Weekend Guide 2.19.09

Mardi Gras may not be until Tuesday, but we've got something to show you this weekend. Just stop by any of these local venues - bead necklaces not required:

Ongoing Shows

Phillip Dvorak and Megan Wolfe at Bucheon Gallery through February

Dale Eastman and Zonal Home through February

Josh Hagler at Frey Norris Gallery through February

Mirang Wonne at the USF School of Law Rotunda Gallery

Mirang Wonne at the Ira Wolk Gallery in St. Helena through March 14

For more shows featuring artists interviewed on Arteaser, check out the Arteaser Calendar.

Weekend Guide 2.13.09

Love is in the air, so when you've finished reading ALL of your valentines, show some love for local artists by checking out these exhibits. Go ahead and wear your heart on your sleeve!

Ongoing Shows

Phillip Dvorak and Megan Wolfe at Bucheon Gallery through February

Dale Eastman and Zonal Home through February

Josh Hagler at Frey Norris Gallery through February

Mirang Wonne at the USF School of Law Rotunda Gallery

Mirang Wonne at the Ira Wolk Gallery in St. Helena through March 14

For more shows featuring artists interviewed on Arteaser, check out the Arteaser Calendar.

Dale Eastman

I met Dale Eastman at the opening of her show at Zonal, where I was intrigued by her studies of language and the visual and conceptual space between words. Although I was quite intimidated by her own editorial background, we met again for this story.

Born in San Mateo, Dale Eastman was the second of six children. Her father had been a cowboy who would buy herds of sheep and eventually became a salesman, so the family moved several times:

"It was a lot of energy - emotional energy - and a lot of movement. It's astonishing how much time that can take up. I think I was kind of the visual guardian. We all kind of took care of each other because we moved around a lot, so we [the kids] became a little tribe"

With all the activity and interaction, Eastman didn't reserve herself for quiet things like reading or journal writing, but she did take up sewing and even considered becoming a fashion designer:

"Sewing was, I think, the first thing that helped me focus and I think really that was why I was drawn to it as strongly as I was. And my mom sewed most of my clothes and I really loved the idea of that, that she could teach me something"

But after studying History in college, Eastman began a career in journalism. Becoming an investigative journalist, Eastman's work involved in-depth, personal studies of subjects like Jesse Jackson:

"I think what I was trying to do with other people was what I couldn't do yet with myself. And that was ask every single question, probe every possible nuance of every sentence"

Eventually, Eastman's career brought her back to San Francisco to be editor-in-chief of San Francisco Magazine. In 2000, she left the magazine and began writing fiction, but after a childhood and career of focusing externally, Eastman struggled to capture her own feelings:

"There was so much even then, in the fiction, that I couldn't get out because the words weren't enough [...] Writing is a very spacial thing for me and I could sense these literal depths and I could feel myself at times reaching down and pulling things up. After years and years of feeling this and not even knowing what I was feeling, I thought, again, 'What if I don't reach down and pull that stuff up? What if I do something that allows me to stay down there and record that level?'"

To capture that emotional content that was beyond words, Eastman began experimenting outside of writing, with photography and sound installations:

"Just to play with a different side of my brain, I started doing little projects. They're mostly conceptual, but not with thread at all. I was trying to recreate sound and movement that I saw out on the street"

Eventually, she gravitated back to her passion for sewing, connecting fabric squares with abstract thread patterning that contemplated negative space and oriented lines in other ways than the left to right horizontal stripes of text:

"I was kind of just examining the energy that moves between moments that we identify"

With the act of writing revolutionized by computers and word processing, Eastman felt disconnected from the writing process and craved more physical engagement. She thought about sewing the dictionary, to both connect to the process of "making words" and also to reflect on literally feeling at a loss for words:

"It was this physical, spacial awareness [...] part of what I felt was I was just getting so far away from literally making a story"

Meanwhile, Eastman was frustrated with the impassive direction of work by contemporary conceptual artists, such as Damien Hirst, and the emotional deceit within the revelation of false memoirs, like that of JT Leroy. Seeking to embrace emotional authenticity, she took a 1500-word short story she had written and sewed it a word at a time on individual squares and then wound the story in a large glass bottle:

"[To make] people to feel as close as possible what I felt[,] I made a tangled mess and created a story where someone literally has to go through the same process I went through and felt"

Having bridged her writing with visual expression, Eastman was ready to move beyond sewing words:

"I think this is why I love writing, but I think this is why I love art even more: With words, we think because we assign a word to something, we understand it. But with this, I wanted to get to those feelings where: 'I can't describe it, but here's how it feels'"

Still working with thread on fabric squares, every morning Eastman began recording her emotional memories from the prior day. She then strung the squares together and hung the strips from wood, creating a linear pattern that reflected words on a page as much as days on a calendar. What began as a square per day, became strips of squares per day, but some squares are missing:

"[It's] expanding consciousness, so now I'm to the point where I can pretty much remember everything that happens [...] When I couldn't remember a feeling from the day before, I left a space. So then when it's up on the wall and the string continues, what you see is the framework that holds us up"

In this context, Eastman's threads create a skeleton and the cloth squares, each with their cardiogram-like emotional recording, become the bits of flesh hanging from the bones. But in contrast to a written autobiography, this emotional self-portrait is not recognizable:

"For me they're extraordinarily supercharged because of what I went through. So, again, it's something that's simple on the surface but behind it there's an extraordinary amount of generally emotional information"

By recording and displaying without writing, Eastman plays with the very notion of verbal communication. Compared to her earlier struggle to find words, Eastman now turns the expository nature of writing on its ear:

"I think writers [or] artists of almost any ilk have secrets and there's a duality to a secret: a secret isn't a secret if other people know about it, but if other people don't know about it, [then] they don't know you"

Going further with the notions of secrets, Eastman's next project involves sewing boxes, but not always revealing the contents. Thus, after years of writing, her visual creations are now taking her further from words and deeper into feeling:

"For me, art is a way into the psyche of first and foremost myself; but then, because I don't think I'm that much different from anybody else, hopefully the culture around me"

See Dale Eastman's "Making Something Out of Nothing" show at Zonal Home through February.

Weekend Recap 2.9.09

My first stop was the "Supernatural" show at Hang Gallery Annex, which included geometric abstractions by Facundo Arganaraz (below):

On display through February, the show also included angelic deer by Thomas Frongillo (below):

Focused on both animal figures and landscapes elements of natural imagery, the show featured ghostly trees by Ute Zaunbauer (below):

I then crossed the street to the main Hang Gallery, which was opening its Freya Prowe show, "Black Water":

In rich, textured ink pieces, Freya Prowe portrays a watery dreamscape:

Fairies, fish and other sea creatures inhabit and do battle on a monochromatic landscape that bubbles with fairy-tale tension: 

Prowe creates her pieces on a variety of surfaces: wood, panel, and zinc among them:

The show will be on display through February:

Finally, I made my way over to Frey Norris Gallery for the opening of Joshua Hagler's "72 Virgins to Die For":

Hagler's powerful paintings and installations explore notions of purity and violence across various settings:

His work suggests a darker truth to the pursuit of purity:

Hagler draws on religious, historical, social and gastronomic references:

The show is on display through February:

For shows and events featuring artists interview by Arteaser, check the Arteaser calendar.

Megan Wolfe

I met up with Megan Wolfe at Cup O' Joe's coffee in Lower Nob Hill, where we discussed the appropriate amounts of caffeine intake and how she got to her latest works at the Bucheon Gallery.

Growing up in northern Mississippi, in a small town suburb of Memphis, Megan Wolfe was accostomed to having various lifeforms circulating through her environment:

"My dad was always fishing turtles out of the swimming pool, so we'd always have critters around us. I grew up going out[side] and playing with the spiders"

Drawing from an early age, Wolfe began taking art classes when she was nine. Despite a limited local art scene, Wolfe's parents did what they could to support their daughter's interests:

"My parents did try to take me to museums and things like that [...] My mom would drive me an hour to [art classes in Memphis…] They were always very positive and 'Go for your dreams, and do what you want to do, and live your dreams' "

Meanwhile, Wolfe was being home-schooled and craved more interactions with lifeforms beyond those in the backyard. Finding networks of illustrators online piqued her interest socially as well as creatively:

"I was kind of looking for a community to get involved in [and] the internet was this big, new, shiny thing. There was this online community of illustrators. They were high school students and college students and I thought it was really cool because they were giving feedback on each others work and helping each other. I thought it was a good way to grow and moving myself forward because the classes I was taking weren't pushing me enough, so it was kind of this challenge"

But Wolfe didn't have any experience with illustration. Nonetheless, her diligence and determination led her to develop her skills:

" I would go through anatomy books and just pour over and memorize everything"

Wolfe then came out to pursue illustration at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, where she met her future husband in a painting class. After a couple years, Wolfe began to have second thoughts about a career in illustration after observing her boyfriend go through the process of launching his professional illustration career:

"There would be times when he would come home and he wouldn't be happy at all with what he was doing. After that I kind of thought about it and [realized that] the stuff that my teachers [were] getting me to do, I don't really like either"

Meanwhile, Wolfe noticed some other emerging artists in the Bay Area were transcending the academically strict separation between illustration and fine art:

"[These artists] kind of do a little bit of both. They kind of do a bit of illustration and turn around and do the fine art and be in galleries [...] I thought that was very interesting [...] We have a lot of flexibility in this community"

Switching from illustration to fine art, Wolfe began with portraiture and figure work - in some ways a natural shift from the character-focused content in illustration. But eventually she began to explore inanimate subjects:

"I got onto still lifes because I thought, there's more to people and their lives than the face or the figure. There's also the stuff that they have, the stuff that they cherish, and the stuff that collects and builds up in your apartment"

The elements of nostalgia and sentimentality apparent in her series, "It Meant Something To Me", are also reflected in the style of Wolfe's pencil drawing. She discovered that using the paper's texture gave the right emotive sense:

"There's something about the grain that I felt was more interesting and more unique. I really have an affection for photography and there are some old photographs that have that film grain look to them. It gives it an old classical feel and I wanted to also incorporate that into the drawings"

Wolfe then expanded on the notion of the familiar, but ignored elements of the urban dweller's environment. She returned her focus from inanimate objects to lifeforms, but this time weeds and pigeons:

"Like with the still lifes, I sort of look for things that people don't pay much attention to […] People in the city compete with other living things [...] weeds in the sidewalk - it's kind of the same thing - It's life trying to live along side us and we kind of hate it. We want to pull it up and get rid of it and don't want to deal with it"

Now surrounded by people and with no shortage of community in the urban landscape of San Francisco, Wolfe contemplates the struggle of these other lifeforms and the very creatures themselves:

"[Mississippi] birds are actually birds. They don't walk around next to you - they fly away. In regards to the pigeons, it really fascinated me was how they just walk around. I'd never seen a bird do that before! You walk down the sidewalk and you get right next to it and it just doesn't move. It kind of looks at you. I think that's what I like about them. [...] It's the only animal that can kind of co-exist with us"

See some of Megan Wolfe's new works at Bucheon Gallery through February.

Weekend Guide 2.6.09

Ahoy, matey!
Okay, I don't know where that was going, but you can find some treasures around town this weekend.

Ongoing Shows

Joshua Hagler at Frey Norris through February

Phillip Dvorak at Bucheon Gallery through February

Mirang Wonne at the USF School of Law Rotunda Gallery

For more events featuring artists interviewed on Arteaser, check out the Arteaser Calendar.

Tweet! Tweet! Arteaser now on Twitter

Taking some cues from my ongoing social networking survey, I've set up a Twitter feed for Arteaser:

http://twitter.com/Arteaser

In addition to the occasional tid-bit, I'll be posting which artist story had the most hits on the prior day, based on Google Analytics. Check it out!