Scott Greene. Trinitas, 2015; oil on canvas on panel, 50 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

In his fourth solo exhibition with Catharine Clark Gallery, Scott Greene presents a series of beautiful, large-scale but tainted paintings. Deep State surrounds viewers with realistic yet distorted and illogical depictions of the natural world. Whether on land, at sea, or in the sky, nothing is ordinary. From the pristine simplicity of nature, Greene imagines an alluring reality tarnished by human tendencies.

Immediately upon entering the gallery, one is confronted by Trading Post (2015), a painting in which a gigantic pine tree laden with various objects tips into oblivion. The hill on which the tree stood is covered in ropes, cardboard, metals, and heaps of junk. A raccoon clings to the tree for dear life, while the goat in midair appears to be collateral damage, and a person balances precariously near the treetop with pieces of chopped lumber in hand. Though a dire state is depicted, bright, warm colors pervade and challenge the feeling of dread communicated in the narrative. The juxtaposition of humankind and nature in this image, though beautifully rendered, is tragic. The abundance of artificial materials silence nature’s beauty.

In frightening and amusing ways, Greene asks viewers to look upon the devastation of a dark, corroded dystopian future in which the natural world is decimated by humankind. In Trinitas (2015), three inflatable tube men (of the kind one sees dancing in the wind at used-car lots), dominate a landscape of cloudy smog, fog, and dirt. Uncanny phrases such as “Worship with us” line the sides of the tube men and draw viewers into a hopeless and barren landscape punctuated with the remains of man-made structures, rotten bones, and colored bowling balls. In Greene’s paintings, we are our own undoing.

A consistent theme throughout Greene’s paintings is “the point of no return.” In Stars’n Tarnation (2013), plastic trash bags explode from an immense gash in a man’s stomach. The man lies bare and immobile while a frail old man attempts to cover up the wound with duct tape. As in Trinitas, the surrounding landscape is desolate, save for the trash and human skulls scattered on the ground. The once pure and sublime landscapes are replaced with wastelands littered with evidence of humankind’s destructive nature. Deep State speaks to the ongoing environmental goals of drastically reducing carbon-dioxide emissions and eliminating plastic waste, among others. The world Greene depicts signals a catastrophic end that is somewhere between an impending reality and a distorted vision of our future.

Deep State is on view through August 29, 2015, at Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Erica Truong was an EHSS Summer 2015 Intern for Art Practical. She lives in the Bay Area and will attend the University of California, Irvine, for Business Administration in the fall of 2015.

Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener, Austin Young). Fruit Machine, 2009; Still from video, edition of 3 + 3AP, dimensions variable.

Visual depictions of gustatory sensations are currently on view at Catharine Clark Gallery. Deborah Oropallo’s paintings, which portray digitally altered images of pigs, chickens, and Holstein cows, fill the two main galleries, while a quirkily risqué video by the decade-old Los Angeles arts collective Fallen Fruit is on view in the media room.

The fourteen-minute video, Fruit Machine (2009), consists of brief portraits of individual teenagers eating fruit in front of a bright white background while facing the camera. The 12-to-17-year-olds hold their assigned fruit next to their heads, make eye contact with someone behind the camera, and then proceed to eat. The fruits are pedestrian: apples, bananas, cherries, and grapes (no durians here). After each teenager takes a few bites, the video cuts to a three-second montage of all of the kids eating fruit, and then settles on a new teenager. It’s as if the viewer was watching a single reel of a slot machine, but instead of stars or bells, it’s the images of kids eating fruit that spin, arbitrarily stop, and then begin spinning again.

The simple, stark depiction of kids’ eating habits begins to resemble other videos, especially those of Rineke Dijkstra, who filmed European teenagers dancing individually in front of a white backdrop in The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK (2009). Unlike in Dijkstra’s videos, the teenagers in Fruit Machine clearly receive direction from someone behind the camera, and then proceed to joke around. Each kid takes a bite and then slowly chews, at times keeping eye contact with the director, and at other times shyly looking away. Some playfully peel a banana; others hold a cherry between their lips for a brief second before chewing and swallowing. Eating is an intimate act, and watching teenagers do it slowly on video while the viewer sits in the dark backroom of a gallery is suggestive. The viewing experience is akin to watching porn.

The girls, some with straightened hair or wearing makeup, take small bites, hold their free hand in front of their mouths while chewing, and laugh and smile for the person behind the camera. The boys never laugh. Some of them, dead-eyed, mindlessly chow down without hesitation. They are unconcerned with how wide they open their mouths or how quickly they work through the fruit. The girls are distinctly aware of being looked at. The boys are oblivious. On the one hand, the video is revealing of the dynamic between the director and the teenagers. On the other hand, it is a disturbing implication of the larger cultural forces that create the dynamic of a masculine gaze, one in which the producers of Fruit Machine have unwittingly entangled themselves.

Fallen Fruit’s Fruit Machine is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery through May 31, 2014.

Calder Yates (b. 1985) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in San Francisco. He received an MFA in studio art and an MA in visual and critical studies from California College of the Arts and has exhibited work at Recology SF, Southern Exposure, and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. www.calderyates.com

Walter Robinson. Exodus, 2014; Wood, fiberglass, taxidermy, glass, leather, sand
75 x 63 x 20 in. Courtesy Catharine Clark Gallery.

What are we to think about an Egyptian funerary boat powered by oars, piled improbably high with miniature, candy-colored shipping containers? San Francisco artist Walter Robinson has become well known for this kind of humorous, slightly disturbing disjuncture: a combination of conceptually and visually loaded elements, exquisitely realized and presented as a fait accompli. The title of Robinson’s solo show, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, unites a vivid group of paintings, sculpture, and unsettlingly surreal installations. Loosely translated, this Latin phrase means “Thus passes the glory of the world,” reminding us not only of the fleeting nature of our existence here on earth, but that, as Douglas Huebler once said, “Things are only things.” Despite what the ancient Egyptians believed, we can’t take them with us when we go.

Robinson is a skilled maker, creating seamless combinations of ingenious, highly crafted parts and found materials (historically, there have been less of the latter, more of the former). This show represents a departure in that more than half of the pieces shown are two-dimensional canvases, painted in the handsomely idiosyncratic palette that has characterized his work for decades. The themes of these pictures include clowns, pets, and a variety of bucolic landscapes, based on motifs taken from paint-by-number images popular in Robinson’s childhood.

In a spectacular series representing the four seasons, these themes are combined in ways that can only be described as somewhere between humorously dreamy and nightmarish (depending, of course, on how you feel about clowns). In Four Seasons (Winter) (2013), an Emmett Kelly look-alike in the foreground gazes pensively into the distance, while skaters skim across the ice behind him, their faces simplified to robotic dots. In the panel that represents spring, a geisha wanders across a bridge behind a different mournful red-nosed figure.

Rather than alluding to the seasons as a one-way journey, representing the ages of man, these pictures seem more to be reminders of the cyclical passage of time. The wheel goes around, year after year, though we can witness it only so many times. The centerpiece of the show, Exodus (2014), is an amalgam of memento mori: a saddled warthog-cum-pack-mule carrying a giant (functional!) hourglass, one hoof embedded in a human skull. The exodus referred to is not only Robinson’s own imminent, lamentable departure from the Bay Area, it is the steady loss of members of the creative class who can no longer afford to live here.

Walter Robinson: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery through March 29, 2014.

Maria Porges is an artist and writer whose critical writing has appeared in many publications, including Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, American Ceramics, Glass, and a host of other now-defunct art magazines. An Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in the Graduate Program in Fine Arts, she likes to topiarize unsuspecting shrubbery and read out loud.

Stacey Steers. Lillian on Bed with Eggs, 2011; video clip of Night Hunter; film 35mm to HD stereo sound; 15:30. Courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery.

Experimental animator Stacey Steers currently has work on view in Night Hunter at Catharine Clark Gallery. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Night Hunter House (2011), an imposing, black Victorian dollhouse. Through small windows, the viewer may glimpse ten small rooms filled alternately with artifacts of domesticity (a single nylon drying on a rack) and eerie, surreal snakes with foreboding eggs. The rooms also contain small screens that show excerpts of the film Night Hunter (2011), a collaged video starring Lillian Gish, the proto-ingénue of silent films. Gish is by turns the heroine and the damsel of Night Hunter, a delicate film that juxtaposes the “real” filmed world of Gish with an animated one. The simplistic animation and collage techniques illuminate the textures of grainy black-and-white film, creating a world that is stranger and more complex than either medium alone. Gish becomes Alice in a darker wonderland.

Also on view is Steers’ 2006 work Phantom Canyon, which similarly borrows archival images, in this example from Eadweard Muybridge’s seminal Human and Animal Locomotion (1887). As in Night Hunter, the animal and human worlds collide and intersect. Muybridge’s figures now inhabit Steers’ dreamscape, where they transform into bats and fish in a romantic romp with an opaque narrative. The film is shown in a screening room, and stills are arranged on the wall of the gallery.

In a work of ornate animation, the viewer easily forgets that each frame and second of the video consists of individual collages. Luckily, in this exhibition, the gallery also features collages and stills from the films, which help the viewer comprehend the complexity of this craft.

As Faye Hirsch noted in Art in America, “Home is where the heart jumps into the throat. This could well be the motto of the oneiric animation Night Hunter…” Here, fear and domesticity make easy bedfellows, from the detailed dollhouse of Night Hunter House to the tumbling beds in Phantom Canyon. Unlike Gish’s films and many portrayals of fear, the tension in Steers’ work rises and never subsides. In these worlds, catharsis never comes.

M. Rebekah Otto lives in Oakland, California. She grew up in Chicago. Her work has been published in The Believer, The Millions, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently the Content Manager at Dictionary.com.