in the Academy of Art University’s 2008 Annual Spring Show. Of the thirteen artists who work with various media and content, six are graduating from the BFA programs and seven from the MFA programs.

Lindsey Eisentraut, graduating with an MFA in sculpture, uses a variety of materials including metals, glass, ceramic and cement. Her pieces are delicate, carefully crafted and range from the jewel-like Bugs, tiny little silver and glass almost-replicas of actual insects, to the more evocative Pods, made of copper, ceramic, bronze and cement. Pods are laid out on a 5-by-5 grid to form a whole which is 30 by 30 inches. Each tiny pod shape in this formation is treated differently, with varied textures, and values ranging from almost white to almost black within a span of grays. Laid out as they are the whole piece resembles the kind of display you might see in a museum of natural history. The pointy-tipped pods might be specimens of some sort, fossils maybe, or artifacts such as those found when excavating the earliest dwelling sites of humans.

Meredith Cheng, receiving her BFA in printmaking, will be exhibiting large-scale combination prints. Yummy is a combination woodcut/monotype, organized roughly on a loose grid divided by three. Warm yellow and orange organic shapes hover and play in the space. Play is even more apparent in Hide and Seek, where the rounded, organic forms float and dance between layers of ink, color and space.

Po-Chieh Wang, graduating with an MFA in sculpture, deals with environmental concerns. Biomass Biomess consists of three very carefully crafted yellow cobs of corn, made from recycled clay. E Waste, also made of recycled clay, is less specific in its imagery, but looks to be referring to crushed containers that are no longer closed or longer functional in any way.

Mike Feeney, completing his MFA in sculpture, will present Growth, a strange contraption made of bronze, brass and steel hardware. Although the piece is fairly small, 12 by 8 by 16 inches, it actually looks like it could be a maquette for a much larger piece. It isn’t representational, but has the feeling of movement and expansion, and resembles limbs akimbo. At the same time, the piece feels as though it could have been made from discarded bits of musical instruments, to form oddly articulated robotic creatures.

Lucia Hye Yoon Joo, also receiving her MFA in sculpture, will exhibit Dialogue, a collection of non-representational, nest-like translucent forms made of steel wire, gut and tea. Wires sticking out from the tops of the forms have a linear and lively quality, connecting them to living beings or little-known plant structures.

Academy of Art University’s 2008 Annual Spring Show will be on view through July 31 at 601 Brannan St., San Francisco.

‘Northern California Visionary Art’

According to Marvin Schenck, curator at the Grace Hudson Museum, Northern California visionary art originated in the late 1960s and 1970s amidst a background of cultural influences including Vietnam War protests, campus unrest, far eastern spiritual practices, hippie idealism, underground comics and psychedelic music. Centered around the San Francisco Art Institute, both teachers and students were also specifically influenced by surrealism, Jungian archetypes and non-western religious philosophies.

This exhibit, organized in response to the large number of artists in rural Northern California for whom these ideals remain an important creative force, includes Thomas Akawie, Andrew Annenberg, Don Bear, Bonnie Bisbee, Krista Lynn Brown, Josie Grant, Mark Henson, Nick Hyde, Bill Martin, Paul Nicholson, Gene Avery North, Maire Palme, Paul Pratchenko, Janet Rayner, Mark Roland, Doug Volz and John Wagenet. Some of these artists have continued to make work consistent with the visionary ideal, while others are younger artists attracted to similar pursuits of personal dreamscape, spiritual awakening and visions of utopia. Although this imagery has been largely ignored by the mainstream art world, it has filtered into the popular consciousness largely through posters and postcards made for the counter-culture market.

Bisbee’s Joy Filled Mother is perhaps emblematic of the contemporary work. The portrait-oriented painting is jam-packed with a great deal of carefully crafted details that suggests intricate beadwork, weaving and the folk traditions of many cultures. The main character is an attractive woman, perhaps Hindu or Native American, dressed in white robes, her head covered in orange scarves. Standing in or enveloped by an oval doorway of sorts, she is surrounded by hearts that start small at the bottom and grow progressively larger as they move upwards. Her hands are facing outwards, hearts on the palms radiating love energy towards the stylized birds, flowers and plants.

Henson’s Sharing the Wealth also highlights how the values and the concerns of an earlier time are still alive and strong. Here, two worlds are juxtaposed, carefully executed with an enormous attention to minute details. The cartoonish style exaggerates the features of the main characters. Both worlds are in decay, each of a different sort. We have incredible decadence on one side, with throngs of people walking down a kind of Las Vegas strip, passing marquees advertising live sex shows, gambling casinos, shiny skyscrapers and expensive cars. A blond couple driving a red convertible in the foreground has just obliviously run over a small animal. The guy has just nonchalantly tossed an enormous cheeseburger and fries off to the other side of the painting, where the desperate arms of a devastated, scrawny, dark-skinned woman are reaching out to receive them. She is the main character in a decaying, dirty, Third World, urban landscape. Smoke stacks spew gray clouds of toxic fumes, hordes of people fill the unpaved streets and everyone is somehow hustling, trying to sell one small bit of anything. Henson’s detailed, labor-intensive work is testament to art whose practice and content reflects a meditative practice.

Northern California Visionary Art: A Contemporary Legacy will be on view through September 7 at the Grace Hudson Museum, 431 S. Main St., Ukiah.