Joe's Enchanting Abstraction

Joe: Richard Serra's version
Joe: Hiroshi Sugimoto's version
Joe: Jonathan Safran Foer's version
Joe: Joseph Pulitzer, Jr's version
Joe: Your experiential version

So many amazing people are part of this, that I need only share it, without comment.

"Presence of the Missing"

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park,
Riehen, Switzerland 1997-98

Wrappings: remind me of elegance and death
it is like beauty comes full circle with its life span

Christo and Jean Claude are fascinating installation artists whose sketches can often be equally incredible. After viewing Christina Pettersson's pieces at MM Galleries and really processing them, I was brought back to Christo and Jean Claude. The bricks Pettersson draws and the flow of her bodies remind me of the couple's building wrapping sketches. The translucence of each is what attracts me. While one is a sketch for a future installation and the other a finished piece they both lead the viewer through new places of the past.


"The temporality of a work of art creates a feeling of fragility, vulnerability and an urgency to be seen, as well as a presence of the missing, because we know it will be gone tomorrow.

The quality of love and tenderness that human beings have towards what will not last - for instance the love and tenderness we have for childhood and our lives - is a quality we want to give to our work as an additional aesthetic quality." cited


Christina Pettersson
MM Galleries
Mirabile Visu
A graduate of RISD, recently moved back to southern Florida, where she grew up.


I get suspicious when viewing works done with only graphite or black ink. I question the integrity of the artist, wondering what they are saying or what the work says about their energy involved in the piece. After standing in front of Pettersson's graphite drawings, I found a depth convincing me that these images take one places. The visual subjects, bricks and people, each contain rich textures, finite detail, and a surrealist nature. The emptiness, created through the floating images and the simple medium, contributes to the depth.

Electric Innovations

N. Sean Glover
M1 Gallery
Long Time Collective Plus One Exhibit
Oct.26- Nov. 9 2007

Playful drawings that make creatures out of boom boxes. His positive/negative images, created with simple black and white ink, make the drawings more about the balance of space and abstract shapes. He stands out in this exhibit, due to the use of 2D and sculptural mediums. A pile of boom boxes with cords collected in a trail, just as in the drawings, reminds me of balloons with their strings all gathered together, keeping them in a group and safe from floating off.
Glovers sculpture also incorporates light by reproducing formations created by stars in the night sky. The materials he uses are old kitchen pots and pans with holes punctured through where the projected light comes out. This is among his latest work for 2006-2007.

You can check out a YouTube video of his work for more visual understanding. If you are in Ireland you can check out the group show he is part of titled, "City of Ideas" in Galway this November.

The incorporation of technology as art is something his wife, Elizabeth, also in the LTC show, does. You can view her work here!

You Belive Their Definition Because...

Above: Lucretia

Serena Cole
Group Show: Mirabile Visu, at MM Galleries through November 26, 2007



The exhibit is based in memories from youth, carried as dreams, and causing distorted expectations for life. Cole's paintings of women, inspired from fashion magazines and pop culture, questions the Western standards of beauty. Her women are eerily attractive, in a familiar-to-your-association-with clothing and make-up advertisements. Throughout, Cole displays her ability to manipulate watercolor, pen, and at times gold leaf for an ephemeral experience with beauty.Having just finished her BFA in painting at CCA, she is pursuing future exhibits in San Francisco and beyond.



The overall gallery space is surprisingly peaceful and airy. All white interior, second floor location, tall ceilings, friendly gallery staff, and plenty of viewing space to accommodate many visitors.

Other notable artist in show: Michele Muennig

Underneath or Through

This piece is part of a group show at Swankety Swank until the middle of November.
1808 Mc Allister St. at Baker St.

To Calm Yourself

Hiroshi Sugimoto

When his seascapes were on exhibit at the de Young I only got to visit them twice...I wanted so much more. Now he is at the Asian Art Museum and it will only wet your tongue in reaching your Sugimoto satisfaction.

This show is of small detailed items. They provide windows towards understanding and insight to other works he has done. Two such items are: "Time's Arrow," a small gilt bronze reliquary frame containing one of his seascapes and "Treasure Pagoda With Seaview Crystal Ball," a sculpture through which you can see a seascape upside down.

I was unable to find strong images of either of these but recommend his portfolio for other works.


Among his many exhibitions, I pulled out a few titles, as they most resemble what the viewer experiences.


1985
The Art of Memory/The Loss of History, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

1990
Reorienting: Looking East, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow/Nicola Jacobs Gallery, London

1994
Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan/ Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York/San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

2003
Liquid Sea, Museum of Contemporary of Art, Sydney

Contrasting Realities?

Aftermodern, a gallery centered on showing artists who create pieces that "uniquely probe the contemporary
urban experience in terms of the social, sexual, political and spiritual constructs that define our collective existence." What more could you want?

This weekend is the last time you can catch Charles Anselmo's photographs at this space. His portraits of Cuba dig out a reality disconnected from Americans due to varying layers of language, culture, political history, and the need for severe personal perseverance.

Aftermodern, along with five other galleries, is open this Saturday from 1pm-5pm as part of the "Last Saturday Art Walk" in SoMa.

Our Bodies Are Beautiful

Above: "Tall Cotton" Ceramic 53.00" x 23.00" x 42.00"

Kathy Venter
Grew up in South Africa. Now residing in Canada.
On exhibit at Sculpturesite Gallery


These bodies created from terracotta and hydro-stone met me rejoicing in our shared feminine shape. The truth of life that these sculptures presented came in their random patches of plaster. The naked but covered sculpture, woman, being.

The press release has an accurate right up, along with more detail on the process taken to make these forms.


Her last exhibit at Sculpturesite, Immersion II, is worth viewing as well.

Sarah's Choirs

Above: Gleam Like Amethyst
48” x 24” acrylic on wood



Weekends bring quiet days in the Financial District, as we all know. The Yerba Buena Alliance's gallery walk was perfect for such quiet streets. Six galleries within three blocks, all but one greeting viewers with traditional treats of wine and delicious cheese. Unfortunately, I did not make it inside Crown Point Press. On my way over, I heard sirens and watched red engines turn the corner towards the gallery entrance. Little did I know, until I opened the door to find people evacuating, that indeed the fire was inside. Not to worry, first Thursday's is coming up and I'll be back!


I spent more time viewing "Sugar Hinged" by Sarah Sohn, than I did anywhere else the whole Gallery Walk. Her work emits femininity, cellular construction, transparency, and delicacy. The depth her work contains, continually surprises you.

A Study in Line

Connection Means More Than Touching


Will We Keep Growing?


Budding From The Beginning

After finishing this group of drawings, Ruth Asawa immediately came to mind. Her intricate hanging wire sculptures with their "forms within forms" amaze me. It is neat to see how I have been influenced by her on a simple level, which I hope grows to be something greater.

Swimming in the Fall

(16x20 acrylic on paper)

I am pleased with the way this painting turned out. Now, I would like to enlarge it and reproduce it on canvas.

Transparency

Open Studios is approaching its third weekend!

Jhina Alvarado will be exhibiting works from her collection titled "Fail the Fallen."
3587 19th Street at Guerrero October 20-21

Her use of heat and malleable materials (encaustics), separates the work into layers, that provide moments of limbo as they play off each other. Reading the end of her artist statement, I smile thinking how I find myself attempting similar feats in my own work.

I've Got a Girl in the War

Sandow Birk: "Depravities of War"

Catherine Clark Gallery

Great gallery space. She just relocated from 49 Geary to Minna St this past Summer. Cement walls, garage door, high ceilings, small secret room and dual street entrances.

Birk's large wood block prints measuring 48 x 96 inches in size peacefully fit in with the clean interior of the gallery. The sharp, clean black and white prints affect the viewer by contrasting with the subject matter: war.

In comparison to color works of Birk's, these provide the viewer with more contemplation space while viewing.

My pick: "Occupation"

If you go, don't miss the news recordings that are clipped to produce a new dialoge between political figures.

Sugimoto in Style

"With textures, colors, and shapes worthy of definition as sculpture"

Sugimoto's seascapes were incredible on exhibit at the de Young, Summer 2007. Now, the new Japanese fashion exhibit at the Asian Art Museum, incorporates his photographs with the architecture of the garments from 1983-2007.
My favorite, Sweater and skirt by Rei Kawakubo.


http://www.asianart.org/stylizedsculpture.htm

Get Out There

The Intersection for The Arts closing reception with artist talk today. 2pm

An exhibit revealing the creation of art from mundane surroundings that reconstructs the way one views objects easily taken for granted and displays the progression of understanding made through the patterns of human life.


Artists:
Tamara Albaitis, Lauren Davies, Krishna Khalsa, Stephani Martinez & Zachary Royer Scholz

http://www.theintersection.org/calendar/program_gallery.php