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Galleries
By Libby Kountzman
Our intentions were simple: spend the first Saturday of Open Studios witnessing all the local-born artwork as three hours permitted. My only stipulation was that my two art-seeking friends and I select studios spontaneously. No artist pre-screening, no studio background checks. Keeping in this theme, our first stop was an antique store situated a stone's throw from the California College of Arts and Crafts campus. More
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Galleries
Beauty: When Hacking Occurs
Some of the most fascinating works of art come as a result of experimentation and endeavors in non-fine-arts related fields. Electrical engineer and “hardware hacker” Joe Grand has been dabbling with electronics for years, tweaking archaic computer systems and breathing new life into obsolete equipment. Though he’s been commissioned to create badges for computer security conventions, invents and designs consumer electronics and video gaming accessories, Grand has never thought of exhibiting his pieces as art. Now for the first time he’s displaying his work as an installation aptly named “When Electronics Become Art” at 20 goto 10. More
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Galleries
San Francisco artists findinspiration during wartime
As the epicenter of homeland dissent, and one of the most rapidly reactive art scenes in the states, it is no surprise that San Francisco has been host
to several highly politicized art events of late. The large number of shows devoted to the "war cause" is impressive. However, it is more than just the
breadth of exhibits that is capturing the public's attention. The quality and depth of thought displayed by so many of the artists is what is really setting the Bay Area art scene apart right now. .. 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
Aping Popular Culture
Popular culture and modern art have been entwined in an incestuous embrace for quite some time now. Therefore, art that appropriates the symbols and status of media iconography can no longer justifiably be called subversive -- not when irony was mastered nearly a century ago by the likes of Marcel Duchamp. More
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Galleries
A Playground in the Haight
What do Alice in Wonderland, The Beatles, and an urban fashion/art outfit have in common? Try a walrus. That's right, if you're keen to your surroundings you may have caught the easily recognizable walrus silhouette slapped on many a wall and street sign. According to an unnamed source, the significance of the walrus is its representation of not a single individual, but a faceless collective of people, which embodies Upper Playground's operation. More
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Galleries
From the Inside Out
It's more than likely you've heard something of 'XXX', Timothy Greenfield-Sanders recent series of 30 porn star portraits. Beyond an exhibition (that opened at the Mary Boone Gallery in October and is currently at John Berggruen), the project entails a hardbound book, in which contributors' pontifications on porn (Gore Vidal, Lou Reed, Karen Finley, and Salman Rushdie among them) are interspersed through the pages of portraits. The project is also the subject of 2 behind-the-scenes documentaries (one by HBO, the other 60 Minutes), and an audio track to boot. More
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Galleries
A Bonefide Art Form Makes a Comeback
A couple of weeks ago, the gritty underworld carnival of the Tenderloin surrendered a couple of sidewalk squares to a luau jubilantly splashing out of The Shooting Gallery. A hut-like umbrella loomed over a debonair crowd sloshing back exotic drinks from the bicycle-bar, chatting excitedly. The toast of this swinging soiree? The second coming of tiki art -- what is already being called "nouveau tiki". 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
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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