As part of our ongoing partnership with KQED Arts, today we bring you a review of  Electronic Pacific at SOMArts in San Francisco. Author Roula Seikaly notes that the exhibition provides, “a moment to consider what we say, how we say it, and to whom, as globalization propels us toward an uncertain future.” This review was originally published on July 24, 2013.

Jenny O’Dell. 195 Yachts, Barges, Cargo Lines, Tankers and Other Ships, 2009-2011; digital print.

In the trailer for his 2006 film Babel, director Alejandro González Iñárritu includes a voiceover, one reciting a well-known passage from the Book of Genesis that tells of a unified language and pervasive understanding that man enjoyed prior to the Flood. That clarity, that point of agreement was troubled when dissimilar languages — understood here as a metaphor for different identities and interests — were introduced and the disparate tribes with which we associate were formed. Iñárritu’s inclusion of the voiceover is a predictable cinematic trope, but it raises issues about what and how we communicate, and how that dialogue is often overwhelmed by other concerns. Electronic Pacific, which opened at SOMArts on July 11, takes up the increasingly digitized exchange of art and language in the work of eighteen artists that span the complex divide between countries around the Pacific Rim.

The main gallery at SOMArts is not the easiest space to curate, given the institution’s broad mission and it’s unusual architectural footprint. It could easily look or feel crowded with multiple 3D objects vying for viewer’s attention. For Electronic Pacific, gallery curator and director Justin Hoover creates a very manageable experience, one that permits audiences to move through the space without the worrying sense of tripping over or backing into the objects on display.

Read the full article here.

When confronted with endings, we mourn and ultimately accept. We feel some mix of disappointment and satisfaction that we were there before it ended, excitement that it happened, and sometimes relief that it is over. Queens Nails is Dead is the last exhibition for Queens Nails Gallery, an artist-run nonprofit gallery that opened in San Francisco’s Mission District in 2004. Featuring the work of Daniel J. Martinez, Marco Rios, and Jerome Reyes, the show and its blunt title evince more of a last huff than a last gasp.

Marco Rios. Despair Beyond Despair, 2011 (video still); HD video; TRT: 4:20 min. Courtesy of Simon Preston Gallery, New York

Yet last gasps are still there, appearing literally in Rios’s short film Despair Beyond Despair (2011), which reenacts a scene from a 1970 Dario Argento film in which the artist witnesses his own murder. Coming upon the violent scene, which appears to have occurred just after install and before opening night at Los Angeles’s LA><ART, Rios is locked out of the gallery yet trapped by the roll-down metal gate in the building’s entryway. He can’t help but watch the artist in the gallery die; he can’t help but still try to do something about it. Meanwhile, we, the viewers, take in both of their struggles while we stand there awkwardly entranced by the spectacle.

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No Name, the group show currently on view at Lower East Side gallery On Stellar Rays, is a theory-based project that develops a collaborative scene of  “gestures, memories and detritus.” The show presents a collection of objects that are incoherent, elusive, and laden with a mysterious personal logic. The work demonstrates a strong theoretical basis, drawing primarily from Judith/Jack Halberstam’s advocation of failure as a radical praxis for queer world-making. In The Queer Art of Failure, published in 2011, Halberstam looks toward the refusal of mastery and the evasion of cohesive narrative as techniques for resistance and for crafting a new future.

Zackary Drucker. WELCOME, 2012; commercially fabricated doormat; 18 x 24 in. Courtesy of the artist and On Stellar Rays

We can find the essence of queerness in moments that are simultaneous, unfinished, mysterious, angry, abrasive, and elusive. No Name serves as a banner for this queer logic. In the work of artists like Jonathan VanDyke, traces of action stand alone as art objects; harlequin smears of paint on the gallery wall signify the aftermath of VanDyke’s performance piece Self Portrait as My Mother, as an Actress, as a Painter, as a Stranger (2013).* As impractical and cryptic as these traces are, they demonstrate an alternate kind of making and an alternate consciousness or world view.

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With Cinder Blocks We Flatten Our Photographs, currently on view at Romer Young Gallery, includes work by San Francisco artists C. Wright Daniel, Pablo Guardiola, Jonathan Runcio, and Emma Spertus; the Los Angeles–based John Pearson; and New York–based artists Deric Carner and Letha Wilson. The press release notes as precedent curator Peter C. Bunnell’s Photography into Sculpture exhibition, mounted in 1970 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[1] Like Photography into Sculpture, With Cinder Blocks includes works that emphasize the imagined qualities of a photograph—specifically tactility and spatiality—by crafting sculptural or dimensional objects that incorporate photographic processes and imagery. Bunnell describes this process: “The maker of a photograph takes subjects—things—as he finds them and, with the selectivity necessary to determine their significance, manipulates them into an expression of his sensibilities so that they may constitute a revelation.”[2] The sensibilities that come to the fore in the works at Romer Young suggest a preoccupation with transformation, phenomenology, and materiality.

With Cinder Blocks We Flatten Our Photographs, installation view, Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco, 2013. Courtesy of Romer Young Gallery

The notion of the photograph has been largely displaced by that of the image. Images are origin-less: endlessly reproducible and malleable, their content easily manipulated and re-presented. With Cinder Blocks explores the contemporary parlance by which photography reestablishes its physical parameters. It begins with process-driven explorations of exposure and gesture in which the image’s generative action is synchronous to its subject. Examples of this are Daniel’s silver gelatin prints, Untitled (Portrait) and Untitled (Profile Portrait) (all works 2013 except where noted), and Pearson’s Untitled (No. 2), a wall-hung cyanotype on silk and cotton fabric. To make his works, Daniel presses his face into the photographic paper, exposes, and then flattens the paper so that it records the creases and folds as shadows and peaks. Alternatively, Pearson draped his treated fabric on the desert floor; one sees the traces of dust or sand across the surface but also the rocks that held the edges down for the duration of the exposure. In an e-mail to gallery owner Joey Piziali, Pearson notes that while “photographs always look AT something, these cyanotypes are more an attempt to record being IN something.”[3] Both Daniel and Pearson depend on the direct contact of objects with photosensitized material to create records of their actions.

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The assembly of works by AFRICOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), a collective of African American Chicago-based artists active during the 1960s and 1970s, now on display at the Logan Center for the Arts could fairly be described as a time capsule; it is more important for the moment it captures than for its contents. In addition to this exhibition, titled AFRICOBRA: Philosophy, the collective currently has two other exhibitions on the southside of Chicago: AFRICOBRA: Prologue—The 1960s and the Black Arts Movement, at the South Side Community Art Center, and AFRICOBRA: Art and Impact, at the DuSable Museum of African American History. Historically and aesthetically, the work in Philosophy conveys a palpable yearning on the part of the artists to carve out a viable place for African American identity within the visual arts and society at large. The show is all about the urgency of a political moment that still resonates forty years later.

Gerald Williams, Wake Up, 1969; Acrylic on canvas; 36 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist and Logan Center for the Arts

Much of the work on display features iconic compositions of figures, standing front and center in an almost neo-Byzantine style. The simple messages surrounding the figures are frank and explicit, creating a collection of works that border on propaganda. This is by design, according to the pillars of AFRICOBRA’s aesthetic philosophy described by founding member Barbara Jones-Hogu’s 1973 manifesto, “The History, Philosophy and Aesthetics of AFRICOBRA.” Jones-Hogu states that compositions must feature “the figure frontal and direct to stress strength, straight forwardness, profoundness, and proudness” and that “subject matter must be completely understood by the viewer, therefore lettering [ought to] be used to extend and clarify the visual statement.” [1] Steeped in the politics of self-determination, black nationalism, and Black Power espoused by the burgeoning Black Arts movement, AFRICOBRA artists Jeff Donaldson, Jones-Hogu, Carolyn Lawrence, Jae Jarell, Wadsworth Jarell, and Gerald Williams created colorful figurative works loaded with messages calling for greater political consciousness.

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Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is cosponsored by KQED.org.

We recently sold a piece at an art fair, a photograph, the sale being the second of this particular edition. Because it was the second edition, we needed to have it produced from scratch and then printed/mounted/framed. All the production was paid for by us as a courtesy. After informing the collector it would take a couple of weeks, we were recently bombarded with complaints from said collector that we were taking him for a ride and that he wanted a refund, because of how long it was taking to get the piece made professionally. Collector then went on a witch hunt, in which he called Amex to report us, tweeted that people should “beware” of our gallery, stormed into our gallery to scream at us, as well as abused us in e-mails. We eventually decided to return the money, even though there is a clear ALL SALES FINAL disclosure on all our sale documents, just to get rid of the negative distraction.

I guess my question here is how do we avoid this in the future? We are a small gallery, and these fairs are more than we can afford, but we have to participate to try and sell the work. Any words of advice for our fledgling initiative?

Allow me to rephrase your question: We run a small gallery. Recently, a would-be collector went bananas and things ended badly. How do we avoid dealing with a person like this in the future? And here’s the short answer: if I knew how to keep clear of crazy people, I’d be a rich woman. But since the art world is filled with lunatics*—both loveable and malevolent—and complete avoidance probably isn’t an option unless you move to a hermit’s shack, let’s talk about the things you might do to circumvent a situation like this in your life to come.

John Baldessari. Man with Blue Shape, 1991; photograph, 77.5 x 122 cm

At the risk of seeming unsympathetic, I’m going to remind you that sometimes crazy takes two. Take a moment to assess the situation honestly. Ask yourself: Did this man walk away with all the information he needed? In my experience, one of the main reasons that a person flies off the handle is that he has one set of expectations based on assumptions, and his associate has another set of expectations based on different assumptions. And this is the key part: their expectations may overlap—leading everyone to believe that they are on the same page—but the assumptions underlying those expectations are inconsistent, and sometimes that gets everyone into trouble. So I wonder: how effectively did you convey information to this man about his wait time? Did you casually mention that it would be “a couple of weeks” before he received his print? Or did you mutually agree on a delivery date, put it in writing, and then communicate any changes? If you say “a couple of weeks” as a loose estimate, and he hears “exactly two weeks,” you can see that this is where the problem is going to start.

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Today we bring you the final part of our series of interviews and observations from The Best Things in Museums Are the Windows, a project that artist Harrell Fletcher is doing this weekend with the Exploratorium in San Francisco. For up-to-the-minute information, including where you can join the group, you can follow @exploratorium on Twitter.

Harrell Fletcher. Documentation of project for The Best Things in Museums Are the Windows (Quote by John Muir, at entrance to school), 2013. Organized by the Center for Art & Inquiry, the Exploratorium, San Francisco. Photo: Patricia Maloney

Jordan Stein, assistant curator for the Center for Art & Inquiry at the Exploratorium, texted me shortly after 6 p.m. on Thursday: “Just got to Muir.” It was followed by another a few minutes later: “Dancing in the grass. Wow.” The group was behind schedule, originally due to arrive at John Muir Elementary School on Claremont Avenue around 4:30 p.m. No matter. I walked up the hill from my house to meet them, marveling at the golden hue of midsummer evening light; it would be at least a couple of hours before the fog rolled in. I found the trekkers assembled on the broad lawn of the school in a large circle. A wrought-iron fence encircles the lawn; embedded on the sidewalk in front of its gate is a plaque bearing a quote by Muir: “New beauty meets us at every step in all our wanderings.” It is an apt sentiment to greet these travelers, en route from the Exploratorium at Pier 15 in San Francisco to the summit of Mt. Diablo some forty miles east, participants in Harrell Fletcher’s project The Best Things in Museums Are the Windows. Muir Elementary was the last stop before they camped for the first night in the backyard of one of the staffer’s homes, and a marked exuberance over having arrived at their destination was palpable as I arrived. Someone was even doing cartwheels.

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