“It is so very hard to become a man. . .Everything threatens to beat us down, to strip us of our biological birthright, to destroy us simply for asserting our essential, metaphysical manliness.” – Roger D. Hodge, Onan the Magnificent: The Triumph of the Testicle in Contemporary Art (2000) Today, Matthew Barney will receive the prestigious Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award during the San[…..]

The paintings of Dresden-based Christoph Roßner have the power of a waking dream.  As opposed to our regular, logically- and visually-tangled dreams, the visions we have right before we fall asleep – or even in the middle of the day – tend to focus on single objects:  things recognizable but out of reach, comforting but not quite tangible.  Slow and atmospheric, they demand time and[…..]

In the 1990s, Scott Treleaven was best known as a film and zine-maker. Toronto-bred and living in Paris, Treleaven had made a name for himself through his zine, Salivation Army, which he filled with collage, drawings, 35mm photographs and sprawling notes. It was a meeting place of Queer, occult, and punk interests, if you can imagine such a wild thing. Treleaven’s new show at Silverman[…..]

One offshoot of photography is the debate over the authority we give it, a fact that San Francisco artist Sean McFarland plays with in Viewshed, a solo show up this month at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions.  Viewshed contains two separate but related bodies of work: Dark Pictures, a series of large, extremely dark but detailed photographs taken of what look like wild and wooded landscapes; and[…..]

Chicago-based artist Ryan Travis Christian creates amazingly rendered drawings that employ an amalgamation of sources, all collapsing and folding in on one another. Ryan freely adopts cultural signifiers, both high and low, and fractures them to the point where anything can exist on the same page, regardless of its origin. The artist currently has an exhibition on view, titled Sad Sacks, at San Francisco’s Guerrero[…..]

Today’s article is from our friends at Art Practical, where Spencer Young discusses SNOWBALL, an exhibition by the artist collective leonardogillesfleur currently on view at Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. In this year’s February issue of Artforum, which features a lengthy section dedicated to the topic of collaboration, Tom Hollert writes, “Collectives and collaboratives are still assumed to be intrinsically liberating. Their emancipatory dimension[…..]

All abstract art has one thing at its core:  the human body.  The existence of abstract art is as old as humankind, as are its attempts to either translate or transcend bodily experience without that pesky figuration getting in the way.  This conflict is even present etymologically:  the word ‘abstract’ boils down to meaning something along the lines of ‘drawn away’ – or ‘separated from[…..]