Gordon Newell. Valley Landing, (date unknown); installation view, Fulton Mall (Fresno, CA). Photo: Elena Harvey Collins, 2016.

Outside a Payless ShoeSource in the Fulton Mall, a six-block pedestrian mall built in 1964 in downtown Fresno, there sat, until a redevelopment plan went into action this past spring, a much-rubbed, sometimes tagged casting of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Grande Laveuse (The Washerwoman) (1917). Sited down a side street leading to an underground parking garage and flanked by hedges holding nesting sparrows, it was easy to miss. Across from the sculpture were two benches toward which the sculpture mutely gestured—sometimes empty, sometimes occupied by sleepers, most often by people sitting, smoking, pausing, and looking. The whole arrangement was theatrically incongruent, and emblematic of a place that brought a certain wildness and elegance to downtown.

The new plan for the Fulton Mall is part of a larger effort to redevelop the downtown area, making it attractive to young professionals. It includes a flurry of new loft and townhouse building, in addition to preparations for the construction of the high-speed rail line; when complete, the pedestrian mall will be reopened to car traffic.

Read the full article here.

John Tierney. Elvis Is on the Building, Palm Springs, 2013; oil on canvas; 20 x 16 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Tierney’s paintings capture the capacities and fallacies of images to both concretize and mystify. These mystifiers are not problematic for Tierney, merely interesting and somewhat opportune. The artist explains: “Edward Hopper once referred to grasping the ‘surprise and accidents of nature.’ While my position is, in this sense, congruent with his, I am also interested in grasping the surprise and accidents of photographs—light and shade, movement, the deportment of people. In short, engaging with the serendipity inherent in a photographic image.” Elvis Aaron Presley is a potent symbol of the draw of stardom, and of the power of Hollywood and the music industry to create near-mythological figures out of ordinary people. In Elvis Is on the Building, Palm Springs (2013), Tierney pairs a mural-size image of Elvis in profile, instantly recognizable, with a group of palm trees in hyperrealistic detail growing just behind a house with a roof covered in Spanish ceramic tiles. As Elvis stares back through the picture plane, viewers are reminded that the man the world knew was forged in Memphis and in Hollywood—iconic towns known for producing iconic figures.

John Tierney. The Arrival, Los Angeles, 2014; oil on canvas; 24 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Photography reinforces urban and cinematic tropes and now defines the human experience of place and history. In The Arrival, Los Angeles (2014), Tierney paints what appears to be a young man having just arrived in the city on his motorcycle—wearing a helmet and leather jacket decorated with patriotic American symbols, the bald eagle and the American flag—as he gazes up at the infamous Hollywood sign framed by a series of palm trees. The palm trees in The Arrival, Los Angeles are alive with movement and are depicted in hyper-real detail, but they are the only part of this painting depicted with photographic precision. By painting this Los Angeles icon, a species of plant that was imported to the once-desert city, Tierney is subtly pointing directly to photography and cinema—pictures—as mystifiers, mediums that forge their own reality much as the city and surrounding area did.

John Tierney. Magnolia Bakery, W 3rd St, LA, 2012; oil on canvas; 30 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

While Tierney depicts the Los Angeles area in many of his paintings, he is also keenly invested in exploring the interior spaces of another iconic American city: New York, particularly the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In MoMA, NY #5 (2014), Tierney again depicts the back of a young man, this time in a MoMA gallery looking at a large abstract painting that stretches beyond the frame of Tierney’s canvas. Dressed for winter or rain, the figure is a reversal of the warm atmosphere issued forth by Tierney’s paintings of Southern California cityscapes.

John Tierney. MoMA, NY #5, 2015; oil on canvas; 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The crisp shadows of the man’s pants and jacket, and the strong line that demarcates the white gallery wall from the soft wood floor, give this painting an intense geometry that is balanced by the abstract qualities of the painting the man gazes at. By painting a series of works that depict visitors to this particular painting exhibition at MoMA, Tierney begins to open the expected and rarely depicted behaviors of gallery goers.

John Tierney. MoMA, NY #1, 2014; oil on canvas; 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

In MoMA, NY #1 (2014), a young woman faces the same large abstract painting as the young man in MoMA, NY #5, yet she is shown in a slight profile while taking a photograph of the painting from the side. The artist has depicted the woman in all black and wearing headphones, a well-worn art-world trope, reframing the painting through the small camera embedded in her cellular phone—she is guarded, resisting a direct experience with the painting, leaning as if unsure of what exactly she is looking at.

John Tierney has an unusual interest in using painting as a way to decode and explore photography through a specific lens. As he includes or erases specific signs and motifs—the black uniform, the palm tree, a larger-than-life painting of Elvis’s face—Tierney gives the viewer a moment to contemplate, one that often mirrors the subjects he himself is depicting.

John Tierney is a UK-based artist and has recently retired from his post as a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Durham University in England. Tierney’s work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, and Joshua Tree, California; New York City; and London. In 2012 Tierney collaborated with British fashion designer Paul Smith on a series of limited-edition objects, and his work is currently being shown at Hamburg Kennedy Photographs, Coda Gallery, and Saatchi Online. Instagram: @johntierneyart.

Marion Belanger. Rift #51 (Geothermal Pipes Alongside a Road at Hengill, Iceland), 2011; Fault #26 (North Shore, Salton Sea, CA), 2012; archival pigment print; 18.5 x 14.8 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Atrium Gallery, Haverford College.

Belanger’s photographs depict bright, spare, and brutally captivating landscapes along the plate’s edges. Initially shot on 4×5 and 6×7 inch film, the negatives were scanned to produce large color prints, which are hung in pairs: an image from the Icelandic Rift above (or next to) an image from the San Andreas Fault. Their arrangement causes the exhibition to be “read” like a book. Each pairing, carefully collated by Belanger, creates a subtle parataxis between what is seen and the implication of deeper geologic movements.

The photographs document domestic architecture and infrastructure, highlighting odd silhouettes where land meets sky. Similarities between the two sites begin to accumulate. The bleached California light mirrors the illuminating, misty white skies of Iceland. The same pale light gives the spare colors their punch. The interplay between the literal subjects of individual photographs, which Belanger aptly describes as raw, empty, mundane, and ordinary, draws sharp contrast to the content of the work. Cues leading the viewer deeper are sometimes subtle (a small crack in a cement wall), and at other times overt (a gaping maw where a house once stood). In other photographs, there is no visible indication of the tectonic movements beneath the earth’s surface. Depicting a sleepy suburb or a hiking trail on a foggy morning, this last subset, when seen in relation to the whole, feels terribly haunted. As Belanger remarks in her statement, “The monotone housing developments built on top of the fault seem to deny the existence of the unstable earth below the surface. The ordered built environment ignores the actuality of the land, a dangerous disconnect.” In these shifting registers, the quiet work finds its edge.

Marion Belanger. Rift #26 (Volcanic Excavation Site, Heimaey, Iceland), 2007; Fault #10 (Backyard, Daly City, CA), 2008; archival pigment print; 18.5 x 14.8 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Atrium Gallery, Haverford College.

According to Belanger, Rift/Fault developed in conversation with two pieces of writing. The first is a captivating description of tectonic activity by Simon Winchester in A Crack in the Edge of the World. While Winchester’s account of unseen geologic phenomena is compelling, it’s Belanger’s own curiosity, not the book’s prose, that will lead her to spend a decade of her life on this project. The reading serves as an important investigative tool, nurturing her curiosity and directing her fieldwork, as revealed by the exhibition’s organizational format. The pairings of photographs mirror pages in a codex and follow the swerving essay logic of Belanger’s investigation and the invisible structures of a reader’s mind. The second text is Elizabeth Kolbert’s essay “The Annals of Extinction Part II” published in The New Yorker. Kolbert’s essay, among its other topics, lays out the stakes of the Anthropocene, the current geologic epoch defined by human impact on the planet’s ecology. Since the term was coined seven years ago, a cadre of artists have responded to its new conceptual framework, deploying new and familiar creative strategies. Most relevant here are Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures, a collection of 100 images of humanity held in geostationary satellite orbit, and Rachel Sussman’s ongoing photographic catalog of deep time, The Oldest Living Things in the World. Belanger’s rhetorical response to the Anthropocene places her somewhere between Sussman and Paglen, with all three making singular attempts to look past the temporal limitations of our collective imaginations. While Sussman’s cataloging project is in formal conversation with the Becher School of minimal typologies, and Paglen’s galactic time capsule, though brilliant, is a meta-conceptual spectacle, neither compare evenly with Belanger’s project, which is foregrounded in her idiosyncratic role of artist/observer: reading, learning, walking, looking, and photographing.

Marion Belanger. Rift #11 (Pseudocrator Remnant, Reykjavik, Iceland), 2006; Fault #37 (Sign, Desert Hot Springs, CA), 2012; archival pigment print; 18.5 x 14.8 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Atrium Gallery, Haverford College.

What all these artists share are delightfully quixotic strategies to draw us into conversation with the monumental. In Belanger’s case, it is the particular folly in using a film camera, a device with decidedly human-scale visual/temporal capabilities, to research a subject that reveals itself in deep time and with unpredictable violent quakes and eruptions. In Belanger’s adept hands, the inherent limitations of her chosen tools model our own human limitations, finding the poetic in the face of the inconceivable. Belanger has a gift for making visible the unseen, particularly what resides within boundaries. With these elegant and precise photographs, she documents our small, everyday relationship to the land, while simultaneously providing a peripheral glimpse of the planetary.

Marion Belanger: Rift/Fault is on view at the Marshall Fine Arts Center at Haverford College through October 4, 2015.

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Bill Owens. Untitled (Baton Practice), ca. 1973; gelatin silver print; 7 7/8 x 10 in. Gift of Marion Brenner and Robert Harshorn Shimshak. Courtesy of Mills College Art Museum, Oakland.

In the early 1970s, when Owens took these pictures in and around Livermore, California, few photographers had shown an interest in portraying life within the vast sprawl of housing developments that would become home to sixty million Americans in the decades after World War Two. Having discovered photography during a stint in the Peace Corps, Owens took a job in 1968 as staff photographer for The Independent, a small newspaper in Livermore. Going out on up to six assignments a day made it easy to get to know the people, places, and events of the community Owens was documenting. Along the way, he became one of the most important chroniclers of his time, known for images so memorable that they have become part of our unconscious template for how suburbia should look.

Read the full article here.

Viola Frey. Studio View—One Man Splitting, 1983; alkyd oil on canvas; 72 x 96 in. Courtesy of di Rosa collection, Napa.

On my most recent trip to di Rosa, I had questions about the future of the collection on my mind. How will this collection be displayed, conserved, promoted, and carried forward into the uncertain future that institutions face today? When I arrived, curator Amy Owen was looking at one of the works damaged in the recent Napa earthquake with a group of conservators from the Oakland Museum of California. While they conferred, I studied the two exhibitions in the Gatehouse Gallery: a selection from the di Rosa collection of two-dimensional works by the noted sculptor Viola Frey, and a group show of three younger Bay Area painters titled The Presence of the Present. Frey’s works on paper and canvas, featuring figures and objects set up in her studio, reveal her command of these media as well as her interest in exploring the same themes addressed in the monumental ceramic sculpture for which she is known—most notably, gender roles and ideas about power. In Studio View–One Man Splitting, a large canvas (72 x 96 inches) from 1983, Frey paints the three male figures with assurance, outlining their blocky, suit-clad forms with strong, dark lines. In a short essay, Owen describes the scene as possibly referring to the artist’s frustrations with the art world—collectors coming and going from her studio, ostensibly interrupting the flow of her work. But it also suggests the sculptor’s eye refusing the limitations of two dimensions by capturing the figure from three points of view at the same moment. In two nearby drawings, Frey focuses instead on monumental female figures, powerful rather than enticing, evoking her unflinching position regarding the status of women in a sexist profession.

Read the full article here.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Standing), 2010 | 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

Seth Curcio: So Matt, currently you have an exhibition on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, titled HORIZON/S. The series pulls from cultural images that transcend time, location, and cultures. But, before we dive into these ideas, I’d like to learn some basics, like how these images are constructed. They seem so mysterious – can you walk me through the process of finding your source material and constructing the image?

Matt Lipps: Sure, this body of work, like the majority of my work since 2004, is an entirely analog process involving sculpture, collage, and theater staging on a small scale with a cast of paper dolls that I’ve cut out and propped up with supports so that they may stand on their own. For HORIZON/S I pulled from the first 10 years of Horizon Magazine, a bi-monthly hardback arts journal first published in September 1958. The magazine’s inaugural issue sets up a general invitation to the American people to join the editors of the magazine on a voyage towards an imagined “horizon” of high art and culture – examining art(ifacts), architecture, theater & film actors, and serving up what would be fine “taste” for those who weren’t in the know – a relatively antiquated way of thinking about art objects.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Form), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: Your work is ultimately exhibited as photography. Yet, your process starts with an appropriated image, moves into sculpture, draws heavily on painting, and employs the tools of theater. Ultimately it arrives back at an image. What do you feel happens in this transformation of material?

ML: I’m not sure that I know, but the transformation is evident, and heartfelt for me, too – which is what keeps me engaged in making the work. For me it has something to do with an embodied, phenomenological experience of encountering an image in a dislocated context at an unexpected size. Certainly, the scale of the image is key to this transformation, and photography allows me to play with scale and depth in ways that traditional collage doesn’t. I’ve done several works that exist as sculpture, but it’s generally a frontal presentation that fails to some degree when attempted to view “in the round,” and, the work feels diminished somewhat as mere paperdolls of an expected size.

Re-photographing those images back into a photograph brings a certain amount of seamlessness to the foreground and background that, I hope, holds the viewer’s attention for slightly longer. This is especially tricky in HORIZON/S when you’re confronted with photographic reproductions of varying quality and scale, that depict stone sculptures, painting fragments, illusionistic spaces, portraits, landscapes, etc., and it’s all tied back together and hermetically sealed under the photographic picture plane.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Reach), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: I like to consider how you categorize images and ideas in your practice and how this aligns and deviates from the basic cultural structuring – or lumping – that engages most museums. I know that HORIZON/S is also further divided in to two parts: Private and Public Collections. What are the main distinctions of these two collections?

ML: In assembling a cast of about 200 characters, obvious trends presented themselves – not only in my image selection process, but also in the kinds of images that were reproduced in the original magazine. This is highlighted when examining what size they were reproduced as, and whether or not they were printed in full color, black and white, or at times photogravure.

These decisions were made by the editors, thereby producing a secondary hierarchical structure. When all of the images are set to stand on their own, it’s clear to see what was deemed central to the idea of cultivating good taste, and what genres of art were seen as marginal or clearly dwarfed in comparison.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Women's Heads), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

An example of Public Collections – the first photograph I made in the series – is Untitled (Women’s Heads). I pulled from the group every image I had cut out that was only of a female head and shoulders, to see what that image would look like. In the magazine, as in art history and by extension museums and archives, it’s necessary to organize objects by region, chronology, and/or genre so that they can be “knowable,” or classified into a system. My project aims to question the logic of that practice, and asks what else can be learned from a different system of objects if set free from the typical constraints of the archive and introduced to elements of chance, disorganization, and a personalized re-mixing of art and art historical objects.

But, there were other connections I was making with individual objects that had no logical connection, other than the fact I was compelled to make pictures incorporating them. From this started the parallel series I call Private Collections – the idea being, rather than making a photograph curated around a single homogeneous premise to communicate a single idea, I would make photographs of disparate objects culled together by an individual taste. This act allows for a more narrative story about the individual who may have collected them to emerge.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Marble), 2010| C-print, 40" x 33" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: In this way, you are able to simultaneously mine images and objects that are collected and organized by institutions, and then by you as an artist. Obviously, the result speaks to your own taste, however someone else sets the parameters. This type of curating from existing structures references our remix culture. How do you feel the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of cultural information affects our perception of the world? Especially since so much of this information is already organized or “curated” by others.

ML: Previously, I had always talked about my work in relationship to “desire,” rather than “taste.” But, with HORIZON/S – a broader examination of taste-refinement is brought to the fore.

To answer your question about the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of information…I only feel safe answering how I feel it affects my perception of the world. It’s fantastic! It’s horrific! There are images I can never scrub out of my mind – that I wish I’d never laid eyes on…there are others I’ve had deep and meaningful relationships with/to (and, I mean this with much gravity). As an appropriation artist, I’m grateful to have these tools to employ, and I aim to do so with integrity and sincerity. If I were to offer a word of caution about the endless production and distribution of images, it’s that one might grow comfortably numb – that they’d lose their affect and ability to trigger outrage and mobilize change. Or, that people think they know the operation of any given image before taking the time to read it, because of some imaginary typological vault of pictures that contain finite and quantifiable data. That seems lazy to me, and, in part, with this project, I was trying in my own way to “re-mix” that.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (bar), 2008 | C-print on aluminum, 46" x 33" inches | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: That’s great insight on how you relate to imagery, both images selected by you and the endless barrage of images in the world. I’m also interested in how HORIZON/S remains so seemingly objective in nature, in contrast to the pictures in HOME SERIES. Was there a shift from your previous work that caused you to engage in a project that allows for your personal narrative to remain distant?

ML: There has been a shift, but for me, it’s been at a glacial pace starting from the first photograph I can remember cutting out when I was thirteen years old. The practice has always been about having a relationship with a person, place, or object – a photographic distance announced in the mediation of that object in its image-ness.

Early on in my work, this longing was explicit: my desire to be with a body pictured in a magazine to act as surrogate lover/boyfriend, resurrected from a late-1970’s pre-AIDS moment in time. It was a willful exertion of my desire for him to sit with me on our bed, and to take his portrait, thereby re-flattening him into a Barthesian photographic flat-death (again). For me, that work is about melancholia and loss in as much as it’s about a personalized, magical desire.

Coming to terms with my own sexuality and understanding the operation of these images in relationship to my desire, I was able to formalize a vocabulary around my work and turn it into a language that was legible across multiple genres of photography. This, in turn, allowed me to move past my immediate biography (though, never that far removed from it), and look at broader reaching themes in my work.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Satin), 2004| C-print on aluminum, 40" x 30" | Courtesy of the Artist

Fast-forward to the HOME series, I still incorporated ideas of desire (or, taste, or, selection) and loss in relationship to a personalized history of photography literally housed and cultivated within my childhood home. There, I’m compiling a cataclysmic dichotomy of “high vs. low” that examines the accrual of objects and memories in an intimate, domestic space in relationship to an unpacking of heroic baggage.

And, now with HORIZON/S, where it might appear as though I’ve stripped back all of the personal narrative found in earlier modules, I still employ my vocabulary of image-making, and its deeply concerned with ideas about photographic representation and the desire to understand its operation with respect to art history and the cultivation of taste. It still feels very me, even if I’m less apparent than before.

SC: Do you feel that you have reached a state of completion with HORIZON/S? Is there often a clear stopping point in your series, or do you feel that you can continue it indefinitely?

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Sculpture) 2010| C-print, 33" x 80" | Courtesy of the Artist

The impulse to “re-mix” HORIZON/S was endless – so, yes, it could have gone on indefinitely! In fact, I shot at least 50 images that I thought worked well – but it was ultimately edited down to about 22 photographs. Being a photographer and carrying the burden of seriality is always a delicate balance of editing, and having good friends and mentors helping you see your blind spots.

But, I ended up working on HORIZON/S for almost two years, mostly pre-production and making decisions about the look of the final image. Now, I’m feeling pretty done. Though, I will say that it was fascinating to watch people look at these images, and their need to know who each person/object was – a desire to unlock a deeper logic, or to give name to something that seems familiar but forgotten. I would be curious to push that notion further, partnered with my own fascination with how images traditionally operate, and how I might continue to confound that.

Castillo, Tomorrow Brings..., 2009

Currently on view, through March 7, 2010, is the multi-venue Los Angeles exhibition, An Idea Called Tomorrow. Showing concurrently at both the Skirball Cultural Center and at the California African American Museum (CAAM), the exhibition features the work of fifteen contemporary artists who “imagine what a civil future looks like,” according to the press release, as the show seeks to inspire visitors to “reflect upon the active role we must all play in bringing about a more just, equitable, and peaceful future.” In An Idea Called Tomorrow, artists such as Castillo (her work, Tomorrow Brings… is pictured above), Graham Goddard, Yong Soon Min and Kim Abeles present work that addresses a broad range of social justice and environmental issues. Goddard’s sculpture installation, Paradigm (2009), was “designed to investigate its surrounding environment as an object consisting of a process of ongoing relationships between man and nature” and will be installed by the artist at several locations, beyond the Skirball , in an ongoing effort to continue this dialog as it sits on view in areas that are “at risk and affected by pollution, such as mountains, deserts and watersheds.”

Graham Goddard, Paradigm, 2009

An Idea Called Tomorrow was co-conceived by CAAM’s Visual Arts Curator, Michele Lee, with support from Erin Clancey, Associate Curator at the Skirball Cultural Center. On view at CAAM are works by artists Abdelali Dahrouch, John Outterbridge, Dominique Moody, Joyce Dallal, Charles Dickson, John Halaka, Graham Goddard, Yong Soon Min, Sonia BasSheva Manjon, Ingrid von Sydow, and Betty Nobue Kano. On view at the Skirball Cultural Center are works by artists Kim Abeles, Castillo, Graham Goddard, Dominique Moody, and Kwahuumba & Karen Seneferu.

This past Sunday, December 13th, distinguished California based photographer Larry Sultan died of cancer.  He was born in New York in 1946, but moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1949. He received a BA from University of California Santa Barbara in 1968 and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1973.

It was at SFAI that he met the artist Mike Mandel, with whom he produced his first major body of work, “Evidence.”  This book of appropriated photographs and catalogued images collected from a large body of government agency archives, corporations, and research institutions looks at the then contemporary American life. The body of work evolved into an exhibit hosted by SFMOMA in 1977.

In 1988, Larry Sultan began working as a professor of photography at California College of the Arts, where he grew to be an integral part of both the Graduate Fine Arts, and Undergraduate Photography programs.  He was an influential mentor, teacher and colleague and received a great amount of joy from sharing his experience with his students.

Sultan produced what grew to be arguably his most recognized body of work entitled “Pictures from Home” in 1992.  The project began when his father was forced into early retirement, and became the culmination of a decade of photographs of his parents and their lives, as well as an inclusion of source text, home movie stills, and family artifacts.  This project ultimately led to his next body of work, “The Valley,” a look at the use of suburban houses for pornographic film sets.

Sultan has been internationally recognized and exhibited throughout his career.  His work has been collected by numerous established organizations including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The New York Times obituary for Larry Sultan recounts some of his greatest achievements.

Kathy Aoki is currently presenting a solo show at Oakland’s Swarm Gallery entitled The Museum of Historical Makeovers. In her faux-museum exhibition, Aoki takes on the role of a curator from the year 3011 at a cultural history museum. The exhibition specifically follows Gwen Stefani as if humanity has uncovered artifacts from her clothing lines and accepted them as culturally significant. The museum consists of several sculptural works in the vein of egyptian artifacts, (canopic jars, maps of burial sites), as well as etchings and illustrations detailing modern makeover processes including Brazilian waxings and anal bleaching. Finally, the museum hosts a tomb room of Stefani burial artifacts that is “temporarily closed” due to vandalism, allowing only a small peep-hole-style viewer for museum patrons. As is evident with this exhibit’s tongue-in-cheek portrayal of feminine social standings, Aoki considers herself a “sneaky feminist,” inserting subtle statements of accepted female beauty “norms” into her work concerning feminine gender roles.

Kathy Aoki received her MFA in printmaking from Washington University in 1994 and currently lives and works in Santa Clara, California where she is an assistant professor at Santa Clara University. She has shown at a large variety of galleries, including San Jose Museum of Art, Smith Anderson Editions, as well as participating in San Fransisco Arts Commission‘s Market St. Kiosks in 2004. The Museum of Historical Makeovers runs until October 25th, and is accompanied by an artist talk on October 14th with Aoki playing the role of the Museum curator.

Mark Moore Gallery has been organizing its annual Ultrasonic exhibitions for four years now, featuring emerging artists from the U.S. and elsewhere. This year’s installment, Ultrasonic IV: Fresh Perspectives, more subdued than its high-strung title suggests, seems to confront the present through the lens of the past, rephrasing visual legacies in a way that suggests nostalgia can be prescient.

It’s a fascinating trend: in a time when technology allows the production of slick, seamless images, artists return to the antiquated media of the past.

Josh Azzarella Untitled #46 (The Awful Grace of God) (2007), Video

Josh Azzarella‘s videos, collages of grainy found and reedited footage, turn profound political moments into silent lulls. In Untitled #46 (The Awful Grace of God), just over two minutes in length, Robert Kennedy stands before a crowd that appears loyal but listless. Kennedy doesn’t ever speak – or, at least, he doesn’t look like he does – and the soundless, blurred film makes a melancholic moment out of something that should have been empowering. Though of course, in retrospect, any footage of Bobbie Kennedy is melancholic.

Tim Barber‘s cinematic photographs, with their the-world-is-bigger-than-you-are presentiment, evoke 1960s Cinema Verite – they approximate in-the-moment truth except, once framed, truth becomes another form of fantasy. Barber’s subjects don’t acknowledge the camera. For the most part, their faces are obscured, directed away or literally distorted by a flash of light or suspended foliage. But in one image, Untitled (wrapped in plastic), a woman’s perfectly legible, pristinely made-up profile rests inside a plastic bag. Exaggerated yellows make the image look like it’s been imported from a past decade and the plastic wrapping suggest an attempt to keep a dead face picturesque. Does this attempted preservation act as a protest against immediacy? Or is it simply an inability to let go?

Tim Barber Untitled (pillow) (2008) Digital c-print

While Ultrasonic IV certainly deals with nostalgia’s heaviness, it also offers plenty of levity. Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz re-imagine the snow globe, taking sentimental keepsakes and making them sinister. As objects, the globes are kitschy as the real things; as narratives, they’re absurd and callous. Had the Coen brothers depicted Narnia, the result might have been similar: miniature figures climb through stony ruins, find themselves chained together in the midst of forests, nearly fall from cliffs, and use boulders to stomp one another into the snow. It’s winter wonderland gone terribly wrong.

Looking back, remixing and sampling are things art, like music, has gotten good at, and they’re things Ultrasonic IV does well. The urge to revisit what already exists makes sense; the world has so much information in it already (and so much misunderstood, overlooked information) that taking the remix approach seems economical.

Walter Martin & Paloma Munoz Traveler CCLVII (2009)

At the end of her novella The Dog of the Marriage, Amy Hempel wrote, “I see the viewfinder swing wide across the lawn, one of those panning shots you always find in movies, where the idea is to get everybody in the audience ready for what will presently be revealed” – Except that Hempel’s characters never really get past the panning shot, and neither does contemporary art. The lingering question seems to be whether we should keep anticipating the reveal, or accept that rear-views are the closest we can get to looking forward.

Empty parking lots, finely manicured grass on the side of the highway, construction debris in front of an erecting shopping center, and a Walgreen’s drive-thru pharmacy are typical sites of everyday American life that are often overlooked. Longstreth draws attention to these under recognized and uninviting real spaces, questioning notions of consumerism and constructed landscapes. Clocking myriad hours among the highways and byways of a vast Americana, Longstreth has captured inevitably overlooked suburban settings in numerous photographs (compiled in appealing book form at Gregory Lind Gallery). Extracting ideas from his photographs, while not necessarily painting them verbatim, Longstreth’s flat color block and geometrical lines enhance the simplicity and loneliness within these structures.l

In Small Town In-Ground, a cool blue public swimming pool sits, patiently waiting to chill off neighborhood families on a hot summer’s day. Simple geometric lines outline the built concrete structures while trees in the background assure a patina of a life lived closer to “nature,” and the dichotomies of painting styles Longstreth employs speak of the manufactured in conjunction with the natural.

One work of particular interest is of a newly built shopping center, much like any Wal-Mart or Target seen in Anytown, USA. The building is depicted from the front, and the stucco facade is carefully highlighted with strong lines with each pillar and chip of paint emphasized. A pile of construction debris lies in front of the structure, orange cones peeping out from behind dirt mounds, adding color and life to the benign scene. The painting is satirically titled Rome, and it edifies Longstreth’s conception of America as a great empire imploding from within. The sad and sullen emptiness that exists in Longstreth’s spaces speak to an American dream gone flat.

All It Is is on view until January 31, 2008 at Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

Digital artist and painter Yoon Lee creates work that is a metaphor for the exponential growth of technology and information. The scale of these works are often 8 feet tall and 12 feet long and seem to reference the visual dynamism found in the modernist work of artist Jackson Pollock. The digital element employed allows the artist to achieve highly slick surfaces and a mechanical line quality which aids formally to her concept of technological growth. This is echoed by the shear visual magnitude which is forced onto the viewer by the scale and movement inherent in each piece. Lee received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2005), and she was a featured artist in New American Paintings (2006). This year the artist had a solo exhibition with the Luggage Store Gallery in SF, and participated with Pulse Miami through DCKT Contemporary. Next year the artist will be featured in a group exhibition titled “Euphorion: Art from San Francisco” at Pierogi Gallery, Leipzig, Germany. Lee has also participated in residency programs at 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica, and at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Saulsalito, CA.