Janice Nakashima’s watercolors fuse the atmospherics of Asian landscape painting with forms that recall Native American petroglyphs.
Reviews
Lewis deSoto @ SJICA
Would Jesus drive a ’64 Chevelle wagon? Would Judas pilot a ‘60 Ford Starliner? Those were a few of the choices conceptualist Lewis deSoto grappled with.
William Kentridge @ SFMOMA
Kentridge’s power derives from the way he combines drawing and stagecraft in stop-animation films that deal with the unfinished business of the 20th century.
Mark Emerson & Greg Kinder @ JAYJAY
Mark Emerson’s illusionism isn’t about pictorial space as much as it is about color-induced, geometrically assisted monkey wrenching of the human optic nerve.
“Personal Lives” @ Verge
Like the suggestive Coppertone ads of yore or the propagandistic illustrations of Norman Rockwell, Julliana Pacciuli’s pictures are simultaneously hygienic and voyeuristic.
Grace Munakata @ b. sakata garo
Grace Munakata’s unique deployment of painting’s arsenal of tricks, to both illuminate and obscure, makes an elegant case for the medium’s continued relevance in the digital era.
Dave Lane @ Nelson Gallery, UC Davis
Lane’s sculptural visions incorporate mythopoetic fantasies based on childhood dreams, the likes of which most adults lack the capacity to summon.
Stephen Kaltenbach @ Verge Gallery
In the late ’60s he mixed Duchampian absurdism with text-based object making to lampoon every myth the art world was manufacturing and refining.
Cathy Stone @ Limn Gallery, SF
In sculptures and large-scale drawings, Stone pits black against white, gravity against buoyancy and spontaneity against calculation in works that display grace and pugnacity.
David Wetzl @ CSU Stanislaus
Never mind the so-called zeitgeist. Wetzl wants to show how every belief system in human history continues to shape our experience.
Todd Hido @ Stephen Wirtz, SF
Hido’s pictures of rural roads to nowhere put a new spin on the all-American themes of rootlessness and alienation.
Katy Stone @ Johansson Projects, Oakland
Stone’s complex, multi-layered installations flow across walls in amoeba-like shapes.
John Yoyogi Fortes @ Skinner/Howard
Fortes’ quasi-expressionist paintings hint at oblique political and personal conundrums.
Linda Day & Stuart Allen @ JayJay
Linda Day has taken the basic tenets of hard-edge, geometric abstraction and turned them upside down.
Kent Lacin @ Sac State Library Gallery
At the heart of documentary photography lies an epistemological conundrum: What do we know and how do we know it?
Katherine Sherwood@ b. garo sakata
In what amounts to a visual roman á clef, Sherwood demonstrated why she is one of the most important painters working today.