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Visual Art

“Miju: Effigies and Demigods”

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REVIEW Dear Miju, I know you aren’t a folk singer. You are an artistic collaboration between Bay Area artists (and couple) Michele Muennig and Juan Carlos Quintana. Using childhood imagery and a fittingly subdued palette, you deconstruct fantasy worlds on paper and canvas. Your solo show at Jack Fischer Gallery, "Effigies and Demagogues," is both outlandish and darkly comical: dolls catch fire and real people head to the edge of the abyss. Still, your art — how did you fit so many big paintings in such a small gallery? — reminds me irrevocably of folkie John Wesley Harding, né Wesley Stace, one of our most ironic songwriters.

You are an improved Harding — one who knows when to stop. Harding’s "The Night He Took Her to the Fairground" was murdered by studio musicians but sounds fantastic when he does it solo with a guitar: "He poisoned her with words / She tried to spit them out," he croons, and, as your paintings Shallow Cause for Optimism and Destiny for the 21st Century Manifested show at Jack Fischer, it’s hard to tell if people are trying to hurt each other or if they’re just caught up in the same bad dream. In Shallow Cause, your separate artistic touches combine seamlessly to evoke a marionette that has slackened forever. In Destiny, people exhaust themselves trying to haul the icons of a Manifest Destiny that never existed, while another character parts curtains only to reveal cliffs.

You must have read what I read: Mattimeo (Philomel, 1989), Through the Looking Glass, and Peter Pan. And you must have looked at the illustrations similarly: J.D. Bedford’s Tinker Bell was more frightening than his Captain Hook, for she seemed not to know how foolish she looked, twinkling about, headed for the open sea but dressed for the beach.

MIJU: EFFIGIES AND DEMAGOGUES Through Sept. 27. Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m., Jack Fischer Gallery, 49 Geary, suite 440, SF. (415) 956-1178, www.jackfischergallery.com

Death and the maiden

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

REVIEW Somewhat eclipsed by the mob scene upstairs at "Frida Kahlo," the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s "The Art of Lee Miller" abounds with riveting images — not least those of the late photographer herself, who was, at different times, a nude model for her father, a high fashion mannequin for Vogue, and a muse and collaborator for her onetime lover Man Ray. Many will fix in your mind long after this sizable show ends — the tattered window into an otherworldly Egypt of Portrait of Space (1937), the chorus line of dangling rat posteriors in Untitled (Rat Tails) (1930), and the persistently chic English ladies in wartime protective headgear of Women with Fire Masks, London (1941).

But two Miller images — sensational were they not so sober — bid you return to examine them further: The Suicided Burgermeister’s Daughter, Leipzig, Germany (1945) and Untitled [Severed Breast from Radical Mastectomy] (circa 1930). Both play morbidly within the haunted dreamscapes of surrealism, teasing out a certain tongue-in-cheek formalism, or, in the case of the portrait of the deceased fräulein, upend classical aesthetic values with a detachment that’s chilled to the bone and coolly black-humored.

Experimenting with architecturally focused abstraction, dadaism, and surrealism in the early ’30s, during her Parisian tryst with Man Ray, Lee said she was working as a medical photographer in the city when she managed to spirit away a breast amputated in a mastectomy operation from a local hospital. Back at the studio she photographed it two ways: once with its sagging skin-side exterior facing her camera, and again with its gory innards threatening to spill out like kidney pie. In both images the breast lies in an elegant ivory plate on a creased, innocuously striped, lightly grid-printed place mat, with a fork and knife laid out for an imagined meal. The two perspectives on print are displayed side by side, as if to ironically mimic the natural placement of these mammaries. If not for the card, one would mistake the slab on the plate for a somewhat unappetizing kidney pie or pig’s ear. Whitney Chadwick, the author of Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Thames & Hudson, 1991), described Miller re-envisioning this breast "not as an object of male desire, but as dead meat," and it does seem as if Miller sought to load these life-giving symbols of nurturance and desire with connotations of vulnerability and sacrifice. She takes the dismembered body part’s symbolism to its bitter end — while referencing the common surrealist obsession with those primal glands as well as the Catholic iconography of St. Agatha, who is often pictured proffering her plated breasts to devout viewers. The frequently and easily commodifiable body parts are served up for your visual consumption.

Exhibition catalog author Mark Haworth-Booth points to the surrealist notion of "convulsive beauty" and the movement’s general fascination with effigies in reference to Miller’s stunningly lit and composed The Suicided Burgermeister’s Daughter, shot during her tenure as the only female photojournalist allowed into combat during World War II. The body’s hair, skin, brow, pretty lids, and steepled nose evoke the eternal appeal of an angel aloft above a headstone. Her arms caress the front of her heavy wool Nazi nurse’s coat. Her lips, unnaturally pale and marble-like, are slightly parted, revealing perfect teeth with a whiff of inadvertent eroticism, and she lies on a leather couch — on which the one distended button and a small rip in the leather arm are the only hints of decay.

Most intriguing, Miller seems to have blurred the area above the body, making it appear as if a fine mist or fog is descending on the prone form. In the accompanying original dispatch for Vogue, the magazine she once posed for and later reported for, Miller writes of "the love of death which is the under-pattern of the German living caught up with the high officials of the regime," text that went unpublished in the magazine. The careful formality of Burgermeister’s Daughter‘s composition brings to mind and counterpoints those of more recently deceased Germans: Gerhard Richter’s paintings of the also-suicided members of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Yet, with Burgermeister’s Daughter and Untitled, it’s hard to imagine another artist so associated with the temporal flash of fashion making images as powerful and as fueled by the death urge.

THE ART OF LEE MILLER

Through Sept. 14.

Mon.–Tues., Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

$7–<\d>$12.50, free for members and 12 and under (free first Tues.; half price Thurs., 6–8:45 p.m.)

(415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Vizzy with the possibilities

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KATIE KURTZ PICKS


•"The Wizard of Oz" Not much has changed since L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz debuted over a century ago and gave Americans something we still crave: escape to a fantastical land free of wicked witches. These days it’s not the Emerald City that Dorothys everywhere are tripping toward but a place called "hope." The works in this group show curated by Jens Hoffmann, including more than 20 artists (Clare Rojas, Raymond Pettibon, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, et al.), were made either in response to the classic tale or relate to the story’s many layered meanings.

Sept. 2–Dec. 13. Reception Sept. 2. CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, 1111 Eighth St., SF. (415) 551-9210, www.wattis.org

•"Vocabularies of Metaphor: More Stories" In this group show of works on paper highlighting deconstructed narratives, all but two of the 16 artists included are women — one of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls drawings makes an appearance. "Vocabularies" is a chance to see how women are considering the figure — female, male, and animal — in a postnatural world, though this idea is not the exhibit’s emphasis. Of note are Rachelle Sumpter’s gauzy gouaches, Canadian Yuka Yamaguchi’s dismembered turtles, and Pakistani Shahzia Sikander’s nature-inspired pattern-making.

Sept. 6–Oct. 18. Reception Sept. 6. Hosfelt Gallery, 430 Clementina, SF. (415) 495-5454, www.hosfeltgallery.com

•California Academy of Sciences The mothership of scientific and sustainable nerdiness finally opens! This Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified facility includes a planetarium, swamp, rainforest, and a living roof. If you prefer your nature virtual, you can always hang out with the PenguinCam.

Big Bang opening gala Sept. 25; free to the public all day Sept. 27. 55 Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, SF. (415) 379-8000, www.calacademy.org

•"Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900" Scientific photography of yesteryear is a healthy reminder of just how long we’ve been trying to discover everything that can possibly be discovered and recording it for posterity. More than 200 photographs, American and European, scientific and pseudoscientific.

Oct. 11–Jan. 4, 2009. SFMOMA, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

•"The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres" Co-curated by Berin Golonu and independent curator Veronica Wiman of Sweden, this activist exhibition is intended to further the green dialogue through collaborations between artists and organizations, conversations with the public, and urban interventions.

Oct. 31–Jan. 11, 2009. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

KIMBERLY CHUN PICKS


•"Barbara Holmes and Casey Logan" What a dump! The two artists’ four-month residency climaxes with 3-D work inspired by and composed of salvaged material. Sculptor Holmes worked with wooden lattice to create a series of kaleidoscopic forms in assorted states of weatheredness, while Logan morphed musical gear and other detritus into pieces that meld with his fascination with science and fiction.

Sept. 26–27. SF Recycling Art Studio, 503 Tunnel, SF. www.sfrecycling.com/AIR

•"Nikki McClure" The graphic rep of Olympia, Wash.’s riot grrrl scene is undoubtedly best known for her bold, iconic paper cuts revolving around nature, motherhood, activism, and community. Music cover-art, illustrations, and books have all found a place in a vision grounded in simple gestures, uncontrived pleasures, and everyday labors.

October–November. Needles and Pens, 3253 16th St. SF. (415) 255-1534, www.needles-pens.com

•"Outpost" Exploding the imaginary and futuristic dimensions of architecture, "Outpost" collects the apocalyptic planes and jagged rubble of Bay Area sculptor David Hamill and the dazzling grids and Spirograph-esque constructs of New York City artist Jeff Konigsberg.

Sept. 5–Oct. 18. Reception Sept. 5. Johansson Projects 2300 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 999-9140, johanssonprojects.net

•"Hilary Pecis" Folktronica, meet your maker: the SF artist creates her downright psychedelic panoramas by layering drawings with fragments sliced from glossy magazines. Pecis was also recently named as a recipient of the 2008 Murphy and Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts and will be showcased at SF Arts Commission Gallery.

Sept. 6-26. Reception Sept. 6. Receiver Gallery, 1415 Valencia, SF. (415) 550-RCVR, receivergallery.com. Also "Immediate Future: the 2008 Murphy and Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts," Sept. 6-Oct. 18. SFAC Gallery, 401 Van Ness, SF. (415) 554-6080, www.sfacgallery.org

•"Yves Saint Laurent" Viva le smoking! The beloved groundbreaker may be dead, but Yves Saint Laurent has never been hotter, judging from this autumn’s many attempts at rich-hippie/gypsy folklorico, highly sexed men’s wear for women, and silky Parisian-lady drag. This major retrospective’s single US turn showcases more than 120 accessorized ensembles in addition to drawings, photos, and videos.

Nov. 1–March 1, 2009. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF. (415) 750-3600, www.famsf.org/deyoung

JOHNNY RAY HUSTON PICKS


• "I Feel I Am Free But I Know I Am Not" See “Connect four,” this issue

Sept. 4–Nov. 1. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, 2nd floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

• "Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas" Olivo Barbieri looks at Vegas as toy town.

Sept. 18–Jan. 4, 2009. SFMOMA, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

•"Bayete Ross-Smith: Pomp & Circumstance" and "Jonathan Burstein: Visage" Ross-Smith’s prom portraits are fresh, and Burstein’s paintings of museum guards trampoline off the humor present in his handsome past portraits of himself.

Sept. 4–Oct.11. Patricia Sweetow Gallery, 77 Geary, mezzanine, SF. (415) 788-5126, www.patriciasweetwogallery.com

• "Lutz Bacher: ODO"

Oct. 31–Dec.31. Ratio 3, 1447 Stevenson, SF. (415) 821-3371, www.ratio3.org

• Open Studios A step outside the galleries, museums, and art fairs — for better, for worse, and for real.

Oct. 11–Nov. 2. Various locations, SF. (415) 861-9838, www.artpsan.org

• "Dustin Fosnot: Simmons Beautyrest" Fosnot’s comic inventiveness should be a relief.

Oct. 14–Nov. 15. Steven Wolf Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 411, SF. (415) 263-3677. www.stevenwolffinearts.com

• "LA Paint" A survey of 11 painters, sure to fan a variety of Bay-and-LA flames.

Oct. 4–March 8, 2009. Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak, Oakl. (510) 238-2200, www.museumca.org

• "These are the People in Your Neighborhood" Mr. Rogers is quoted for this 15th birthday celebration including work by Libby Black and Xylor Jane, among others.

Sept. 12–Oct. 17. Gallery 16, 501 Third, SF, www.gallery16.com

•"Artists Ball Seven: The New Party" Stanlee Gatti and Mos Def, together at last.

Oct. 3. YBCA, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2700, www.ybca.org

•"Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered" A prelude to "Warhol Live," which hits the de Young next year.

Oct. 12–Jan. 25, 2009. Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF. (415) 655-7800, www.thecjm.org

>>More Fall Arts Preview

Sino the times

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

If the world-class flash of the Beijing Olympics isn’t enough of an example of China’s rising international cultural power, we’ll have continued reminders at Bay Area museums and galleries in the coming months. It’s perhaps a tipping point: Pace Beijing, a big outlet for a major western gallery, just opened, signaling a market vetting of art currently being made in China. In fact, a wide swath of Asia will the focus of the international art world this fall with a confluence of biennials — and a triennial — that rival the 2007 European "grand tour" of the "Venice Biennale," "Documenta," and "Münster Sculpture Project." This September sees the opening of biennials in Singapore; Taipei, Taiwan; Yokohama, Japan; Guangzhou and Shanghai in China; and Busan and Gwangju in Korea, the latter organized by Okwui Enwezor, dean of the San Francisco Art Institute.

So it does seem fitting, given our Pacific Rim position, that we at least reflect this activity. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art got a jump-start in the Sino-surveys, as "Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Logan Collection," opened prior to the Olympics and continues through Oct. 5. It’s a lively crash course in its subject, though the museum did give us one in 1999 — the pivotal "Inside Out: New Chinese Art," which included most of the artists on view now. The current show has the opportunity to provide scope — with newer works augmenting some classics — and the mix seems particularly smooth, no doubt because we have become far more familiar with China in general and with at least some of the cultural conditions that fuel the work.

"Half Life" satisfies with 50 pieces of painting, sculpture, and installations, but it seems modest in comparison to "Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection," a show that will fill almost the entire UC Berkeley Art Museum from Sept. 10–Jan. 4, 2009, with 141 works by 96 artists. Both exhibitions provide the opportunity to bring artists here and generate public dialogues, panel discussions, artist talks, and film screenings, which will play out in various venues around town. Berkeley’s show brings Ai Weiwei, a breakout international art star with intellectual buzz, out for a Bay Area residency.

One can’t help but notice that both these shows have "collection" in the title revealing a troubling sense of western ownership — a scenario suggesting that such works wouldn’t come to our attention without patronage. In this case, the collectors take on a passionate, fact-filled advocacy role: Swiss collector Uli Sigg has been supporting art in China for two decades, while Kent Logan, who has acquired works with his wife Vicki, writes extensively on his collection in the SFMOMA show’s catalog. Apparently it takes vision — and packaging — to float this work into a western context.

Other shows continue the focus on Asia, including Chinese sculptor Zhan Wang’s solo turn at Haines Gallery (Sept. 4-Oct. 4). His supershiny metal scholar’s rock is a highlight in the de Young’s sculpture garden, and that museum has organized a historical show with themes that may prove to be an interesting counterpoint: "Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970" (Oct. 25-Jan. 18, 2009), which surveys work by Asian and Asian American artists who worked in the United States — albeit at a time when the art world was less heated and international than it is today. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Mills College Art Museum expand the geographic scope with, respectively, Manila-Bay Area exchange show "Galleon Trade: Bay Area Now 5 Edition" (Sept. 4–Oct. 19) and "The Offering Table: Women Activist Artists from Korea" (Sept. 6-Dec. 7). The Asian Art Museum opens another can of cultural worms — and dazzling artifacts — with the historical "Arts of the Islamic World from Turkey to Indonesia," Sept. 5–March 1, 2009. One hopes that such exhibits expand on what we ordinarily think of as Asian art, contextualizing the current fascination with the contemporary Chinese art scene.

GLEN HELFAND’S PICKS FOR FALL VISUAL ART

•"Andrew Schoultz: In Gods We Trust," Sept. 4–Oct. 25. Reception Sept. 4. Marx and Zavattero, 77 Geary, SF. (415) 627-9111, www.marxzav.com

•Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Sciences building opens Sept. 27. 55 Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, SF. (415) 379-8000, www.calacademy.org

•Teddy Cruz and Pedro Reyes, Oct. 17–Dec. 13. Reception Oct. 16. Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 749-4563, www.waltermcbean.com

•"Lutz Bacher: ODO," Oct. 31–Dec. 13. Ratio 3, 1447 Stevenson, SF. (415) 821-3371, www.ratio3.org

•"The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now," Nov. 8–Feb. 8, 2009. SFMOMA, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

>>More Fall Arts Preview

“Japanese Wolf”

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P>REVIEW When was the last time you chatted on your cell in a crowd of yaks? Or honored the dewy lavender morning with a steaming cup of green tea and a goat friend? Or crouched with a pack of sunset wolves howling on your back?

No offense, but I bet your social circle isn’t this diverse. For the girl-woman at the center of Yumiko Kayukawa’s paintings, though, communing with nonhuman creatures is typical. Born in the small town of Naie in Hokkaido, Japan, Kayukawa found her muses amid the land’s sweeping beauty and native fauna. Her connection with those elements runs throughout her body of work: the giant tiger perched atop the earth, enjoying the company of three lounging pop-tart girls in Sekai De Ichiban Neko (The World’s Biggest Cat); the wide-eyed tarsiers helping to hang wishes for stars on bamboo in Tanabata (Star Festival); and the contented whales cuddling a pink scuba-suited underwater heroine in Oshizukani (Quiet Please). Kayukawa makes such intimate relationships with the wild animal kingdom look effortless.

And seductive. Kayukawa’s humans are young and pouty-lipped, with bright eyes, suggestively bent backs, and painted nails that are never chipped — even when keeping a frothing bear at bay. Saturated hues and pastels — sea green, cantaloupe, camellia, pale yellow — heighten this playfulness, as do the requisite kanji, floating in space like manga dialogue and titling each curious scene. Kayukawa’s eroticized pop vision is imbued with a fearless openness, evident in her decisive lines but even more so in the intention embedded in these paintings. When was the last time you had a tiger by the tail, much like her protagonists, and got away with it?

JAPANESE WOLF Through Sept. 6. Tues.–Sat., noon–7 p.m. Shooting Gallery, 839 Larkin, SF. (415) 931-8035, www.shootinggallerysf.com

Sweetest taboo

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PREVIEW The taboo has always had a special place in my heart. As a pre-adolescent, I was given a list of banned books from a rogue librarian and I hunted down and read every one of them. It may have seemed odd to find an 11-year-old black boy reading the likes of John Rechy’s City of Night (Grove, 1963) and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (Olympia/Grove, 1959), but these verboten tomes, along with the librarian’s free beer and porn, served as an illicit gateway out of my little coal-mining town into the larger, lustier world. If not for the innocence-stealing pederast posing as the coolest adult I knew, I might still be in that town, feeling like I was missing something but never knowing what. In short, banned books saved my life: I never would have read a single one had they not been banned.

That’s why it’s exciting, even titilutf8g, that the San Francisco Center for the Book, in collaboration with the African American Museum and Library in Oakland, presents "Banned and Recovered: Artists Respond to Censorship." The 63 installation, multimedia, and graphic artists showcased at the two sites don’t so much address the issue of banned books as celebrate their favorites, which happened to have been banned somewhere at one time or another — and what great book hasn’t? Among those praising the forbidden at the Center for the Book are Enrique Chagoya, who offers a 2000 diptych to Burroughs, and ex–Black Panther propagandist Emory Douglas, who brings Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) to light.

BANNED AND RECOVERED: ARTISTS RESPOND TO CENSORSHIP Through Nov. 26. Mon.–Fri., 10 a.m.–5 p.m. San Francisco Center for the Book, 300 De Haro, SF. (415) 565-0545, www.sfcb.org. Also Sept. 5–Dec. 31. Tues.–Sat., noon–5:30 p.m. Reception Sept. 5, 6:30 p.m. African American Museum and Library at Oakland, 659 14th St., Oakl. (510) 637-0200, www.oaklandlibrary.org/AAMLO

Hunters and collectors

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW It wasn’t so long ago that the term "curated" moved from dusty archive territory to popular lexicon. When did curated databases, boutique merchandise, and Netflix queues become commonplace? In the Bay Area, more than one school offers a master’s degree in "curatorial practice" — but who has a concise description of what that really means? The term has become elastic, perhaps because there’s too much material — of all sorts — to deal with in contemporary culture. Someone’s gotta figure out how to marshal and present it coherently.

Two current high-concept group exhibitions are equally about their curatorial premises and respective curators — Henry Urbach and Jens Hoffman — as the objects on display. Both have extended titles — "246 and Counting: Recent Architecture + Design Acquisitions" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and "Passengers" and "The Exhibition Formerly … ," at the Wattis Institute at California College of the Arts — and will evolve during their runs into 2009. Both are activated by transparent systems that generate their form.

"246 and Counting" includes every object Urbach, SFMOMA’s Helen Hilton Raiser curator of architecture and design, acquired during his first two years at the museum. In the wall label, he admits the show "aims to focus our attention on collection building." It’s not a stretch to say it has something to do with shopping: Urbach, who previously ran a commercial gallery in Chelsea, NYC, admits as much in the audio guide: "To shop well is half my job" (the other is to experiment with "curatorial practice"). And the presentation will grow to include each new piece he buys before "246" closes. The exhibition itself is a surprisingly refreshing take on the "collection show," the homely, hometown sibling to the bigger traveling exhibit.

Playing out on low platforms and arranged chronologically based on the date the works were purchased or given, "246"<0x2009>‘s structured format ironically allows for a degree of irreverence. Urbach leans framed photographs by Richard Barnes against the wall, stacks 1986 Beosystem stereo equipment, and splays silkscreen posters by the beloved activist nun, Sister Corita, on the floor under transparent Plexiglas boxes. It’s the same means used to showcase an iPhone, a donation from Apple, credited to Jonathan Ive. The fact that many of us have one makes for an automatic entry point.

The objects are identified on laminated cards, so the display initially resembles a high-end vintage store or the apartment of an aesthete/design guru — the format affords an approachable sense of personality. Urbach’s gesture is one of exposure — of the museum’s hierarchy and of his own sensibility. He uses this to assert a curatorial identity, and the narrowed focus makes for satisfying, authored viewing. If there’s an inclusion you question, you know who’s to blame.

The former director of exhibitions at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Hoffman — who just completed his first year of programming at Wattis — expresses a similar tastemaker sensibility. The contemporary art has a more experimental vibe because the gallery doesn’t collect. It feels as if Hoffman selected his picks from international art fairs. As noted on the Wattis Web site, "Passengers" is a "constantly transforming exhibition of emerging international contemporary artists, none of whom have ever had a solo presentation in an American public art institution." It’s structured around 12 artists: 11 with a few pieces, and one with a somewhat larger presentation, in a literal white cube space, before the latter artist leaves the show and another from the 11 remaining cycles into the bigger box.

The eclectic range of works — by artists familiar to Frieze readers but who will probably turn up in biennials down the line — tend to be funky and/or conceptual in bent and include Annette Kelm’s serial photos of a woven baseball cap; Valérie Mréjen’s short films about enacting various identities; and Federico Herrero’s painting project (though Aug. 30), which also involves a mural on a Potrero Hill home.

On Sept. 2 the show morphs into "The Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers" — coincidentally with a showcase of works by San Francisco artist Tauba Auerbach, whose Alphabetized Bible (2006) is included, in editioned form, in "246" and "Passengers." The exhibition’s form will shift as well: after each solo presentation, the artist will leave the show, but none will be added. The final artist, Aurelien Froment, gets the entire space in August 2009. This may not be fair to the previous "Passengers," but it does make for a tidy denouement.

Like "246," the "Passengers" structure is perhaps more memorable than any of its works, making both meta-projects: shows about the act of making shows. It’s fitting, then, that Hoffman’s title salutes Prince, who has constantly reinvented himself, the structures of music distribution, and performance platforms. The musical artist has had his share of misfire projects, but you always know he’s going to come up with some convincing new challenge to cultural consumption. *

246 AND COUNTING: RECENT ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN ACQUISITIONS

Through Jan. 4, 2009

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

For hours and prices go to www.sfmoma.org

PASSENGERS: 1.12 FEDERICO HERRERO

Through Aug. 30

"The Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers" runs Sept. 2–Aug. 29, 2009

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts

1111 Eighth St., SF

For hours go to www.wattis.org

No mere ornament

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REVIEW In Mary and Russel Wright’s Guide to Easier Living, first published in 1950, the designers instruct the midcentury housewife to avoid the "deeply carved wooden chair" in favor of a "contour design" to "simplify cleaning." This form-follows-function approach to design reached its height in the mass market in 1950s and ’60s, most notably with the introduction of the stacking, molded fiberglass chairs of Charles and Ray Eames — which can still found, en masse, in libraries throughout the University of California system.

Initially fueled at the beginning of the 20th century by the creative force of the Bauhaus movement, the reaction against ornamentation was iterated not only in the home but also in painting and music. A traveling survey, "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury," now on view at the Oakland Museum, presents a cross-section of modernism as explored by West Coast — and specifically Los Angeles — artists and designers. The exhibition takes a social and domestic stance, interspersing living room–like sets with didactic timelines, framing Vernor Panton’s iconic "S" chair with the introduction of Barbie and Wile E. Coyote cartoons. While this presentation nicely emphasizes the consumer context of much of the midcentury design, the pristine examples of hard-edge paintings do not benefit as much from this framework.

Characterized by well-defined abstract and geometric forms, the paintings by Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin, among others, instead situate themselves through their own clear, clean lines. Much the same way the subtle variations in Mondrian’s surfaces define his work, the intricacies of these paintings reinforce the mentality of their era — a philosophical idealization of the California landscape and climate. They vibrate an optimism in direct opposition to the frustration found in abstract expressionism on the opposite coast.

BIRTH OF COOL: CALIFORNIA ART, DESIGN, AND CULTURE AT MIDCENTURY Through Aug. 17. Wed.–Sat., 10 a.m–5 p.m. (first Fri., 10 a.m.–9 p.m.); Sun., noon–5 p.m. Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak, Oakl. $8, $5 seniors and students (free second Sun.). (510) 238-2200, www.museumca.org

Eye of the needle

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› johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW During the fall of 2004, I interviewed Bruce Conner, who had no shortage of viewpoints regarding contemporary art. "Many people," he said, "will develop a style of painting or subject matter or content that appears to be very innovative, and their next solo exhibition will be made up of 20 paintings that are all the same, aside from tiny variations."

Lauren DiCioccio offers a remedy for just such a malaise. Though her current show at Jack Fischer Gallery isn’t fully solo — she’s exhibiting with Aliza Lelah — she’s crammed five or six exhibits’ worth of ideas into her half. The extreme density and the versatile expansiveness of DiCioccio’s approach acquires special potency when one considers its relationship to the space: working from the smallest gallery in 49 Geary, Fischer presents intuitive outsider work with casual aplomb. His best shows present an experience akin to stumbling out of a sterile mini-museum into the residential hotel room of a smart enthusiast.

At the moment, that room includes 47 pieces by DiCioccio that stem from at least a handful of specific individual practices. Like some other young Bay Area artists such as Ruth Laskey, DiCioccio’s brand of personal creativity involves obsessive repetition. In other words, she’s transutf8g craft into art, with imagination and without much pretense. She sews unusual.

In the realm of nostalgia, DiCioccio threads lightly. Her series of works at Jack Fischer include 14 semi-amazing facsimiles of 35mm slides made by hand-embroidering bridal organza; five sculptures constructed from individual paper pads and thread; three mini-Mead spiral notebooks with felt covers and cloth pages sporting machine-sewn lines; eight "color codification dot drawings," in which she assigns colors to letters of the alphabet then paints on frosted Mylar after placing it over a magazine page; 11 variations on the classic plastic "Thank You" shopping or food-delivery bag, again made with organza; and, perhaps most strikingly, six pieces in which she sews through the top page of an entire issue of the New York Times encased in muslin.

Got that? DiCioccio’s show demands more viewing time than it takes to process the above sentence-long paragraph, and rewards that commitment with contemplative pleasure. At a moment when the average artwork gets around five seconds of zombie dead-eye before going gazeless once again, that’s saying something. Some of what DiCioccio is doing is derivative, or at least bears an obvious kinship to other projects. Her "Thank You" bags, for example, are a proletarian cousin to Libby Black’s experiments in paper designer wear. The paper-rad effect of her paper pad configurations isn’t far from origami, even if the waterfall effect she creates with aqua thread in one piece is lovely. But her best ideas are matched by a skill and dedication that honors humor and open-ended playfulness.

The open-ended quality of DiCioccio’s work is evident in the color paintings, which use a cryptic-yet-ripe foundation of meaning: the recent "green" issue of Vanity Fair with Madonna on the cover. ("And incredibly, looking not a day older," reads the parenthetical title of one of these untitled works.) Here, DiCioccio’s color-by-letters method highlights the structural beauty of mastheads and two- or three-column text configurations complete with pull-quotes. As she covers the magazine and its text, she simultaneously teases out ironies about Madonna and the notion of eco-friendly paper periodicals.

Green turns into gray lady — and Madonna’s unforgivingly ageless brand of masculine femininity gives way dour old boys and even Old Glory — in DiCioccio’s Times series. There, her threads meet up with disposable, obsolete newspaper, a material not far from dust in more ways than one. As with DiCioccio’s 35mm slide facsimiles, which bear micro-images of landmarks like Mount Rushmore, there’s a sense of an American way of life nearing death, and the artist is smart and honest enough to play it every which way but heavy-handed. Instead of trying for perfection, she lets threads hang loosely, suggesting a spirit left behind.

LAUREN DICIOCCIO AND ALIZA LELAH

Through Sat/16

Jack Fischer Gallery

49 Geary, Suite 440, SF

(415) 956-1178

www.jackfischergallery.com

“Summer Reading”

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REVIEW I wish I were Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentine man of letters was top among those writers, such as Orhan Pamuk, Margaret Atwood, and Ali Smith, whose nonfiction is even more potent, surreal, and addictive than their fiction. Borges once remarked on a translation of William Beckford’s Vathek: "The original is unfaithful to the translation." I’d say the same about "Summer Reading" at Hosfelt Gallery. Taking as their inspiration a range of literary classics, from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the 18 works on display at the group show manage to be more than just windows into each artist’s reading of a particular book. They provide a bird’s-eye view of internal floor plans, acting as translations from the literary into the visual, increasing ambiguity while lowering page count.

Su Blackwell’s four wall-mounted sculptures use actual books, their pages cut and molded into little trees of text and gallivanting characters, creating miniature worlds so fragile that they seem to have been frozen in time so they will not break. In Blackwell’s The Secret Garden — inspired by the book of the same name — a little girl is supported by tree branches from one angle, but from another appears to be reaching for them unsuccessfully, frightened and alone.

John O’Reilly’s collage, Dead Centaur — Of Cormac McCarthy, captures the dark textures of reality in McCarthy’s writing, and José Antonio Suarez Loñdono’s intimate notebook drawings, inspired by Kafka and Evan S. Connell, are like footnotes in the form of silhouettes. Amy Hicks’ videos, ReAdaptation: the book series (2007–08), use flip-books meticulously constructed by taping pictures onto book pages. One of the volumes is on display and looks like something a stalker would construct, but the videos are more melancholic than creepy.

SUMMER READING Through Sat/9. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Glenn Kurtz reading, Fri/8, 6 p.m. Hosfelt Gallery, 430 Clementina, SF. (415) 495-5454, www.hosfeltgallery.com

Exposer

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REVIEW Some early Bay Area figurative painting, wrote Peter Selz in 2002, encountered "the human figure by means of the physicality and the gestural performance of abstract expressionism." More explicit figures later emerged from this abstract cauldron. Ana Teresa Fernández, however, would rather start with the explicit body and work backward. Fernández, who grew up in Mexico, isn’t a figurative painter, performance artist, videographer, feminist, or Latina artist — although she assumes all of these roles from time to time. The best work at her 2008 Headlands Center for the Arts Tournesol Award exhibition, "Tela Araña Tela" (a mirroring of the Spanish for spider web), is so powerful, the movements in her work so difficult to look away from, that she acts as a detective, an intuitive investigator of the emotions embedded in human muscle tone and media complacence — an exposer of the skin-tight, commonplace untruths of so-called manual labor.

By meticulously documenting stills from her own performance work — which uncovers, overstimulates, and ironically decapitates familiar images of femininity and the female worker — Fernández manages to blend forcefulness and stillness into her brand of revelation. The two large, untitled paintings depicting her body in muscular heels, beset — I don’t know how else to say it — by laundry on a clothesline, show no human face. The face has been smothered, disappearing into a wavering white sheet. The even larger painting shown here between those two, Untitled, a documentation of Jennifer Locke’s 2007 Artists’ Television Access performance in which she covered her body in glue, reveals a lattice or an amorphous web around Locke’s face, making it hard to tell if it’s the skin or the glue that’s melting. The works on paper displayed here — also performance documentations — lack the forcefulness of the paintings. But don’t miss the video installation, where balloons are popped like they’ve never been popped before.

TELA ARAÑA TELA Through Aug. 9. Wed.–Sat., noon–5 p.m., and by appointment. Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market, SF. (415) 255-5971, www.luggagestoregallery.org

Manufacturing Frida

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REVIEW Though overshadowed during her lifetime by her famous muralist husband Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo is one of many examples of driven artists who achieved their icon status posthumously. And, like other historical figures with life stories loaded with tragedy, Kahlo underwent her share of suffering, which makes for great book sales and dramatic film plots. But as anyone who knows a bit of her story beyond her groundbreaking art can attest, she handled the physical and emotional pain with flair: she was a modern, intelligent Mexican woman who, from the 1930s through early ’50s, chose to flamboyantly dress herself in celebration of her cultural ancestry. She was exotic — even among her circles of culture vultures and political activists — and strikingly beautiful, so it’s no wonder that nearly half of her paintings are self-portraits. One thinks she might have wowed herself. Nonetheless, the well-known photographers who caught her on film left more telling documents than her paintings — of someone who radiated charisma and soul.

Before we dismiss a round of would-be Fridamania as an attempt to generate even more profits from Kahlo reproductions on bags and T-shirts, we should remember why she was plucked from history. Currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is the first major American exhibition of Kahlo’s works in nearly 15 years. Last year, for the centennial of Kahlo’s birth, the Palacio De Bellas Artes in Mexico City held a comprehensive show of her artistic accomplishments, along with personal photos and documents. Visitors to SFMOMA’s "Frida Kahlo" — which was organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis — will get a similar experience to the Mexican exhibition: beyond almost 50 Kahlo paintings, there is a trove of documents and photographs. Don’t expect to see just the greatest hits, though those are present.

Strange still-lifes — like the pile of bodylike root vegetables in Still Life: Pitahayas (1938) — are displayed alongside bizarre folkloric conglomerations of Aztec mythology, Mexican jungle life, and political figures merged with events from Kahlo’s life. Her portrayals of other people are as mesmerizing as her self-portraits. Portrait of Luther Burbank (1931) presents the odd scene of the elder Burbank sprouting from the soil of a browned landscape. The area where his feet should be is a mass of roots growing into a decaying corpse. He holds a leafy tropical plant — a reference to his horticultural focus. Another compelling work rarely viewed outside of Japan’s Nagoya City Art Museum is Girl with Death Mask, (1938) in which a skull-masked child in a pink dress stands on a barren, sky-dominated expanse with a mask of a tongue-wagging monster at her feet.

When we enter the last rooms of the show, we are greeted with walls and display cases of family photographs, many with Kahlo’s handwritten notes. Two photos of Rivera, from 1929 and 1940, have her lipstick kiss prints on the back, and several other images are marked with pencil or ballpoint doodles. These funny, poignant bits of reality were not meant for public consumption, and the fan is given a deeper view into the real person. Add the early color photos of Kahlo and a home movie of Kahlo and Rivera fawning over and goofing around with each other, and you could begin to think that you actually know her.

So when one views the photos of Kahlo in traction, her strained face attempting to smile, or the pre-tragic pregnancy photos, subjects explored repeatedly in her art suddenly become even more clearly felt. Icons rarely get to be real after their ascension: we don’t want them to be mortal, perish, and take their magnetism away. When Kahlo died in 1954 at 47, a final diary entry read, "I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope to never return." Yet no one wants her to go.

FRIDA KAHLO

Through Sept. 28

Mon.–Tues. and Fri., 10 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs. 10 a.m.–9:45 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–7:45 p.m.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

www.sfmoma.org

“Conflux Vignettes”

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REVIEW Being unpatriotic, I spent the Fourth of July observing indoor fireworks at the opening of the group show, "Conflux Vignettes," at Mama Buzz Café’s Buzz Gallery. I was lured in by poet-painter Brian Lucas, whose 2006 book, Light House (Meeting Eyes Bindery), is out of print but obtainable secondhand. Like his longer poems, which accumulate as aphoristic remarks, Lucas’ abstractions accrue in obsessively worked increments. Whereas in his earlier work these parts formed discrete centers of interest, his more recent paintings, like the acrylic Correspondence, reveal a more unified sense of composition, their lush brightness influenced by his six-year stay in Thailand, from 2001 to 2007. Lucas’ paintings have the complexity of the finest abstraction, with an illusion of depth hitherto unrealized, and suggest equally the cosmos and the lotus.

Also here are odd assemblages by Daniel Glendening, black mat-board cutouts overlaid with rainbow-colored gouache and acrylic. The edges are shaped alternatively as pistols, cacti, and AK-47s. The most ambitious, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, includes all three — its overall shape suggestive of the southwestern United States and a good metaphor for a country refusing gun control. Paper squares repeating the title are affixed by copper nails driven through the piece and into the wall. (If you buy the work, Glendening offers to come nail it to your wall at home.)

Rounding things out are large paper-on-canvas pieces by Julie Oppermann, executed in watercolor and acrylic, yet defying most viewers’ conceptions of watercolor. The concentric circles, overlaying each other yet slightly askew, create the moiré effect, hovering like a Duchamp rotorelief without the literal motion. Tree-Cells, a smaller series in mostly red shades of oil, resembles something like exploded alligators — in a good way. All in all, a well-curated grouping, indicating why the space has its buzz.

CONFLUX VIGNETTES: BRIAN LUCAS, DANIEL GLENDENING, AND JULIE OPPERMANN Through July 31. Mon.–Thurs., 7 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri., 7 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sat., 8 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 8 a.m.–9 p.m. Mama Buzz/Buzz Gallery, 2318 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 465-4073, www.mamabuzzcafe.com

“3”

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REVIEW For "3," artist Chris Duncan gathers a trio whose work explores pattern-making — either through the mark itself (Kyle Ranson’s decorated figures and Derrick Snodgrass’ prismatic constellations) or ordering select bits of visual information (Ernesto Burgos’ wall collage).

Bay Area artist Snodgrass’ Easter egg–colorful watercolors on paper from 2000 are refracted architectural shapes dotted with sunspots. Between then and now, Snodgrass loosened his grip and minimized his palette. Untitled, a tapestry in shades of browns and blacks, records the physicality of making the work. An orb at the tapestry’s center anchors a profusion of comet tails — the splattered streams radiate outward to the infinite. Back here on earth, local artist Ranson’s seven-panel The Rape depicts the Romans’ so-called rape or abduction of the Sabine women, a story ultimately about maintaining familial lines. Ranson’s rape is literal and explicit. The main male figure’s deadened eyes stare somewhere over the viewer while his naked conquest’s head tilts backwards, her steady gaze revealing nothing. The action across the panels is disconnected: a sentry stands off to the right, his outsize hands hanging dumbly by his sides, and a woman lounges naked and unaware. And is that God above, grinning slightly?

New York City artist Ernesto Burgos’ The Dumb Are Mostly Intrigued by the Drum offers a surrealistic plane where patterns and figures collide. A wall collage of black-and-white photocopies repeats photographic images of predatory birds, variously shaped atomic bomb clouds, lambs, a wide-eyed man whose mouth has been altered to a ghoulish grin, a naked woman whose wrists are bound in bondage ropes, and swatches of grids, to name a few. It isn’t so much that we are interested in patterns but that patterns are dependent on us: how can we repeat mistakes if they don’t make themselves recognizable?

3 Through Aug. 16. Tues.–Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Gregory Lind Gallery, 49 Geary, fifth floor, SF. (415) 296-9661, www.gregorylindgallery.com

Biennialmania

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Biennials, triennials, and whatever other rotation of years, are place-based exhibitions. They obviously happen somewhere, and the place dictates the context. The "Whitney Biennial 2008," for example, focused on "American art," an increasingly ambiguous term — in recent years the show has included growing numbers of artists with hyphenated identities. "Today there are more artists working in more genres, using more varieties of material, and moving among more geographic locations than ever before," reads the blurb on the Web site for this year’s edition. "By exploring the networks that exist among contemporary artists and the work they create, the Biennial characterizes the state of American art today."

That sense of international movement seems to be informing the shape and scope of biennials everywhere, creating curatorial fashions that are almost predictably inventive — and often place structural concepts ahead of visual appeal. The West is riding a surge of art surveys, and you just have to skim the institutional rhetoric to sense how complicated, or perhaps rote, the idea of location has become.

The current Site Santa Fe biennial in a very identifiable New Mexico location is a salient example. It was created by the curator/organizer, Lance Fung, who contacted curators at alternative spaces around the world and asked each to recommend artists. The 22 selected artists and collectives were commissioned to produce ephemeral "site-inspired" projects. As the release notes, "All the works are created on site, and are informed by this specific locale and the surrounding Santa Fe environs…. Much of the show has actually occurred prior to the opening, on the ground in Santa Fe, and prior to that, in virtual space, as ideas, proposals, and thoughts that have been transmitted around the world." The show contains just one collaborative team that lives in Santa Fe.

According to its Web site, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ fifth triennial "Bay Area Now" exhibition, opening Saturday, July 19, "explores questions around how to re-imagine a regional survey in the midst of globalization." The Bay Area is an interesting case in this regard because it is a fairly self-enclosed, self-defined site — and unlike the Santa Fe show, few people will travel to San Francisco just to see "BAN 5." Curators Kate Eilertsen and Berin Golonu tackle this formidable scenario with a cross-generational, cross-disciplinary gallery exhibition and four guest-curated shows that "will diversify ‘Bay Area Now”s curatorial vision and extend the artwork beyond the walls of our galleries and beyond the confines of our region." It remains to be seen how successfully they meet the challenge.

It’s interesting to compare "BAN 5" rhetoric with that surrounding the "2008 California Biennial," which opens in October at the Orange County Museum of Art. (Full disclosure: I contributed a short interview to the catalog.) "How does one approach a regional biennial?" states the promotional literature on the show’s Web site. "In a climate of globalism and transnationalism, how does a regional biennial serve artists and audiences? What is distinctive and different about cultural production at this point in time, in this context? How does one approach contemporary artistic practices based on locational parameters?"

The "CAB," organized by Lauri Firstenberg, will also stage off-site projects at venues such as Estación Tijuana, an independent exhibition space in Tijuana, Mexico, and SF’s Queens Nails Annex, a space that hosts BAN 5 as well. Extending an exhibition’s geographical reach is admirable and interesting, though those efforts may fracture these shows and make them harder to see — one wonders, if you just make it to Queens Nails, will you really see "BAN 5" or "CAB"?

The parallels are distinct and reflective of the zeitgeist. But as much as we’d like to think these exhibitions are about now, they most directly reflect the years in which they were organized. America will be getting a new president, but it’s shrinking from rising fuel costs and economic woes. In such an environment, regional identity — think locavores — most likely will grow stronger. Here’s hoping "BAN 5" captures some of that energy.

You’re going to myth me

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You don’t need to pick up all the subtleties of Berkeley-born Iranian American artist Ala Ebtekar’s work to appreciate the resonant beauty of, for instance, The Ascension II (2007), and its angelic, part-griffin, semi-human, quasi-Homa messenger drawn from Persian mythology, winging across reams of Farsi as assorted readers’ delicate notes intricately lace the printed manuscript. But it helps to know that the iconography of that winged messenger reaches back 5,000 years to a pre-Islamic Iran, was eventually appropriated in depictions of Ayatollah Khomeini, and that the angels with keys dangling from their necks, surrounding the wary mythical creature, refer to the child soldiers enlisted during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) to run across battlefields and detect land mines. "They’d give these kids these keys to heaven," explains Ebtekar at his Palo Alto studio near Stanford University, where he received his MFA. "It’s like, ‘Whoa!’ That’s a certain kind of mythology, but it’s tapping into something apocalyptic."

And you don’t need to know the specifics of aerospace design to appreciate the watercolor, acrylic, and ink jets tearing across script in The Breeze of Time (2002): they happen to be the exact ones used in the Iran-Iraq War. Ebtekar is aware that viewers bring their own connections to the work. "Yeah, I was doing this stuff before 9/11, in school, on book pages, and then 9/11 happened and I stopped. I thought, there’s no way I can do this," he recalls. Much of his work tied in directly with the Iran-Iraq War, a part of his own personal mythology, and the reason his activist Iranian parents remained in the States. "I was very much tapped into those older stories and histories. But then they announced the [Iraq] war, and I thought, actually, if there’s any time to do it, it’s more important to do it now than not."

The urgency of the present continues to call to Ebtekar, who draws from his studies in Iran of the refined art of Persian miniature painting and the less-known, more visceral field of coffeehouse painting for his works, which range from the aforementioned pieces that play off rich layers of text and imagery — and Iranian poetry and history — to large-scale graphite drawings that superimpose the outlines of Iranian wrestlers — current street-level mythological heroes — with hip-hop figures culled from Ebtekar’s music-obsessed youth, one spent DJing at parties and interning as a hip-hop DJ at KALX 90.7 FM.

As we listen to classic tracks by his mother’s pop idol, Iranian diva Googoosh, and scope out images of strongmen striking poses in a zurkhaneh (house of strength), juxtaposed with aerodynamic break-dancers in his studio — aptly situated over a downtown Palo Alto coffeehouse and crammed with art supplies, books, cassettes, vinyl, and a Tehrangeles T-shirt Ebtekar made for the 2006 California Biennial — it’s clear the artist’s pop interests still find a way to light: witness the 2004 Intersection for the Arts show that saw Ebtekar pairing a white-washed Iranian coffeehouse installation with shoes sporting fat laces fashioned from ornate Persian textile. "Bay Area Now 5" will find him combining his two approaches with a piece that layers ancient and modern-day warriors in a ghostly epic that looks backward and forward — a gesture familiar to Ebtekar, who rolls his eyes over John McCain’s comment on recent cigarette exports to Iran — "Maybe that’s a way of killing them" — and is currently teaching art at UC Berkeley in preparation for his dream. By 2011, he wants to start an art foundation and school in Iran.

After the US presidential election, Ebtekar hopes he can make it happen. First, he says, "there needs to be more diplomacy. In Iran, there’s this thing about nostalgia. You had such a great empire in the past — how do you move forward?" As a Bay Area 18-year-old who fell in love with Iran when he studied art there in 1997, he’ll be able to synthesize the past and future, bringing his ancestral mythology back to the old country in new forms. "It’s like having these multiple identities and being able to tap into this side of you and that side of you," Ebtekar explains. "They’re not clashing, you know what I mean. They’re rocking it full force."

Doing it naturally

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Donald Fortescue and Lawrence LaBianca’s "Bay Area Now 5" work — jokingly referred to earlier this month as the "Top Secret Oyster Project" — is not just about the creation of a well-crafted object. The piece also deals with the current state of San Francisco Bay’s wildlife, tides, and geography. So the two artists decided to let the physical environment affect the work — literally.

After putting in plentiful research, studying ocean survey charts, and talking with local environmental authorities on the work’s impact of their piece, the pair hired a diver to install the steel-table form they built — a muscled-up version of traditional cabriole or animal-legged furniture, as Fortescue describes it — on the floor of Tomales Bay, where it was designed to sit for several months. During the installation, however, their diver told them that the conditions weren’t the best for the hoped-for weathering and oyster- and barnacle-encrusting process, so the table was relocated to Pillar Point. In the meantime, they gathered hydrophone recordings in Bodega Bay to augment the work.

Fortescue, an Adelaide, Australia, expatriate who now heads the California College of the Arts’ furniture department, and LaBianca, who teaches interior architecture at CCA, share more than a keen interest in the physicality of the Bay Area: the two master craftsmen have a history of creating fine-art sculpture. "For me, it’s all just one spectrum — sometimes located more in one area than the other," says Fortescue from Sebastopol. Although this will be the pair’s first manifestation of an object together, it’s not the first time they’ve worked together. The met in Chicago six years ago when they each had work in a retrospective show of recipients of Virginia A. Groot Foundation grants. About two years ago, they collaborated on a proposal to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for an installation based on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Even though that project didn’t get the green light, they learned a great deal about collaboration, an approach that seems suited to the Bay Area art scene. "Unlike New York, with artists jockeying to get into the best galleries, you see a lot less ruthless, cutthroat behavior here," Fortescue says. "This is a much more friendly environment, much more helpful.

"I wouldn’t be surprised if what we are making is the most crafted object" in "BAN 5," Fortescue continues. "We use making as a way to explore new ways of making — crafting as an excuse for crafting." Oh, and it’s a great excuse to spend even more time amid the Bay Area’s natural settings.

Creature feature

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Nature — in its many contrived or bizarrely hybridized forms — has ways of rearing its at-times-grotesque, at-times-seductive heads in Misako Inaoka’s work. Are her cunning mutants little monsters — be they chirping mechanical birds with propeller beaks or flowery pincushion pates, or donkeys or cattle mermaid-merged with John Deere tractor parts? Miniature extras from a lost installment of Ultraman? The petit-four-size stuff of surrealist nightmares? Or bio freaks in search of a new species to call their own?

It’s easy to get carried away by the puckish black humor of these critter creations or simply their kawaii — or cute — qualities, before sinking deeper into Inaoka’s query into the nature of authenticity vs. artifice, an idea that also crops up in her mossy or AstroTurfed environments, one of which will receive prominent placement in the glass-enclosed hall facing Mission Street during "Bay Area Now 5." "I’m interested in the way we mimic nature to create an urban landscape. When we can’t have access to real nature, we have AstroTurf. Or these birds that people purchase for amusement or as a pet," says the deeply tanned, elfin 31-year-old in the sweltering Dogpatch studio she shares with about six other artists. "Even I forget when I go to the park. I think, ‘Oh, this looks beautiful and smells great and looks green.’ But it’s all manicured."

If, in less than four decades, humans are expected to vault beyond pacemakers and merge with machines and some form of artificial intelligence, thereby erasing distinctions between organic, animate beings and inorganic, inanimate objects, as scientists like synth inventor Ray Kurzweil have theorized, then Inaoka’s small sculptures — created by chopping apart dollar- and toy-store creatures and reconfiguring them with resin, toy parts, and flower-store detritus — resemble harbingers of the new hybrids we all might be rushing toward in the quest to adapt to a rapidly shifting environment. "This is my fantasy — what if they can change quickly and if they could adapt easily," says Inaoka, as she shows me another piece she created specifically for "BAN 5" (she also has work in Stephen Wirtz Gallery’s "Summer ’08" group show, through Aug. 23): white birch branches scattered with silver-coated bird-mods sporting jet wings, machine parts, and, in one case, a walker.

The Kyoto, Japan, native received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Mills College, where, on that beauteous, highly controlled campus, she first began to experiment with making moss-clad environments. Since then her work has received its share of stereotypical responses: comparisons to Zen gardens, ikebana, or bonsai. But Inaoka prefers to find inspiration in common, everyday objects she might find in her Mission District habitat: a tree-shaped cell phone antenna or the little flowers that push through the cracks of the sidewalk. "I try not to think too much," says Inaoka of her process. "I just make and make like I was five years old again. Then the thinking process or research follows. ‘Why did I make this shape? Why did this come up?’ When I have too many concepts, it just kind of kills the energy."

Super Wofler

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Super Wofler! That’s as good a nickname as any for artist, curator, teacher, and creative tornado Jenifer K. Wofford. In Denmark, a Super Wofler is a mass-produced ice cream cone — as Wofford discovered during a recent artist-in-residence stint near Copenhagen, where she also tracked down a version of Planters’ elusive and endangered CheezBalls, as well as a school named Wofford College, founded in 1854.

But in the Bay Area and in the Philippines, the Super Wofler of Wofford College is Wofford, whose project Galleon Trade invokes and revises Spanish colonial trade routes to forge new cultural and critical exchange. Sparked by Wofford’s curatorial and organizational acumen, Galleon Trade kicked off one year ago in Manila, the Philippines, where art by 12 Californians — including Michael Arcega and Stephanie Syjuco — landed at two galleries, accompanied by many of the artists. Last year, the Guardian gave Goldie awards to Wofford and Arcega, but many other Galleon Trade participants — such as Jaime Cortez and Gina Osterloh — have made equally striking and impressive work.

Wofford has a large San Francisco installment of Galleon Trade planned for the Luggage Store Gallery next year. For the moment, the "BAN 5" version will spotlight some local Galleon Trade–ers, and some Filipino artists — like Norberto "Peewee" Roldan of Green Papaya Art Projects — who Wofford met last summer. "A couple artists are doing work that is phenomenological as opposed to overtly political," she says, during a phone interview that includes an only half-joking reference to "carpetbaggers" when the touchy topic of including non–Bay Area artists is broached. "I could see people getting pinched about the fact that we’re expanding the idea of what should be included." Who says the Bay Area only resides in the Bay Area, anyway?

GALLEON TRADE Sept. 5–Oct. 19 in the YBCA Terrace Galleries. Opening party, Sept. 4, 5–8 p.m.

Book ’em

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Michael Swaine is contagious. Whether investigating Reap What You Sew/Sewing for the People (2001, ongoing) in the streets of the Tenderloin, using braille to make a Plea for Tenderness (2007) at the Southern Exposure Gallery, or joining forces with Futurefarmers and the interdisciplinary design studio’s founder, Amy Franceschini, with whom Swaine began collaborating in 1998, the San Francisco artist brings a driven curiosity and sense of aesthetic detail to every project he touches. If you experience his work, you can’t help but get involved. He has been dubbed Futurefarmers’ "analog anchor," and his involvement in "BAN 5"’s Ground Scores: Guided Tours of San Francisco Past and Personal, guest-curated by Valerie Imus, is an ideal real-world interactive piece in a city of book lovers.

Swaine hopes his walking tours of individual home libraries, How to Organize a Public Library, elicit new audiences for art. He wants to reach "outsiders who don’t go to museums, who perhaps don’t want to go to museums," he said recently on the phone from his SF studio. "Maybe they just happen to love books." Everyone on the tour will be an "active participant," he said. To sign up, people will fill out a survey and must agree to include their own home library on the tour — if it fits the grid of walkable homes that weekend.

The artist is no stranger to walking tours. When he first moved to the Bay Area, he worked at the Exploratorium and fell in love with Bob Miller’s "light walks." These inspired Swaine’s now-legendary "weed walks" that he co-leads with botanist Archie Wessells, and first developed in the Exploratorium parking lot. For his 30th birthday, Swaine organized a 17-hour walk around San Francisco, meeting a different friend each hour and "connecting the dots."

I could connect with Swaine’s vision: my father, an architect in Santa Cruz, has long dreamed of building a library structurally based on the Iliad. What this means, exactly, neither of us knows, but talking about it has been a great bonding ritual for years. Maybe I can convince my dad to come up to the city and turn my sporadically gathered collection of 1970s poetry books and photography monographs into a Homeric fort. If I can, you are all invited to come by with plastic spears and knock it down. Then, with Swaine’s guidance, we might begin to farm the future, collaborating with the books at our feet.

HOW TO ORGANIZE A PUBLIC LIBRARY Walking tours Aug. 23 and 30 (also Sept. 20 and 27), noon–4 p.m. Locations to be announced. For reservations, call (415) 978-2710, ext. 136, or go to www.apleafortenderness.com

Nailing it

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Queens Nails Annex has long had its street-level glam talons on the pulse of the Mission District art scene — one that so often melds visual art, music, film and video, and performance — so it’s fitting that unexpected connections are emerging from its curatorial contribution to "BAN 5": "Estacion Odesia," a four-parter named for a metro stop that will present visual works by artists and musicians at QNA and their audio pieces at YBCA listening stations; produce a limited-edition box set of music and visual artifacts; and throw a music club with downloadable playlists, an opportunity to share tracks, and monthly meetings. One surprise at the QNA show has to be the video piece by Renee Green, the dean of graduate programs at the San Francisco Art Institute, which QNA cofounder Julio César Morales describes as an extremely media-ted portrait of Green’s brother Derrick, the vocalist-guitarist of Sepultura, painted with magazine stories and radio interviews without using any of the metal giants’ actual music. "It’s an interesting mix of documentary and her personal connection to her brother," Morales muses.

ESTACION ODESIA Sat/19–Nov. 16, YBCA, first floor galleries. Also July 25–Aug. 30, Queens Nails Annex, 3191 Mission, SF. (415) 648-4564, www.queensnailsannex.com. Music club happens Aug. 15, Sept. 15, and Oct. 17, 7 p.m.

Timothy Horn: Bitter Suite

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REVIEW At some point this summer, you’ll likely be asked — or roped into — accompanying visitors to see the Dale Chihuly exhibition at the de Young Museum. It’s a pretty series of darkened rooms with enormous blown glass forms, lit to show off a floorshow of colors and whimsical shapes. There’s nothing conceptually difficult or politically offensive in this Willy Wonka–scale display. But if it leaves you craving craftsmanship and concept, a quick trip upstairs to see Timothy Horn’s installation "Bitter Suite" should cure that.

The Australian sculptor, known for his large-scale versions of 18th-century jewelry, also has a background in glasswork. But two of the three pieces he created for this part of the museum’s Collections Connections series sparkle with sugar crystals. Horn’s objects are a response to the not-so-happy Cinderella story of Alma Spreckles, widow of millionaire sugar baron Adolph Spreckles and founder of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Horn’s hefty 300-pound chandelier piece Diadem is a larger-than-life, rock candy–encrusted beast hanging near Sir John Lavery’s matronly oil portrait, Mrs. Adolph Bernard Spreckles (1932). Mirrors on either side of the room create that never-ending-hallway effect, with the honey-colored chunky chandelier echoing like a lost guest at Versailles. Big enough for a small princess to ride in, Horn’s carriage, Mother-Load, is also caked in sugar crystals and shellacked light brown. Looking like a giant baked cookie confection, it’s cousin to the museum’s sedan chair (circa 1760) that once served as a phone booth in Spreckles’ home. The third piece, Sweet Thing, a grossly magnified French baroque earring with big blown-glass pearl drops, drips with unwearable glamour. In this era of comically high-priced contemporary art and Las Vegas-as-the-adult-Disneyland, Horn points us to the intersection where beauty and greed mutate together.

TIMOTHY HORN: BITTER SUITE Through Oct. 12. Tues.–Sun., 9:30 a.m.–5:15 p.m. (Fri., 9:30 a.m.–8:45 p.m.). De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF. $10, $7 seniors, $6 for ages 13–17 and college students with ID (free first Tues.). (415) 750-3600, www.famsf.org/deyoung

“Jim Campbell: Home Movies”

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REVIEW The West Coast electronic artist Jim Campbell returns to the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum to reprise his popular 2006 installation "Home Movies," a screening of amateur, low-resolution family films projected through a tapestry of LED lights. Strung from ceiling to floor, the highly pixilated reflections of quotidian family life become nothing less than digital simulacra when magnified to such extremes. Building on the conceptual linkages of his Illuminated Averages (2001-03) and Ambiguous Icons (2000-03) series, the technophile artist has arrived at a startling depiction of memory and magic. Campbell’s explorations of communications apparatuses since the mid-1980s largely mirrors the hypermodernist theories of Jean Baudrillard — problematizing rather than simply fetishizing the digital domain — and rejects the scientific utopianism of Bergsonian temporality for the more radical slippages of personalized memories and nostalgia. For Campbell, the question surely remains whether digital perception has elevated or mutated our inscriptions of the past.

The answer, of course, is far from conclusive and further still from novel. In fact, "Home Movies" is reminiscent of cinema’s magical roots in the 18th century Fantasmagorie shows, which posed similar concerns in their embrace of new technologies. Spectral and hypnotic in their visual imperfections, these magical lantern exhibitions introduced the sublime moment when the still painting became animate, reaching out from its crypt of secrets to grab hold of the spectator in a living darkness. The Fantasmagorie often thrived on intimate family images, using projected portraits of recently deceased ancestors to unsettle or mesmerize the audience. In his brilliance, Campbell has recognized a similar power in manipuutf8g the iconography of America’s recent past, using the omnipresent home movie as a prop of sorts for his own digital legerdemain.

Historical and aesthetic precedents aside, "Home Movies" is a supreme cinematic delight, re-presenting the primal pleasures of film-going but refracting this nostalgic glow through a matrix of increasing digital deconfiguration.

JIM CAMPBELL: HOME MOVIES Through Aug. 1. Wed.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. $4–$8 (free first Thurs.). (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

“Matt Gil: Reel to Real”

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REVIEW Remember those jazzy Raymond Scott tunes that accompanied many Depression–era Bugs Bunny cartoons? The rhythmic tinkling of the xylophone, the metronome and piano one-two-ing, while the trumpets and clarinets wah-wahed to our wise-ass rabbit scrambling to free himself from the inner workings of a factory. Those images merged Technicolor fantasy and swinging wackiness to the dumb, impersonal nature of mass production, a cartoonish combo that comes to mind when entering Matt Gil’s exhibition at the Marx and Zavattero Gallery. Residing over the majority of the space is Gil’s kinetic work Conveyor with 24 Sculptures (2007-08), a nonstop catwalk of coffee-tabletop-size ceramic forms parading in a loop for the viewer. The slip-cast, candy-colored glazed shapes are straight out of the space-age Googie design era: it’s the kind of curvy, biomorphic, and geometrically surreal commercial art our parents and grandparents bought at department stores. Gil’s mechanism rotates smoothly, though the forms occasionally wobble. Nothing like wobbling ceramics to make one nervous in a gallery. This carousel, however, leads one to imagine that — like Schroeder’s closet full of Beethoven busts — there might be a replacement or two in the artist’s studio. What transforms Gil’s piece further is that it’s underlit by floodlights, generating Dr. Seuss–like shadows on the walls that grow larger, then smaller. There are other large-scale sculptures — including the blue standing noodle Puzzle Piece and the almost 11-foot-tall black tiki comb Muckracker 1.0. Nevertheless, Conveyor‘s humor and nod to Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction makes it deservedly the most attention-worthy thing in the room. Along the walls are Gil’s ink and watercolor sketches of would-be monumental forms. These too radiate a giddy simplicity, inviting viewers to appreciate form and space for precisely what they are.

MATT GIL: REEL TO REAL Through July 2. Tues.–Fri., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Marx and Zavattero Gallery, 77 Geary, second floor, SF. (415) 627-9111, www.marxzav.com

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