Pulse New York 2009

After the Armory Show (and some much needed sustenance) we headed down to Pier 40 for Pulse New York. In terms of tracking down San Francisco galleries participating in the shows in New York, I hit the jackpot. 

Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions was showing several local Bay Area artists, including Brion Nuda Rosch (above) and Clare Rojas (below):

Work by Chris Duncan (below) was also on display:

My personal heritage obliged me to stop at the Lena & Roselli Gallery booth, apparently the only Hungarian gallery at New Yorks contemporary art fairs:

The gallery was featuring Hungarian artists Istvan Nadler (above) and Laszlo Lakner (below):

This piece by Jamie Vasta (below) was at the booth of San Francisco's Patricia Sweetow Gallery:

The gallery was featuring a number of works by David Huffman, including this large piece (below):

David Huffman also had a glittery piece (below):

Next, I stopped by San Francisco's Rena Bransten Gallery, where I enjoyed this piece by  Vic Muniz (below):

The gallery also featured a colorful photographic series by Uta Barth (below):

I paused at a series of eerie works by CCAC grad, Marci Washington (below):

My next stop was Marx & Zavattero, also of San Francisco:

The gallery was showing works by David Hevel exclusively: 

The show, called "How Deep Is Your Love," included over a dozen adorned porcelain monkey statues (above and below):

Finally, San Francisco's Catherine Clark Gallery featured several artists. The installation piece below required the viewer to step on a platform to prompt the video and music over headphones:

Sandow Birk and Elyse Pignolet had an intriguing piece using airport imagery: 

A detail of their piece, "The 99 Names of God (SFO)", is below:

On a similarly Middle Eastern inspired theme, the gallery was showing a peice by Al Farrow built using bullets and artillery shells (below):

I enjoyed Christoph Draeger's 8000 piece puzzle (below):

The gallery was also showing work by Chester Arnold (below):

One final chapter in the New York Contemporary Art Fair series remains: Bridge...

ArtSpan Auction Award Winners

I just learned the award winners for Saturday night's ArtSpan Benefit Auction, which includes a couple artists featured on Arteaser. Congratulations!

Barbara Kleinhans for Non-representational
Fernando Reyes for Figurative
Erika Meriaux and Fernando Reyes were also Juror's Choice winners.

The jury was comprised of:
Diane Dunn, Marin Arts Council
Elizabeth Nicholaou, The Shooting Gallery
Jen Rogers, Varnish Fine Art Gallery

A complete list of winners is as follows:
Representational
- Peggy Huff
- Veerakeat TongPaiBoon

Non-representational
- Kristiana Spaulding
- Barbara Kleinhans

3-Dimensional
- Paul Baker
- Reed Slater

Fine Craft
- Reed Slater
- Maggie Malloy

Figurative:
- Fernando Reyes
- Chad Cameron

Photography:
- Roxanne Worthington
- Monica Denevan

Juror’s Choice:
Diane Abt, Marc Babsin, Suzanne Barnard, Emily Clawson, Monica Denevan, Peggy Huff, Ivy Jacobsen, Leslie Lowinger, Molly Meng, Erika Meriaux, Julie Nelson, Fernando Reyes, Jane Rush, Reed Slater, Kristiana Spaulding, Victoria Veedell, Stephen Wagner, Roxanne Worthington, Jade Zabrowski

Hope to see you there! I'll be wearing a piece by Joui Turandot :)

Weekend Guide 3.12.09

Great Caesar's ghost! It's almost the Ides of March! But never fear - we've checked with everyone from Cassandra to Nostradamus and the weekend is looking full of delightful local art:


Openings and Events

ArtSpan, the non-profit organization behind SF Open Studios, is holding its annual Benefit Auction on Saturday at SomARTS Gallery from 6:30-9pm. More information and tickets are available here. Several artists featured on Arteaser have donated works to the auction:

Katie Gilmartin

Philippe Jestin

Mike Kimball

Barbara Kleinhans

Erika Meriaux

Fernando Reyes

Ongoing Shows

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

Sarah Newton at the Dorothy Herger Gallery through March 16

Fernando Reyes at Reaves Gallery through March 28

Katie Gilmartin at City Arts Gallery through March

Mirang Wonne at the USF School of Law Rotunda Gallery until May

Mirang Wonne at the Triton Museum through May 17

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

The Armory Show New York

Welcome back for another installment of my Spring 2009 Art Fair review! From Scope, where San Francisco art dealer Andrei Rozanoff eventually joined our troupe, we headed over to Pier 94 for The Armory Show contemporary fair was being held. I only saw one San Francisco gallery, Ratio 3, which was showing several artists, including Ruth Laskey (below):

Photography by New York artist Ryan McGinley (below) were also on display:

Recent SFMOMA SECA award winner Jordan Kantor (below) also had works showing with Ratio 3:

Santa Monica-based Angles Gallery had a couple dramatic works by Israeli artist Ori Gersht (below):

I also enjoyed this piece by Tom LaDuke (below) in Angles booth:

Kukje Gallery from Seoul had an installation that was hard to ignore. No really, I feel the same way:

We paused again at Berlin's Gallerie Mehdi Chouakri:

The gallery was featuring several glittery works by Swiss artist, John Armleder (above and below):

This postcard-sized piece by Andrea Bowers (below) was easy to miss, but timely indeed: 

I enjoyed this set of Egon Schiele-esque works by Hope Gangloff (below) at New York's Susan Inglett Gallery:

Sharon and I took a long pause at Vienna's Engholm Engelhorn Gallerie to take in works by Drago Persic (below):

Stay tuned for more coverage of last weekend's NY art fairs! Next: Pulse. Tha-thud. Tha-thud.

Scope New York

I spent this Saturday visiting several art fairs going on in New York City with my dear friend Rex and Sharon Reaves of San Francisco's Reaves Gallery:

Our first stop was Scope NY at the Lincoln Center, where over 40 galleries held booths. There we found San Francisco's Shooting Gallery:

In addition to works by Greg Gossel (above) was a large piece of assembled homeless signs by EriK Foss:

Works by Ron English (below) were also am display with the Shooting Gallery. We also had a chance to meet Libby Nicholaou (below, far right):

Also representing San Francisco at Scope was Lincart:

The gallery featured work by Charles Linder (below left), among others:

Several works by Jeff McMillan were also on display (below):

Graham Gillmore also had several works selected for the Lincart booth:

The Costa Rican-based Jacob Karpio Galeria had some intriguing works by New York artist Jordan Eagles, who uses blood as one of his materials:

NY-based dFAULKEN was present with five artists:

Karim Hamid (above and below right) had several pieces on display:

Also with dFAULKEN was painter Sara Carter (above left):

From Miami was the Hardcore Art Contemporary Space, which featured works by five artists, including Anne Brunet (below):

I enjoyed a matchbox book by Julie Lopez (below). The drawing portrays the artist's route home:

From Madrid was Galeria Fernando Pradilla:

Dominating Fernando Pradilla were several works by Juan Francisco Caras (above and below):

Casas uses bic blue pens to create his photo-realistic portraits on paper:

Munich-based Galerie Andreas Binder featured five artists in its booth:

Among the works at Andreas Binder were paintings by Matthias Meyer (above) and works by Tina Berning (below):

Jonathan LeVine Gallery from New York featured Camille Rose Garcia (below) exclusively:

Hamburg-based Heliumcowboy Artspace had a decidedly low-tech presence:

Bringing virtually no materials, artist Jon Burgerman (below center) was on-site creating original works with the help of "lab assistants", Jorg (right) and Ollie (left):

Stay tuned for more coverage of New York's art fairs!

Dana Harel

Thanks to my warm reception at the Frey Norris Gallery covering Josh Hagler's recent show there, I was put into contact with Dana Harel. She and I sat down over tea at the Palace Hotel to discuss how she came to her most recent series, "Kin."

Born in Tel Aviv, Dana Harel observed her father and grandparents paint in their leisure time. Pursuing art only as a hobby, her family members had developed meticulous technique, but did not attempt new content, which shaped her early experiences with art:

“I took some art classes, but I was never pushed to think for myself. It was kind of about learning techniques or painting or looking at other art or landscapes and painting what you see”

The practically-minded Harel studied architecture at university, eventually moving to the Bay Area with her husband and completing her degree at the California College of Arts (formerly CCAC) in Oakland. While the study appealed to her, the profession did not:

“I loved architecture, but I liked it in school where it’s very conceptual and you loved what you do. And then I graduated and started to work and I was very disappointed. I kind of felt broken”

Taking some time off from work when her first child was born, she began to apply her draughtswoman skills towards artistic compositions. At first, her subjects were nominally architectural in nature, but Harel’s interest was more human:

“It would be about intimate spaces, about the body, but I would not necessarily draw the body. I would maybe draw as space that can give you an idea of the body, like maybe confessional booths or restrooms or very small, confined spaces that have some correlation to the body”

These intimate spaces, designed explicitly with the human body in mind, Harel considered to be like organisms themselves that fit into their broader environment. She continued to draw architectural subjects, but began to relate them to their surroundings:

“I was looking at the architecture as landscape […] and was trying to see how the body correlates to the building – like, ‘What’s the connection?’ I knew there was something more than just being in a space”

By introducing natural landscape, Harel explored how the body’s connection to a building ultimately connected back to nature. The interfacing with nature through a building highlights our distance from nature:

“In the building, we know how to behave. It’s a concrete, built environment. It’s manicured to our needs […] We have so alienated ourselves from nature that we don’t necessarily know [how to behave in it]. We pose in nature, we take pictures in nature and then we get in the car and drive off”

Meanwhile, Harel began transitioning away from solely architectural subjects by drawing chairs, which she felt shared structural properties with the human form. As she began to draw from live models, she would continue to draw certain limbs from chairs. The effect is that of surreal subjects in slightly awkward poses:

“[I was] looking at that as a distorted, horrible image, but making it really beautifully. It’s as if we are trying to correct everything in our body that is not perfect. We don’t give in to the imperfection part of life”

Eventually, the architectural elements disappeared from her work entirely, replaced by human subjects. While she continued to draw a natural backdrop, her primary interest was the human form and its relationship to its surroundings:

“I always try to think where the body connects to wherever I’m going, so if it’s in the landscape or the woman, it’s ‘How can I go as close as I can- the closest with nature?’”

Pushing further into the proximity between the body and nature, Harel began to consider the body as the landscape itself. Taking inspiration from her children’s uninhibited ability to relate with nature, her new series, “Kin,” explores hand shadow puppets. Like her figures that were drawn as merged with chair parts, her hand puppet subjects seamlessly become the animals they are meant to resemble:

“[I was] making it magical […] in a very childish way, but the outcome is almost monstrous”

The viewer is confronted with the body as a part of nature in an explicit, though ultimately unnatural, way. By focusing on the hands, Harel achieves the ‘body as landscape’ notion and separation from conventional figure or landscape compositions that can come with preconceived assumptions upon interpretation:

“It forced me in a way not to deal with the big landscapes and the whole human body. Because I would think about everything and I would need everything to be thought of and have a reason. So the face or the lips being in a certain way […] I just felt like anyone could interpret it in any way they want. It’s a story by itself”

Being relieved of the burden of so many other details reveals the depth and thoroughness of Harel’s compositions, as well as her architectural training:

“The rigor and the ideas, the process and the way I think is still coming from that […] The way I imagine things when I do a picture, I know how it [will look]. Then I kind of build it up - maybe I’ll have an outline - and then I go from the inside out”

Even her subjects in "Kin" are drawn to the scale of the actual animal. Similarly, her chosen medium remains the architectural tool of graphite, but more importantly its fineness allows Harel to construct the detailed landscapes that transcend body and nature:

“I think graphite in a way is harder for me because I can’t use color that much to transfer emotion […] but I like that challenge”

See some of Dana Harel’s work in the “Herstory” show at the Napa Valley Museum, with an opening reception this Saturday, March 7 from 5:30-7pm. Her “Kin” series will show at Frey Norris Gallery in April.

Weekend Guide 3.5.09

While I may be New York City, where I'll be attending many of the numerous contemporary art fairs around the city, my heart remains in San Francisco, where you can enjoy a number of openings and ongoing shows this week!

Openings and Events

Mirang Wonne at the Triton Museum on Friday, March 6 from 7-9pm

Katie Gilmartin at City Arts Gallery on Friday, March 6 from 7-10pm

Ongoing Shows

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

Sarah Newton at the Dorothy Herger Gallery through March 16

Fernando Reyes at Reaves Gallery through March 28

Mirang Wonne at the USF School of Law Rotunda Gallery until May

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