The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, one of San Francisco’s premiere cultural art venues, is currently exhibiting Wallworks featuring artists Makoto Aida, Edgar Arceneaux, Chris Finley, Tillman Kaiser, Odili Donald Odita, Amanda Ross-Ho, Yehudit Sasportas, and Leslie Shows. The exhibition is the curatorial debut of Betti-Sue Hertz, YBCA’s new Director of Visual Arts, and brings together artists to produce new site-specific wall pieces. Working in response to Fumihiko Maki‘s acclaimed architectural design of the YBCA, which was built in 1993, each artist has responded to the space, either directly or indirectly to create massive new works. The works on view range from formal to conceptual, and reference elements of art and architectural history, cultural trends, and personal relations with the natural world.

Philadelphia-based artist Odili Donald Odita created a series of hard-edged brightly colored wall paintings, titled Post-Perfect, which rely heavily on modernist ideals. The works push the viewer through an imaginary space, causing the eyes to climb walls and then dissolve again onto the base of the floor. Japanese artist Makoto Aida created a massive printed / painted collage titled Monument For Nothing III, which represents an amalgamation of contemporary cultural sources from Japan. The cultural references seem to boil over and explode onto the gallery wall in a twenty-five foot high by nearly fifty foot wide display. Also on view is the massive wall installation titled Display of Properties by Alaska-born, San Francisco-based artist Leslie Shows. The work includes dozens of color drained flags, of all sizes, which protrude from the gallery walls. The bold colors and family crests which once adorned the flags now drip down the walls and mix as they run, creating a beautiful fusion of color while stripping the flags of their nationalism.

Wallworks brings together a mix of artists, all of which employ a monumentally graphic aesthetic however each investigate the Yerba Buena Center’s space in a unique and dynamic way.

One of the current exhibition series on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),The Studio Sessions, explores the work of artists who create performance based conversations regarding their artistic practice and present the videos as the final work. A noteworthy artist within the series, Christian Jankowski created a series of videos titled Telemistica, which explore the popular media world of Italian TV-fortuntellers. For the videos, the artist learned how to converse in basic Italian and called into several televised fortunetellers to discuss the future of his artistic practice and the outcome of his upcoming works to be shown in the Venice Biennale. In actuality, the artist recorded the conversations about his work and displayed the televised talks as the final artwork. The work cleverly reveals details about the artist’s relationship to his practice and reflections on his artistic future. Jankowski manipulates a preexisting tool of media and exploits his insecurity and uncertainty about his artistic future to create a powerfully compelling and uniquely revealing new series of videos.

The Berlin-born, New York-based artist has an impressive resume of international exhibitions. Just some of his recent solo exhibitions include work with Innsbruck Contemporary in Austria, And Now For Something Completely Different at BAWAG Foundation in Vienna, and Above All I’m an Art Lover at Regen Projects in Los Angeles.

While contemporary technology has brought forth droves of artists and amateurs alike using digital means to create a photograph, Cassandra C Jones explores digital media without adding to a world over saturated with images. In her current solo show titled Send Me a Link, with Baer Ridgway Exhibitions in San Francisco, Jones recycles images found through internet research and recontextualizes them through still and animated digital collage, creating a sense of motion and depth through static imagery. By incorporating images that are repeatedly used in amateur and stock photography, Jones redefines the viewer’s relationship to the appropriated photo and creates a new understanding of the world’s bond to the ubiquitous image.

In this body of work, Jones constructs new assembled images from photos which would be considered cliche or mundane, due to the mass quantities existing in modern resources. For example, in Disco Girl and Car Fire, Jones demonstrates how the viewer is already linked to the visual symbols within each video. The appropriated images create new photos and videos without any direct manipulation, redefining the nature of collage through contemporary digital means. In the Lightning Drawings, Jones digitally overlays images of lightning strikes to create drawings, connecting the tools of drawing and photography. Similarly, Swarm and Iris expose the multiplicity in modern imagery through single figures being reconstructed to overlap creating pattern and depth. Each of these images allow the viewer to consider the individuality and multiplicity of the subject matter, revealing the repetitive and over saturated qualities of the modern photograph. The exhibition, Send Me a Link, not only demonstrates how easily photos and videos are shared socially through modern technology, but also gives a context for how we relate to these images in our daily lives.

Cassandra C Jones received her BFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. Since, Jones has shown with Vanina Holasek Gallery in New York, the Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Ibid, the title of a new exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Jennie Ottinger, features dozens of recent oil and gouache paintings and pen drawings. The exhibition, which is currently on view at Johansson Projects in Oakland, CA, presents a cast of odd characters who move seamlessly through varying compositions and activities. Contained within rather reductive environments, these characters congregate in a variety of scenes which take place on street corners, in hospitals and on freeways. Each character is on the verge of dissolving into the murky background from which it originally emerged. Ottinger’s work is dictated by a beautiful fragility which suggests a sense of impermanence and melancholy. While all of the work is characteristically figurative, the artist has reduced the information contained in the images, obliterating any sense of a linear narrative. Instead, any connection between the works can be deduced through the body of work as a whole, rather than from connections made within any single work.

Jennie Ottinger received her BFA from California College of Arts and her MFA from Mills College in Oakland. The artist has completed recent exhibitions the Conduit Gallery in Texas, Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, and Red Cake Gallery in San Francisco.

Bay Area collaborative artists Brody Reiman and Charlie Castaneda are currently exhibiting a new installation at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. The exhibition titled places we have never been, features a collection of found landscape paintings, some of which date back to the nineteenth century and range in artistic skill level and period. The paintings are supported within the framework of a larger installation which contains stacked slices of drywall that are framed in oak, porcelain-cast rocks that are scattered along the gallery floor and painted walls that subtly shift in color. Each of these elements incorporate the canvases into the space and are utilized in an examination of the natural landscape, the historical role of landscape painting, and the ways in which landscape painting is transformed by man and idealized by the mind. Reiman and Castaneda are examining how landscape as an imagined or idealized space can become domesticated and made decorative by the exhibition’s construction through the use of culturally loaded materials such as drywall, oak veneer, and porcelain.

Both artists completed their undergraduate degrees at Carnegie Mellon University and their MFA at University of California, Davis. Reiman is an assistant professor of sculpture at University of California, Berkeley, and Castaneda is a faculty member with the San Francisco Art Institute. The duo is also represented in New York City by DCKT, and have an exhibition with their New York gallery next month.

In celebration of DailyServing.com’s recent move to San Francisco, CA, we have decided to dedicate this week to art-based happenings is the Bay Area. If you are a Bay Area gallery, artist, or curator, please be in touch. We would love to hear from you.

Currently on view at Gregory Lind Gallery is an exhibition of new photographs titled Reincarnation Blues by New York-based artist Chris Gentile. Continuing his series of temporary sculptures which are produced and photographed in the artist’s studio, Gentile creates ambiguous forms from everyday materials such as cardboard, plaster, electric tape, and plastics. The artist then photographs the sculptures or installations and presents the work solely in the photographic form, removing the viewer from any sense of physicality or scale that the materials embody. The result is beautifully ambiguous forms that leave the viewer with only clues to the original shape, material, scale, method of construction and environment. Many of the photographs, such as Human Nature and Saint John (Tide of Regret), contain a performative element capturing a series of actions which question not only material and scale but also the element of time. Reincarnation Blues is not simply attractive formally, but demands the viewer to ask and answer questions through a series of implied visual and metaphorical clues. Gentile carefully shapes our perception of his works by intentionally reducing information and capturing the object in a two dimensional form, leading the viewer through a game of perceptual questions and answers.

Reincarnation Blues marks the second solo exhibition for the artist at Gregory Lind Gallery. Other exhibitions include Always the Sun at Richard E. Peeler Art Center, Greencastle, IN, Half Colors of Quarter Things at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City and Shot Spot at the Geoffrey Young Gallery in Great Barrington, MA.

Currently on view at P.P.O.W in New York City is the exhibition Young Curators, New Ideas II. The exhibition, which was organized by Amani Olu, is a curator focused survey containing seven varied mirco-exhibitions that investigate various topics. The curators included in the exhibition are Karen Archey, Cecilia Jurado, Megha Ralapati, Jose Ruiz, Nico Wheadon, Cleopatra’s (Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Kate McNamara & Erin Somerville), and Women in Photography (Amy Elkins & Cara Phillips).

With exhibition titles such as Low Museum, In Heaven, Comet Fever, The Individual and the Family, and Deconstructing the Female Gaze, these micro-exhibitions attempt to confront and investigate various issues which are prevalent in contemporary art practices and beyond. Low Museum asks the basic, albeit important questions, What is the process through which one becomes a curator of contemporary art? And, how does popular culture view this role? The exhibition Comet Fever questions the obsession with phenomena outside of human control, while The Individual and The Family questions art making through both collaborative and identity-based creative practices.

Young Curators, New Ideas II provides the viewer with an opportunity to engage with the curatorial practice of several young New York-based curators within one space, and offers these young curators the opportunity to present their work within a group show setting.