Category: Art

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D, Shrimp, Cheese, Neel, Davide

Friday night was D’s birthday, and since he wasn’t in the mood to compete with Reese’s attention demands, we celebrated last night. He invited several charming friends of his and their dogs over to a dinner that I made to his precise specifications, “Spaghetti–NOT fettucine, NOT penne–spaghetti, and a Caesar salad, with SHRIMP–BAY shrimp,” etc, etc… He asked to watch Meet Me in Saint Louis after dinner, which gave the atmosphere an even more festive pall. What a strange film. It’s almost like a vaudeville show, with intensely entertaining musical interludes woven into and around several potentially volatile plotlines that fizzle out before anybody gets too upset–except Margaret O’Brien, that is, who flips out at the prospect of moving to New York after big sis Judy serenades her with “Have yourself a mery little Christmas,” and destroys the snow people on the lawn out front with a bat. And the color and costumes are fabulous. Dean told me it was the best birthday he’s ever had. It was the dogs. He’s a real dog person. He’s so hairy that I think they look at him as one of their own. I was very happy to have made him happy. He can be a tough cookie to please.

BC and I did make it to Neel Eargood’s show on Polk yesterday (731 Polk, Tues-Sat 10-6, through 3/31). He’s created gridded works of stained glass and metal that float in space as rolled or delicately undulating sheets. He combines colors, or just patterns in clear glass, so that lights falls on and through the works in very beautiful ways. His titles are often hilarious, if not self-referential, like “Gimme Some of That Hot Cubic Tube.” Cara Barnard and Duane, the artists showing with him, create abstract graphic forms on paper and canvas that render in two dimensions a flatness and organic weirdness that extend Neel’s play with light and form into the Freudian. Get thee down to Polk Street, LJers and support our very own Neel.

Later, I had a lovely complaining session with Davide over coffee at that place next to Superstar on Castro, which used to be a really nice cafe with comfy seats and good panini, but is now a place with okay panini and seats that are not only uncomfortable, but are like 4 feet off the ground, inducing vertigo and dangly feet. I love talking with Davide, and am grateful for his emotional breadth.

I didn’t make it to any other exhibitions this week, but will make it to first Thursday openings this week. Come along.

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Canceled

My New York debut has been canceled. Let’s say “postponed.” The gallery director is seriously ill, and his partner is closing the gallery at the end of the month. I’m still planning to be there, though, from March 5-26, and am eager to see my friends, real and virtual, and to explore the rich cultural atmosphere of that marvelous city. For anyone who might be interested, there’s an exhibition that now sits in 8 boxes in my studio, ready to hang!

Pencil in a time to take me out for a drink, New Yorkers.  I need one.

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Waiting For the Axe to Fall. Or Not

Yesterday I received a call from the gallery director in New York. His partner’s seriously ill, he’s overwhelmed—he might have to close the gallery and cancel my show. I’ve spent a year putting together this show, my first solo show in New York. I took in many extra grueling garden jobs last year to raise the $10,000 for printing and framing, sublet an apartment in New York for 3 weeks to hustle people into my show, my family bought plane tickets to be at the opening, my east coast friends who have never seen my work are flying in to spend time with me at the show, I printed my own invitation that’s arriving next week… I put all I had into it designing a beautiful exhibition for the space. I’ve tried for years to get my work to New York. I had concerns about this gallery from the start, but decided to look at the show as a sort of open studio, to get people in to actually see my art, because the scale is something that can’t be grasped in slides or over the internet—that maybe this would lead to something better…

I told the gallery director that I’d really like him to think about what we can do to make this show happen. Because of the partner’s illness, no press release has been sent out, no invitation printed, nothing. The show opens in less than three weeks. I’ve offered to step in (having run a gallery for 5 years) and do a lot of the detail work that he relied on his partner to do… He’s going to call me today and let me know his final answer.

I’d like to say that I’m prepared for the worst, that I’ve already run this scenario over in my mind, but honestly I never imagined the gallery closing. I thought at least I’d have the work shown. This is a disappointment so deep that I feel my chest caving in just imagining it. So I wait for the call… How do I pick myself up, strap my boots on, and start all over again?

On the bright side, I have 8 big boxes with 52 framed photos, 12 sound pieces, and 2 videos ready to be shipped to a gallery near you…

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Davide and Mack

I met Davide at StarBears this afternoon, to get caught up on the latest in the worlds of academia, love, and Asian cinema. Mack stopped by and gave me a big hug and chatted a bit. He had a filthy red ribbon dangling from his neck, which he explained matter-of-factly to someone was a “ball tie,” like we all have one. I told him that a few weeks ago I checked my website statistics and noticed that my site visitors jumped by about 1,000/day and traced the link to his site, where he had posted a book cover that included two of my photos of him and Jack Radcliffe as well as a link to my website. He called me “buddy,” totally melting my butter, right there in front of everybody. No one else exudes such aromatic musky über-friendliness than that Mack truck of a manly man Mack. Ow-ow-ow…ah-oooooooOOOOOOOOO!

And Davide’s doing really well.

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Aural Hallucinations

I saw a sound performance tonight by Carl Stone at Meridian Gallery–the kind where the artist sits in front of a laptop and occasionally moves his head while we listen to 40 minutes of feedback. The piece that he performed was a nice mix of completely lush melodic passages and total abstract cyclical pulsing. After about 20 minutes of the pulsing electronica, I started to aurally hallucinate, thinking that I could clearly hear telephones ringing and mermaids singing. It was totally great. I went with Dean Smith, who will be showing there with me in June. He’s probably going to be showing his completely amazing thoughtform films, and I’m either going to make a very grand sound piece, or show some very furry photos and a small sound piece–not quite sure yet so stick around for further developments.

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Fashion Bears

from today’s New York Times, and just in time for you to go out and get something appropriate to wear to my opening in New York:

…Mr. Varvatos’s challenge to the status quo for men was meek in comparison with that of John Bartlett, who based his collection on a hairy and hypermasculine segment of the gay population known as “bears,” and within that category of manly gay men, a subset that paradoxically likes fashion. As Mr. Bartlett described the clothes — including a loden cashmere peacoat and see-through merino wool long johns he set to a dance remix of the music from “Brokeback Mountain” — what makes them more appealing than, say, an affordable wool jacket from Pendleton, is that “even the most butch of creatures love luxury.”

Some designers would tell men that the difference between luxury and affordable is a matter of apples and oranges. But not Mr. Bartlett, who sees only bananas.

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Sounds Like…

I spent the bulk of the day working on the sound piece for my next show. I mixed and edited six of the twelve channels, but have no idea how they’re going to all sound together yet. I’ve taken an online project that I made a while back, which depended on user interaction, and am replacing my active viewer with a passive participant. Yes, I’m versatile, and UB2! There are six players (two channels each), and the lengths of the pieces, which repeat, are varied, so there will be a different combination of sounds at all times. I’m hoping to finish the sound this week, and then see how it all works next week, making adjustments as necessary.

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A Gallery-ing With Emily

Emily and I went gallery hopping today. Our first stop was at Haines, for the Kota Ezawa show. He’s become this big art star since I last saw his work, so it was actually a little difficult to focus on the content because I was adding up all the red dots. His show is calledThe History of Photography Remix and consists of iconic photographic images culled from the history of art and pop culture. The images are scanned and then output as flat Matisse-like cutouts, abstracting the diverse imagery into a single cohesive cartoony vision. It’s conceptual work that aims to please, very slick and seductive, reductive in a way that plays to intellectual concerns and looks great with contemporary interiors.

The Katy Grannan portraits at Fraenkel are installed beautifully, with the walls painted gray and the lights dimmed. Her portraits are of individuals, mostly scantily clad, who expose themselves to the camera in either shallow water or this really uncomfortable-looking dark sylvan glade. The forest location seems like a trysting spot, hard to imagine as a place for a picnic, like the photographer and model sneaked off to this secluded woods together to strip and get all photographic.

The rest of 49 Geary was uneventful, except for running into Jack Fisher, who now has a gallery there. As I walked by and read his sign, I blurted out, “Jack Fisher–I used to garden for a Jack Fisher” and out walked Jack Fisher, whose garden I used to take care of. He’s been there since June, unbeknownst to me since I typically avoid that portion of the 4th floor because I can never sneak past my former dealer without being spotted and always get sucked into some endless conversation as the hours twitter away with me unable to get in an “I really must be going…” Anyway, it was great to see him there and chat, for he’s a swell down-to-earth fellow, sure to rattle the building with his eclectic tastes and honest vision.

The Luggage Store, our final destination, featured the work of three fairly obsessive artists in a show called Explosive Compulsive. The show included cut paper lattice diagrams of the human nervous system, big cut paper Rorschach-y things, and large surreal apocalyptic scroll paintings. I couldn’t tell who did what, but the artists were Jen Liu, Reed Anderson, and Adriane Colburne. Laurie and Daryl, the directors, told me that for the next show an artist is flying in an actual chunk of a New Haven, Connecticut street, and even recreating the weather conditions with snow and a cloud that he’s making with a “cloud machine.” The Luggage Store rocks!

And speaking of contemporary interiors, my bedroom is unseasonably bright and mod now, with my new triple-tiered 3/4 Coco-sized Modeline globe lamp!

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D, Chris, Chris, Chris, Brett, and two more Chrisses

D and three of his Chrisses–me, BC, and a super sweet lumberjack-y dude friend of D’s–went to see Brokeback Mountain yesterday. I had already written my LiveJournal entry about the film, in my head, prior to seeing it, but mentally tore it up as I shlepped my weeping Chrissy from the Embaracadero over to the Ferry Building for lunch. Yes, I would love for love between men to be repesented as incidental one day, and for the phrase “but I’m not queer” to be something that filmmakers would find way too regressive to have their characters actually say, but until then, I’m content to be moved to tears by the frustrated longing and epic one-night stand of these two sheep-boys.

Another surprise, and Davide, you’re going to be thrilled to hear me say this, was Spielberg’s Munich, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner, which, although still presenting the nuclear family as the core of the universe, was an utterly absorbing and fascinating film. The point of the film is that violence only begets more violence, and in an extreme deviation from Spielberg’s typical point of view, there aren’t just good guys and bad guys. This point is demonstrated elegantly through the transformation of the central character from idealist patriot to shattered exile. At the end of the film, his wife watches him as he makes passionate and detached love to her, his mind focused on the brutal deaths of the hostages and kidnappers, observing his dual and conflicting roles as murdering patriot son and life-giving father.

D wanted ham last week, so for the next month or so I’ll be making hammy things. I baked a ham like my mom and dad make for New Year’s, with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries. It’s like meat candy. My daphne odora “rubra” opened today, and its scent is filling my house with an intoxicating lushness–a contrasting high note to the smell of the ham and split pea soup simmering in the kitchen. The winter is my favorite time of year for sniffing. There’s the smell of wet leaves, Presto logs, and moist bark, daphne in January, sarcacoca… I imagine that the few pollinating insects left in town are lured like little buzzing zombies to these intensely fragrant blooms. The smells of winter are like a musty armpit, upstaging the stimuli of the other senses.

If I were the type who made New Year’s resolutions, and I’m not, so I won’t, but if I did, it’d have something to do with being more like the kind of person who makes New Year’s resolutions.

After meeting two more Chrisses, I bumped into cutie pie Brett Reichman at a party last night, one of my favorite artists, forever pixie-like. He’s finally left Rena, who sold his work but rarely showed it, and will be showing at Paula Anglim in April. Mark your calendars, lads and lassies–Brett’s work is a technical and conceptual tour-de-force, stimulating to both eye and mind.

I really wanted to tie all of these disparate thoughts together, but there’s a bear in the bed.

I’ll be a-gallerying on Thursday with Emily, if anyone would like to tag along…

Quote of the day:

Why can’t we shoot a few counterrevolutionary elements? After all, dictatorship is not like embroidering flowers.
–Yao Wenyaun

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Holiday Crown of Roots: The Passion of My Palm

A few weeks ago, I noticed that the Phoenix roebelenii (Pygmy date palm) in my living room seemed higher in its pot, the soil actually starting to spill over the top of the planter. I had planted it with about an inch of space between the top of the soil and the top of the pot and figured that it was a little too happy and that it had outgrown its pot already–but after only one year? I took it outside to repot it and upon pulling it free of its terra cotta planter, discovered that it had devoloped a perfect ring of roots on the bottom that sure enough had slowly pushed the plant up.