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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
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
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
At Frey Norris Gallery
Christine Wong Yap and Jenifer K. Wofford are two San Francisco-based artists whose work -- collectively ranging from comic-book-esque sketches of immigrant nurses to installations of paper bags embossed with cheeky truisms -- is more preoccupied with instances of the mundane than anything else. But glancing through “Sorry", a collection of their recent works at the Frey Norris Gallery, you needn’t wade through the playful renderings of everyday vernacular and ritualized habits to get to the heart of the show, which exploits the manner in which language and image are often shrouded in indeterminate, constantly changing meanings. More
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Galleries
The Legacy of Feminism
The question of what it means to be a woman might summon a few immediately stereotypical ideas (bras, lipstick, painful visits to the waxing salon), but at least in this generation, it’s becoming increasingly rare to find femaleness aligned with stalwart pronouncements of power or that dreaded “f” word: feminism. More
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Galleries
Youth, Imagination and Transformation
The new exhibition at indie arts space Intersection for the Arts predictably foregoes gallery gambits and examines the power of public art to create communal transformation. The concept of public art, at least in the art world, has largely been confined to high-brow ideas of site-specific installations meant to evoke eyebrow-raised reactions. More
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Galleries
Immediately upon entering Juice Design, a graphic design company which stages occasional art exhibits "for fun", the scope of the show is clear. Think small. The high ceilings and white surfaces exaggerate the little pieces mounted, hung, pinned and stapled to the walls. The artists were given space perimeters roughly the size of a bathroom tile from which to create "keepsakes"; the limitations gave the artists room to play with the concept of an object which exists as a tool of remembrance. The lack of overt political themes, with a few exceptions, makes sense as one surveys the room... More
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Galleries
Humans love to look at humans, particularly the broken ones. We crane our heads at car accidents, obsessively search for vicarious thrills on reality tv, stage freak shows, buy books about "modern primitives", and, in an especially crass gaze into the void, make a whole subgenre of films devoted to capturing the moment of death. The Mutter Museum, founded when Dr. Thomas Dent Mutter presented his unique collection of specimens to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1858, has long been a cult favorite for the pathologically curious... More
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Galleries
Celebrating 20 Years with a show at CCAC's Logan Galleries
Stepping into the weathered two-tone green bus, my attention was immediately divided. The surroundings were both foreign and familiar; stickers in both Arabic and English abounded, with lived-in details like a rabbit-foot keychain hanging out of the ignition and jangly skeleton hanging on the dashboard. It was Ken Kesey's bus, made for the Middle East. Sunlight flitted through the slats, filtered through different colored shades as one went towards the back of the bus. Time was rendered meaningless by the shades, obscuring any attempt to gauge the light outside. Instead of seats, there were cabins with carefully pasted newspaper comics, enig More
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Galleries
Exhibition At the Presidio
How long does it take to transform a traditionalist Eastern nation into a modern Westernized one? For Japan, it took roughly forty-four years. During the Meiji Era (1868-1912), Japan went through a culture-wide shift of ideals that sent her charging into a world predominantly governed by Western powers. More
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