In Doug Rickard’s photos – culled from Google’s mapping service – human beings register as mistakes, causalities caught by a lens intended to record geography.
Reviews
Leonardo Drew @ Anthony Meier Fine Art
With ravages to the urban landscape imprinted on our collection imagination, Drew’s work seems harrowing in its timeliness.
David Maisel @ Haines Gallery
Using X-rays from the archives of the Asian Art Museum as source material, Maisel explores the ghostly space between the purposeful document and the otherworldly trace.
Song Dong @ YBCA
In “Waste Not” “everything is well ordered but dead, like the clothing, rings, and eyeglasses gathered from the doomed in a death camp,” reports Jeff Kelley. “The only duty left is to archive, and the only remaining utility is to remember.
Deborah Oropallo @ Gallery 16
In the gender-confused universe of Deborah Oropallo, nothing is real and everything is permitted. Her reworking of Internet images suits an era in which personal identity is reinvented on-the-fly.
Bolles & Westerhout @ SFMOMA Artists Gallery
The success of this unlikely pairing shows what can happen when inspired curatorial vision bridges the divide we sometimes erect between media.
John Hundt & Camilla Newhagen @ Jack Fischer
In Hundt and Newhagen the fighting spirit of Dada is alive and well. Their work points to the extant power of irrationality.
Hasan Elahi @ Intersection 5M
Hasan Elahi passed nine lie detector tests. But the FBI still thought he might be a terrorist. So the Bureau asked him to stay in touch. He complied. The artist filled their inbox with a torrent of useless information.
Abstraction: Then and Now @ Berkeley Art Museum
Does abstraction have a viable “third path,” between the poles of Impressionist “opticality” and Symbolist introspection? Mark Van Proyen reports.
Gottfried Helnwein @ The Crocker Art Museum
Gottfried Helnwein’s paintings and photographs tackle the persistence of evil and the cruelties perpetrated by humans against each other.
Enrique Chagoya @ di Rosa Preserve
In cross-cultural mash-ups, where indigenous icons return to a Disney-fied America, and art historical figures dance through cartoon vistas, Chagoya explores a terrain where all cultures meet and mix.
Video: Patrick Dougherty @ Palo Alto Art Center
Watch this video and learn how Dougherty transforms tons of sticks into architectural masterpieces that quite literally jump the nature/culture divide.
Alex Couwenberg @ Andrea Schwartz
Couwenberg mixes the spatial ambiguity of cyberspace with the disorienting angularity of Cubo Futurism — recasting the Southern California landscape as a mind-bending interior experience.
Christina Seely @ CCAS
Light usually signifies good things, like prosperity and knowledge. But not in Christina Seely’s images. These photos of the “brightest cities on Earth” will make you think twice the next time you flip a light switch.
Tony May @ SJICA
Tony May’s SJICA retrospective showcases the artist’s genius for embedding strong ideas in meticulously crafted objects that both tweak and invoke art history.
2010: Rear View Mirror
What made 2010 notable? OK, it was a lousy year for galleries. But most survived. More remarkably, they hosted more than a few truly memorable shows. Here are some of the highlights we covered in 2010.