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Galleries
In the work of video artists Ellen Lake and Catherine Ross, there's an overt obsession with thwarting viewer expectations. Both Lake and Ross wed the weird with the humdrum, and seemingly mundane video footage with loopy fantasy. The two artists exhibit new and recent video work in Obsessive Absence at New Langton Arts; the culminating effect is the sort of quaint beauty you can only find in giant colorful rubber band balls and cartoonish headgear at amusement parks. More
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Galleries
Most people know Elliot. You know someone who knows Elliot if you don't know Elliot yourself. Chances are good you have been invited to a performance, art opening, or some kind of event at Build, the intimate gallery space at 483 Guerrero, between 16th and 17th Streets. Sometime in the year 2000, after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute with a B.F.A. in interdisciplinary studies, Elliot Lessing took over the storefront art space. Previous to assuming a role as Executive Director of Build, Lessing ran Art Hut, a space for site-specific artist installations based in the living room of his home in the upper Haight. In the last insta More
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Galleries
Have you ever wanted to show someone the best scar on your body - to tell someone what happened to you, or what you think of that scar today? Harrell Fletcher wants to see your scar. He wants to hear your story and, most of all, he wants to use his art to collaborate with as many people as he can. Fletcher's most recent collaborative projects, currently on display at New Langton Arts, trace the paths he's taken across the world and the various ways he uses his practice to observe and document the people and places he's experienced. More
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Galleries
The Dark Cartoonery of Bill Dunlap
"Sex, death, and booze," admits San Francisco painter Bill Dunlap. "That's basically what I'm about." As easy as it is for Dunlap to deconstruct his iconic depictions of virtue and vice, there's a deeper resonance within the cartoonish nature of his work that arises from the unsettling but inevitable acceptance of life's temptations. There's also a not-so-subtle sense of humor and irony evident from both the colorful, rubbery style of his subjects and the seemingly incongruent subtitles that often accompany them... More
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Galleries
Excavations
As San Francisco's electronic music scene explodes in popularity, it becomes harder and harder to find original, innovative dance music at intimate offbeat venues. The city's trademark soulful and sexy House moved the megaclub masses from coast to coast with a classic sound embedded in the styles and standards it established years ago. Recently Electro-Clash came and went through the city's smaller clubs but its cheeky amalgam of retread 80's rock and dirty beats retreated back to Brooklyn... More
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Galleries
The Brutality of the Everyday
Beautiful Ugly Violence, Margaret Harrison's newest body of work, is the result of her recent residence and collaboration with Intersection for the Arts and is on display through May 8. A pioneer of British feminism, Margaret Harrison's first solo exhibit in 1971 was shut down by British police who deemed the work, particularly an image of Hugh Hefner as a near-nude Playboy bunny girl, "offensive". Her work has continued with a fierce (and, obviously, often funny) feminist critique ever since. More
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Galleries
The Persistence of Celebrity
All appreciators of modern art owe a debt to Salvador Dali. Granted, he was one of those artists whose reputations inevitably precede their legacies; he's just as known for his feverish landscapes and evanescing clocks as he is for his braggadocio and impossible mustache. Dali hob-knobbed with the likes of Luis Bunuel and Federico Garcia Lorca; and he achieved international rock star status among the paparazzi, fashionistas, and poo-bahs of the avant garde. Dali was never admired for his subtlety, and his compulsive penchant for self-multiplication in both his life and his art happily invite lampooning... More
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Galleries
A Matter of Perspective
It is rare when we discover a location where the connection between our bodies, our vision and our experiences can exist together in a thick sea of images, but Bay Area artists Deniz Demirer and Alex Killough have given us the opportunity to do just that in their installation, Video Symphony: Sequence to Simultaneity: Body Motion, Tech Motion showing at Ego Park Gallery in Oakland. More
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Galleries
New Work by Felipe Dulzaides and Robin Rhode
The exhibit features new works by Cuban-born artist Felipe Dulzaides (based in San Francisco) and South African-born Robin Rhode (based in Berlin). Both artists offer an international array of performance, video, photography, and sculptural installation that borrows from a diverse stable of influences and themes from Hip-Hop culture to family water parks. As appraisals of institutions, civic free-for-alls, viewer expectations, and the meaning we invest in objects, the assembled work transforms common objects and familiar places into stylish meditations on place and context. More
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Galleries
Strangers in a Strange Land
White powdery footprints, detailed with an intricate Persian flower motif, mark the way up Intersection's black stairs and into the gallery, which has been transformed into a liminal locale - a traditional Iranian coffee - house spattered with hip-hop paraphernalia. More
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