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Galleries
A New Place for Artists -- in the Mail
At the Southern Exposure release party last month, visitors and friends sipped Heinekens and plastic cups of wine to celebrate the first issue of Thing Quarterly. But they had come not just for the festivities -- most were lending a hand, assembly-line-style, with the periodical itself. More
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Galleries
The Art of Reverse Engineering
What do disassembled wireless presenters, oscilloscopes, graphical representations of ones and zeroes, and destroyed muscle cars have in common? Reverse Engineering was probably not the first common thread to come to mind, but this theme is intriguingly explored in the fourth installation to grace the white walls of 20 goto10 gallery in Nob Hill. Spanning two long walls, this exhibit features the work of two local artists: Luis Miras and Spencer Mack. More
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Galleries
Open for Interpretation
Walking up the stairs to the Intersection for the Arts gallery, potential spectators might be somewhat bewildered at the sight that greets them; coating the steps is a sheet of white felt, covered with ostensibly Persian names, in dispassionate block letters. Among the more obscure appellations, one can pick out “Saddam” and “Osama” almost instantly, as the eye’s natural tendency is to wander to what’s recognizable and fill it out with familiar meaning. In some ways, you can say that’s the very crux of Taraneh Hemami’s collection of installation work, "Most Wanted". More
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Galleries
Exotification by Decoupage
One of the key themes explored by this modest show of pieces by local Asian American artists it that of Asians themselves as the object of a fetish. Walk down the street anywhere in San Francisco or the Bay Area , and you’ll spot several instances of what are uncharitably referred to as “rice kings” (or queens) -- tall, handsome and rich white guys with Asian girlfriends (or boyfriends). This phenomena does excite strange emotions in otherwise fair-minded people... More
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Galleries
The Breadth Of What We Fear
Terror is perhaps the major hot button term of our epoch. It used to define overwhelming fear, a sense of looming danger exemplified by an inability to act. At some point, that protean, not easily identifiable fear became alloyed by specific words and ideologies --such as the threat of systematic violence by hostile others, government intimidation, and the egregiously coined “War on Terror.” It’s impossible, these days, to even bethink the term without having it attributed to code red. More
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Galleries
A Room of One's Own
In the early 18th century, Fredrick I built the Amber Room, a small room with inlaid, hand-carved amber walls and bejeweled mosaics built as a gift for the Russian czar at the time, Peter the Great. After changing hands among the royalty of the day, the Amber Room was displaced during World War II, only for parts of it to resurface in Europe in the late 90s. It has since been reconstructed and is on display in various forms in museums and traveling shows, however, going to visit its modern day doppelganger is hardly the point of The Amber Room, a group exhibition of new work currently on display at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco. More
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Galleries
Four Artists Get Racy
These days, art galleries abound with the kind of staid conceptual stuff that might raise your eyebrows just a notch but won’t necessarily do much to get the juices flowing. Just in case the latter is what you’re looking for, a new exhibition at the Heather Marx Gallery, entitled “Naughty” for simplicity’s sake, is pretty straightforward in its objectives: namely, to plumb the depths of the racy and risqué. More
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Galleries
Eight Artists Get Loony
Here’s an etymology game that might seem patently obvious: derive the meaning of “Octonarius Lunius”. Most of you who had your Greek and Latin prefixes drummed into your head in grade school know that “octo” means “of or pertaining to eight.” “Lun” means “having to do with the moon.” The eight artists assembled in the eponymous group show might raise questions more relevant than word origins, but the “Loony Eight” is a suitable moniker for the crew, in only the most flattering sense. More
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Galleries
War and the Persistence of Memory
By now, the rupture between history and its present depiction is par for the course in contemporary art -- but Binh Danh and Elizabeth Moy go at it one further in their haunting menagerie of images culled from personal legacies of war and reflections on the abiding effects of human conflict. In a collaborative exhibition entitled Disrupted: A Photographic Installation About Memory, History & War, Danh and Moy string together narratives retrieved and woven anew from both original photographs and archival images of the Vietnam War. More
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Galleries
The Logo is Mightier than the Sword
This compact exhibit of graphic arts explores the political agendas of American social activist movements and the potent symbols used to convey their underlying messages. The historical range of these movements spans abolitionism through gay rights, and includes the United Farm Workers, Black Panthers, AFL-CIO, anarchism, IWW, ecology, nuclear disarmament, feminism, and the Resistance. More
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