Along with nine, hand-selected participants, artist Desirée Holman has spent the last two years developing a series of avatars. The resulting project, Heterotopias, 2011, a video and supporting drawings on view now at the Berkeley Art Museum, refers to corporeal reality’s relationship to virtual reality, the physical process by which the digitally rendered avatar is formed, and the ironic stasis of the body whilst the[…..]
Much is written about the biography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. A Navy man, born in Illinois, he attended Williams College through the Navy’s V-12 program. He became a licensed optician and lived most of his life in Lexington, KY. In 1950, before his first child was born, he made a life changing decision: he bought a camera. That’s when he found his new calling. He[…..]
Lynn Hershman Leeson is historic. Some of the most exciting moments of her recent documentary on feminist art, !W.A.R., or !Women Art Revolution, 2010, were shot on her own living room couch. She and her alter-ego, Roberta Breitmore, are synonymous with an era of women’s art to which all artists (especially—but not exclusively—women) owe a great debt. But we are no longer in the seventies. […..]
In our attempts to decode new art, we often skip over a fundamental process that helps make art function: false perceptions. Artists often make things that deceive. The metaphysical disconnect between the object that we are looking at and the intellectual experience is the subject of Otherworldly at the Museum of Art & Design, which focuses on dioramas, models, snow globes, and other illusionary sculptures[…..]
Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying In the yellow haze of the sun There were children crying and colors flying All around the chosen ones All in a dream, all in a dream – Neil Young, After the Gold Rush, 1970 Recent contemporary photography, particularly examples frequenting the walls of major museums, often seems drained of political poignancy, given over instead to[…..]
Writing about “Bay Area Now 6” calls to mind the joke about the elephant described by six blind men. With 18 artists showing 98 objects, its identity depends on where you stand. This triennial survey of current art in the San Francisco Bay area is a leviathan, a potpourri of media, artists and diverse agendas. Making matters more difficult, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts—with[…..]
An athletic international globe-trotter, Shaun Gladwell‘s first solo show in the US is Matrix 162 at the Wadsworth Atheneum. The exhibition is of five videos (2005 through 2010) and one still image from a video. It ends up reading as a sort of mini-retrospective. It brings together work from his early preoccupation with extreme sports and urban motion through his reflection on the Mad Max[…..]
