Great Show

Last night BC and I schlepped over to the east bay to visit Michale Damm’s temporary Remote Satellite Gallery. Michael collaborated with 2 other artists, Léonie Guyer and Kyle Knobel, each of whom activated the space in very different but complementary ways. Approaching the gallery, we first encountered Michael’s video work projected onto a scrim seamlessly stretched across the storefront of the space, with dreamy images of reflections in water, pigeons, and of various crumbling rusted details of his neighborhood. Inside the gallery, Kyle installed a linear series of small drawings, each of the same pair of handlebars, but each slightly different. I thought of the exercise of trying to draw a perfect circle, and then of something found in the neighborhood, and connected the film still-like quality of his installation to Michael’s moving imagery. Léonie penciled in barely visible outlines of her various little organic-y feminine-y shapes on the surface of one of the walls. A tiny 1/2 inch shape was painted red, and a few of the pencil shapes were drawn on paper that moved slightly, like little breaths, up and down with the passage of people. Her work drew attention to the sploches on the gallery floor and stains on the ceiling as if her work were a natural extension of the building’s own markings, just more delicate and refined. Everything, actually, seemed like an extension of the building’s own expression, and its locale. Altogether, a completely elegant and thought-provoking show.