Connections--Contemporary Art, Architecture, Urbanism, and Memory

NEW LANGTON ARTS
In Residence
Pete Nelson and Tercerunquinto



After two weeks in residency at New Langton Arts, Pete Nelson and the collective Tercerunquinto each created mega size installations in different sections of the gallery.

New Langton Arts’ Archive For Sale: A Sacrificial Act
Here's something we never thought of before. Banker’s boxes as art. It's not like you can’t make a 30 year art history housed in tables full of file boxes compelling, right? Tercerunquinto, a collective formed by artists Julio Castro, Gabriel Cázares, and Rolando Flores has nailed organizational aesthetics and zeroed in on New Langton’s art’s most valuable asset: its historical memory. It's truly brilliant. Maybe visually bland, but mentally intriguing.
For more discussion: http://langtonblog.wordpress.com

What would happen if New Langton Arts, a cash poor non-profit with 30 years of history tied to the emergence of new art forms, (photographic, audio, and video docs and files full of communications with artists and fiscal paperwork) put all of it up for sale? Tercerunquinto sees it as a “sacrificial act” -relinquishing things that define you in order to survive. What are the possible different offers, the appraisal, and all the other elements that would come into play if New Langton sold their history? It’s simply an instillation, we don’t know if New Langton will decide to do it, but provocative ideas often reap interesting results. Well worth thinking about.

Pete Nelson’s installation about foundations uses the gallery space as his medium. His sculptural pieces involve the links between a time clock, a room size pink inflated blimplike structure and an assemblage of wood, mirrors and a little text. “Foundations” refers to the support for the structures and the invisible groundwork of social expectations and right and wrong. www.newlangtonarts.org

Triple Base Gallery
Double Blind
Jay Nelson and Bryson Gill
September 7 - October 7, 2007


Brought together by a shared interest in site-specific and multi-disciplinary contemporary art practice, Triple Base Gallery’s co-curators Joyce Grimm and Dina Pugh invited artists Bryson Gill and Jay Nelson to create their current show, Double Bind. San Francisco-based artists and long-time friends, Gill and Nelson are presenting new paintings that illustrate both their common sensibilities and recent divergences. They attended California College for the Arts together and often influenced one another in their work. For this exhibition neither saw the other's work in process as an experiment to see what differences or similarities would emerge. The results pull in many directions without any clear visual recipes gathered. Quietly bubbling and percolating, they seem less the same than different. www.basebasebase.com




Lincart
Michael S. Moore and Bob Van Breda

Michael Moore is showing daily watercolor paintings, capturing the changing light and shadows of the high desert in and around the Northern Great Basin along with large landscape paintings. “I spend a lot of time on the desert,” Moore says. The monochrome seeming sagebrush ocean of the northern basin navigating playas in pickups, scrambling around in rocky canyons, staring at rabbits, birds, and bugs. Silence or wind; the occasional truck on the county road. My paintings were always about this country even before I came into it over thirty years ago. It’s nice over here; the light is hard and brilliant, and there’s more weather than a person might reasonably expect. I try to make work about that, about the coalescence of the image and its realization, and about the silence. Slow paintings, which bear watching.”

Conte #40, Bob Van Breda


Bob Van Breda captures the fun in chewed-up pencils. Artsy qualities included, his room full of highly sharpened assemblages are models for mischievious skyscrapers pointing like fingers, upwards and out. As Lincart says, “It’s Pick Up Sticks meets Lincoln Logs as Bob pegs pencil onto pencil, building mock-ups for public art that function entirely on their own as Pencil Sculptures.” Let be honest, makes you want to go play in your own pencil box don’t it? We might not all be trained as architects and I have low expectations for my own results but his idea is contagious. See it at your own risk. You might fall in love. www.lincart.com

Catharine Clark Gallery
150 Minna Street new address
The Depravities of War
Sandow Birk
September 8-October 20



Incurion, Sandow Birk

Many words have been written about this exhibition of 15 large-scale woodblock prints that investigate the Iraq war, after the set of etchings titled Miseries of War by Jacque Callot, 1592-1635. Suffice it to add that this show is more powerful than anything else we’ve seen about this war, with equal parts ironic criticism, tenderness and humor. Just go see it. Intelligent, generous and very present, each print holds enough content to make a great film. www.cclarkgallery.com

SFMOMA
Take Your Time
Olafur Eliasson

While we were in the neighborhood we couldn’t resist the chance to wrap up in a blanket to see Olafur Eliasson’s show at MOMA, Take Your Time. Yikes. What makes art hot when it’s so cold? What did Mom use to say? “If you don’t have anything nice to say, hush up, but we won’t let that stop us, in the minority as we are on this one. So many terrific recommendations but we respectfully disagree, not that Eliasson will give a care….It’s eye-gouging and all but somehow, we thought it just weird. Because he could de-construct a car and cover it with ice we would consider it fine art. Being from Chicago, it did stir up some memories but is it engineering and chemistry or is it art? Wow, sorry, what brought on that fit of judgement? Anyway, what we mean is, the show left us cold. On the other hand, we both enjoyed the Felix Schramm show, Collider, on the 4th floor where a titling wall slices through walls and corridors. Stay tuned.

MarinMOCA
Re-newal, opens Sept 29, 2007
The second show of this burgeoning museum will feature the work of 15+ Bay Area artists. This show, Re-newal, features encaustic works juried by Bob Nugent, Ab Ex painter and Professor Emeritus, Sonoma State University. The opening for this exquisite show is Sept 29, 5-8 pm. Mark your calendars and pop on over to discover and explore this exciting art form and Marin's newest museum. Culture at every turn. www.marinmoca.org