Susan O’Malley. Less Internet More Love, from the series Advice From My 80-Year-Old Self, 2015; mural at Bob McGee’s Machining Co., Inc., 2735 San Pablo Ave, Berkeley. Courtesy of Kala Art Institute. Photo: Bob McGee’s Machining Co., Inc.

The medium of print has a long history of expanding art into the public realm, and Print Public at Kala Art Institute has boldly pushed the envelope of the role of print in the urban context via a highly inventive series of public workshops and interactions that led up to the current gallery presentation. Kala presents this project not only as a gallery show but as a long-term collaboration with its neighbors and UC Berkeley: “Print Public was conceived in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of City & Regional Planning as an arts-integrated approach to urban planning and community activation.” Because the project was developed and elaborated over a two-year period, the involved artists had ample opportunity to design innovative ways to integrate the local community into their projects. Most devised a public dimension designed to bring attention and visitors to West Berkeley, where Kala is located, and then collaborated with residents to produce interactive, or at least locally informed, works. The exhibition organizers call this a “place-making initiative.” Such terminology can have many meanings, but the intent in this case was for the assets of the neighborhood to be explored by the artists and then reflected back to give residents a sense of their own community. Perhaps it is not so much place making as place finding.

Read the full article here.

Kim Anno. Water City Kids, 2013; large-format photograph; 38 x 28 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Why celebrate when the world is going to hell? Kim Anno’s ambitious effort to envision the future of humanity through a multiplatform work of art offers an answer with play and consistent hope, despite imagery of rising waters and the gravitas of an ancient Greek chorus.

Water City Berkeley—a live musical performance centered around a dual projection that ran for two shows on Saturday, December 7, at the Kala Art Institute—is the fourth chapter in Anno’s Men and Women in Water Cities series, and it is the most ambitious to date. This ongoing project of Anno’s, who is Professor of Painting at California College of the Arts, marks two important turns that inform one another: the first, from abstract painting to film-centric work that engages contemporary political content; and the second, from working solo in her studio to a collaborative mode of production. Anno has embraced other artists—composers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, even cheerleaders—in order to enrich and to complicate the visions she harbors of our world and its future development.

Water City Berkeley’s vision of a half-submerged future draws on collaborations with Oberlin Dance choreographer KT Nelson, who has contributed beautiful compositions to the film performed by dancers half-submerged in the waters of the Bay. Composer David Coll’s provocative score, played live by SF Sound Players and the Berkeley Chamber Ensemble during the performances, is full of whimsical surprise due to its enigmatic rhythms and diachronic temporality.

The film itself is a carefully edited, 21-minute dual-screen projection featuring three sections carefully paced to deliver both a narrative and powerful imagery. The first sequence, “Work and Days,” features men and women in corporate dress on the beach and in the surf. The next segment, “Inexorable Tea House,” was filmed in the Tea House at the Oakland Estuary and combines readings from Oedipus Rex with a musical performance by a masked band of musicians (Kingdom of Not) accompanied by dancers. In the last and most dazzling section, “Poseidon’s Race,” a game of Capture the Flag is played on the beach, including dancers in referee costumes, athletes, cheerleaders, and children who seem to be performing a kind of ritual. Echoes of political domination are re-created in the form of play via the flags and airborne chest bumps. The visionary effect of the cinematography is enhanced by episodic interventions from an extra-filmic live chorus, who recite passages from Greek tragedies from behind the seated viewers. The august voices of ancient playwrights, newly retranslated by Anno, give the film’s images a sense of history and a common destiny amid our world’s changing ecology. By the end of the performance, there was not a hair left resting on the back of my neck.

John Zarobell is Assistant Professor of International Studies and Program Chair of European Studies at the University of San Francisco. Formerly, he held the positions of assistant curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and associate curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

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Kim Anno. Water City Kids, 2013. Large format photograph; 38 x 28 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Why celebrate when the world is going to hell? Kim Anno’s ambitious effort to envision the future of humanity through a multiplatform work of art offers an answer with play and consistent hope, despite imagery of rising waters and the gravitas of an ancient Greek chorus.

Water City Berkeley—a live musical performance centered around a dual projection that ran for two shows on Saturday, December 7, at the Kala Art Institute—is the fourth chapter in Anno’s Men and Women in Water Cities series, and it is the most ambitious to date. This ongoing project of Anno’s, who is Professor of Painting at California College of the Arts, marks two important turns that inform one another: the first, from abstract painting to film-centric work that engages contemporary political content; and the second, from working solo in her studio to a collaborative mode of production. Anno has embraced other artists—composers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, even cheerleaders—in order to enrich and to complicate the visions she harbors of our world and its future development.

Water City Berkeley’s vision of a half-submerged future draws on collaborations with Oberlin Dance choreographer KT Nelson, who has contributed beautiful compositions to the film performed by dancers half-submerged in the waters of the Bay. Composer David Coll’s provocative score, played live by SF Sound Players and the Berkeley Chamber Ensemble during the performances, is full of whimsical surprise due to its enigmatic rhythms and diachronic temporality.

The film itself is a carefully edited, 21-minute dual-screen projection featuring three sections carefully paced to deliver both a narrative and powerful imagery. The first sequence, “Work and Days,” features men and women in corporate dress on the beach and in the surf. The next segment, “Inexorable Tea House,” was filmed in the Tea House at the Oakland Estuary and combines readings from Oedipus Rex with a musical performance by a masked band of musicians (Kingdom of Not) accompanied by dancers. In the last and most dazzling section, “Poseidon’s Race,” a game of Capture the Flag is played on the beach, including dancers in referee costumes, athletes, cheerleaders, and children who seem to be performing a kind of ritual. Echoes of political domination are re-created in the form of play via the flags and airborne chest bumps.  The visionary effect of the cinematography is enhanced by episodic interventions from an extra-filmic live chorus, who recite passages from Greek tragedies from behind the seated viewers. The august voices of ancient playwrights, newly retranslated by Anno, give the film’s images a sense of history and a common destiny amid our world’s changing ecology. By the end of the performance, there was not a hair left resting on the back of my neck.

John Zarobell is Assistant Professor of International Studies and Program Chair of European Studies at the University of San Francisco. Formerly, he held the positions of assistant curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and associate curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

Using languages and symbols, Enrique Chagoya is a master code-switcher. His drawings, etchings, and lithographs now on view in Freedom of Expression at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California conjure a universe that is at once familiar and alien, like a vivid dream. The phrases and images he appropriates from history and popular culture are things that a viewer has seen before, but never in quite this combination. Cartoon characters pick their way through landscapes populated by skeletons, gun-toting soldiers, and tidal waves; and yet the most dangerous part of each composition is not a corporeal threat but the minefield of cultural disorder.

Enrique Chagoya. Escape from Fantasylandia: An Illegal Alien's Survival Guide, 2011; color lithograph on papel de amate. Courtesy of the artist and Shark's Ink. Photo: Kala Art Institute.

One of the most fascinating components of the work is Chagoya’s attention to detail at every level. Escape from Fantasylandia: An Illegal Alien’s Survivial Guide (2011) is a perfect example: before one even considers the imagery on the surface, the material and technical components (lithography on amate paper) prepare the viewer for a clash. A German author invented the lithograph in 1796, and papel de amate is a pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican paper; thus, in advance of any other consideration, a pastiche already exists.

Enrique Chagoya. Escape from Fantasylandia: An Illegal Alien's Survival Guide (detail), 2011; color lithograph on papel de amate. Courtesy of the artist and Shark's Ink. Photo: Kala Art Institute.

Going further into Escape from Fantasylandia, the images are combined in such a way as to imply an internal logic, and yet they also exist in a cultural, geographic, and even temporal chaos. In one panel, a conventionally pretty Caucasian woman from a mid-century comic book is dressed in archaic peasant garb. She restrains a child-size skeleton by the upper arm and asks, “¿Debo entender que no te simpatizo para tu amiga?” (roughly translated as, “Am I to understand that you don’t want me for your friend?”). Given her posture and the circumstance, her sweet face looks malevolent; in consideration of her rough grip, her beauty turns out to be a Trojan horse, and the gaunt little skeleton is wise to lean away from the rod she carries in her other hand. From the grim faces of the smaller skeletons that march along at the bottom of the panel, we can guess what happens next; but they are concerned only with following a floating trail of five-dollar bills, and cannot help.

Enrique Chagoya. The Adventures of the Modernist Cannibals, n.d.; codex lithograph, chine colle, and woodcut on amate paper. Collection of Sue Kubly. Photo: Kala Art Institute.

Similarly, The Adventures of the Modernist Cannibals (lithograph, chine colle, and woodcut on amate paper), contains symbolic images that point to different cultures and time periods. The confusion of non-linear narratives in this book-like work is countered by its progressive, landscaped format. But in the end, disorientation reigns: Superman tumbles from the sky into a ritual human sacrifice on an Aztec pyramid, while Captain America dashes through the main gallery of an antiquities museum. In the next panel, a pre-Columbian man in a feathered headdress sits in front of an easel painting a large canvas that looks very similar to Sigmar Polke’s 1969 work Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black!—itself a commentary on the supposed spirituality of the Modernist movement. And although Modernist Cannibals is folded between panels as though to make a book, it is presented open; if it had remained folded, the far right panel would be the front cover, but displayed as it is, the viewer who normally reads from left to right finds herself in the position of having apprehended the work backward. Temporal chaos, indeed.

Enrique Chagoya. The Adventures of the Modernist Cannibals (detail), n.d.; codex lithograph, chine colle, and woodcut on amate paper. Collection of Sue Kubly. Photo: Kala Art Institute.

Dragging the weight of their individual histories along with them, Chagoya’s uneasy potpourri of signifiers—from pre-Columbian glyphs to American comic-book characters—form dialectical pastiches that never quite resolve into calm synthesis, and that’s the whole point. Though other works in the exhibition—such as the single-panel lithograph The Pastoral or Arcadian State, Illegal Alien’s Guide to Greater America (2006), or the aquatint etching in the style of Goya No se puede mirar/Cannot Watch (2012), or the charcoal and pastel When Paradise Arrived (1988)—also evince the same rich discomfort of characters and states, I found myself more drawn to the lavish agitation in the multi-paneled book works. The compositions there are magnificently awkward, manifesting in images the border-state disquiet that occurs when one belongs to many distinct communities simultaneously.

Enrique Chagoya. The Pastoral or Arcadian State, Illegal Alien’s Guide to Greater America, 2006; color lithograph. Courtesy of the artist and Shark's Ink. Photo: Kala Art Institute.

References to colonial history, cultural imperialism, and near-hallucinatory allusions to the failure of capitalism make the works in Freedom of Expression simultaneously comprehensible and bewildering. The viewer who speaks more than one language might find that these mashed-up images make sense even as she is hard-put to articulate precisely how they function; just as in a foreign tongue imperfectly learned, one can get the gist even without being able to translate word for word.

Freedom of Expression, The Work of Enrique Chagoya is on view at Kala Art Institute through July 6, 2013.