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Museums
By Rachel Churner
Can you create an exhibition around a title? Co-curators Elizabeth Armstrong and Victor Zamudio-Taylor have done just that in Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art currently at SFMOMA. What emerges from this masterful title is a collection of the contradictions and multiplicities inherent in the baroque itself. Used to describe a style of art prevalent in the 17th century that was characterized by bold ornamentation and contrasting elements, the term baroque also denotes grotesqueness, extravagance, and flamboyance. More
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Museums
By Rodrigo Diaz
Video as a medium has expanded our understanding of our sense of sight -- however it has come with limitations. Video footage of the Rodney King beating and recent terrorists attacks ingrain themselves in our collective psyche. Yet acquittals of the police officers, and analogies to an "action film come alive", elucidate video's failure to truly communicate "reality." This is the premise that Blind Vision: Video and the limits of Perception at the San Jose Museum of Art, through November 11, 2001, aspires to highlight, yet partially misses due to the selection of artists and a claustrophobic presentation. More
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Museums
By Greg Youmans
Few things are scarier than math. Other subjects, art for instance, may be daunting and inscrutable. But faced with difficult art, we can always defend ourselves with our imperious subjectivity, scoffing at an artwork's failure to affect us as intended, or, better yet, accusing a piece of simply not meaning anything. These are harder positions to take when math confronts us in our ignorance. For many of us, math is meaning. And when faced with the austere beauty of a parabola, reducible to a simple equation composed of numbers and symbols — into which the subjectivity and imprecision of language do not even enter! — a person can indeed feel s More
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Museums
By Julie Kim
It's hard not to like what's showing in the little hallway tucked away in the otherwise expansive Architecture & Design galleries at SFMOMA. It's an intimate space, reminiscent of the corridor connecting the bedroom and kitchen in your Victorian flat. A visit to this gallery provides a much needed respite from rainy-day-museum-overload, where you might find yourself wandering aimlessly from one large white box to the next, unable to really focus on or be enlightened by the art. There's only room enough for a handful of contemporary design pieces, so it's a good place to hide out if you really want to absorb. More
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Museums
Sampling / Christian Marclay
An examination of the relationship between sight and sound is at the center of SFMOMA's current Christian Marclay exhibit. Marclay, an artist whose career has spanned music and visual arts, seems to be gleefully challenging us to question what we are seeing as opposed to what we are hearing, and vice-versa. More
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Museums
Introductions South
Despite a title like (un)Common Ground, the emerging Bay Area talent included in this group show at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art displays a group mentality. This is not to say that they risk conformity. It's quite the opposite, in fact, because each body of work possesses a style unique unto itself. Rather, the artists compiled by curator Chris Oliveria seem to share a common dialogue, one that, aside from other less obvious factors, may result from their shared identity as Bay Area artists. More
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Museums
By Melissa Broder
The Cartoon Art Museum changes their Gorey at Bay exhibit every three months, presenting Edward Gorey lovers with a perennial buffet. For the rest of the population, a trip to the Cartoon Museum is inherently a mind-expanding experience. The current Gorey Stories exhibit altered my perspective on the validity of cartoons, both within a social context and in an aesthetic framework. This exhibit will continue until November 17th, when it will then be replaced by Gorey Details on November 23rd. More
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Museums
At the Musée Mécanique
Musée Mécanique reopened December 20, just in time for tourists lugging soggy presents to duck in out of the downpours and have a little fun. Having relocated from its previous home at the Cliff House, overlooking Ocean Beach, the Musée Mécanique is now a part of Fisherman's Wharf, one component of what is referred to as the 'Pier 45 Walk', which also includes World World II vessels the USS Pampanito, and the Jeremiah O’Brian. More
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Museums
The Hidden History of Woman Comics
Comic books have always been a boys' club. From the bulging muscles of Marvel superheroes to the hyper-sexualized women of R. Crumb, the overwhelming odor of adolescent male fantasy has permeated the form. In my ignorance of the comic world, I had no idea what to expect from an exhibition of female comic artists as I entered "She Draws Comics: Great Woman Cartoonists", currently showing at the Cartoon Art Museum. My reluctance to engage with comics has had a lot to do with the feeling that I could never "get" it; comics seemed to be in a wholly different language, created for boys by boys. What, I wondered, could be in it for me? More
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Museums
Innocence Lost
Beyond his treatment of common children's motifs - dolls, toys and ambivalent nymphets- Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's vision is shrouded in an aura of enigmatic darkness. With his giant color portraits of stillborn babies; paintings that juxtapose Nazi-era photographs with his own images; and pictures of deformed, abjectly countenanced children swathed in bandages, Helnwein is preoccupied with the indelible suffering that mirrors the more delicate aspects of youth. More
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