Weekend Guide 7.30.09

Holy Guacamole! It's already August?!?! Time is running out on a number of shows around the city:

Ongoing Shows

Leslie Morgan at Zonal through July

Brian McDonald at Dolores Park Cafe through August 4

Dale Eastman and Philippe Jestin at Gensler through August 14

Joui Turandot at Fort Mason through August 16

Rebecca Goldfarb at Steven Wolf Fine Arts through August 22

Brett Amory at Fabric8 Galleries through August

Phillip Hua at Micaela Gallery through August

Leslie Morgan at Frankee Uno through September

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

Weekend Guide 7.23.09

It's July. If we were East Coasters, we'd be heading to the Cape with our preppy gear. But we're not. We're San Franciscans, so we grab a jacket and stay cool in the city with some local art:

Openings and Events

Brett Amory at Fabric8 Galleries on Saturday, July 25 7-10pm

Ongoing Shows

Mike Kimball at SOMArts through July 25

Leslie Morgan at Zonal through July

Brian McDonald at Dolores Park Cafe through August 4

Dale Eastman and Philippe Jestin at Gensler through August 14

Joui Turandot at Fort Mason through August 16

Rebecca Goldfarb at Steven Wolf Fine Arts through August 22

Phillip Hua at Micaela Gallery through August

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

Rebecca Goldfarb

When I sat down with Rebecca Goldfarb a couple months ago, she helped me navigate some unfamiliar notions of conceptual art. I still feel a little lost some times, but at least I know that when it comes to art, it's not rude to stare.

Bay Area native, Rebecca Goldfarb, has had a curious history with language, no doubt affected by her mother's profession as a poet. She recalls an early experience with homophones:

"We could take the short-cut, but I always called it the 'hare-cut' because of 'The Tortoise and the Hare' and that was the quickest way to go. Then when I actually went to get my hair cut, I would call it 'I got my short cut'"

This playful relationship with language developed in tandem with her creative instincts towards visual expression:

"Language and the visual world were always there [...] I spent a lot of time making cards for my family and for my mom, on birthdays. So these cards would end up a lot of times having this language[-play] mixed in with the card"

At Pitzer College, Goldfarb thrived in the interdisciplinary and creative mode of the school, dual majoring in environmental studies and art:

"I could have done Enigmatology, but I didn't think of it at the time" 

While a student, she produced an experimental improv theater group, which naturally involved a lot of creative use of language. During a design class, Goldfarb saw an intriguing photo from a magazine article on glass blowing, which introduced her to the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington state:

"I was already interested in glass as this brilliant, seductive material [...] that was the beginning of this... can you say it was an adventure? [Yes,] it was an adventure!"

She convinced a professor to let her study glass and was set up with Jane Marquis. Marquis had studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College and passed on a number of ideas about color and minimalism: 

"She worked a lot with just squares of color [...] She would say there's no such thing as contrasting colors - she taught me a lot about color, actually [...] Maybe that's where some of my interest in this very minimal separation of color came from"

After graduating, Goldfarb apprenticed in glass blowing and casting with Reddy Lieb. Lieb had a curious bicycle wheel on the wall of her studio, which was a readymade:

"Maybe I'd heard of Marcel Duchamp before [...] but that was the moment in which I remember it actually resonating with me [...] so somehow this whole world of conceptual art-making opened up"

Following her apprenticeship with Lieb, Goldfarb continued to pursue glass-making at Pilchuck. Incidentally, the experience furthered her growing interest in conceptual art:

"Pilchuck, unexpectedly, was personally a fecund environment for thinking beyond glass (oddly) because I met artists such as Kiki Smith and Maria Porges who were a part of Pilchuck's visiting artist program"

Within conceptual art, Goldfarb became interested the relationship between perception and experience. Surrealism was also particularly influential to Goldfarb:

"Art is so open to interpretation and there are so many ways in which you can approach something [...] You can create a kind of experience [...] that is not based in reality, or references reality in a way that allows you to look at what we call reality [...] I love Surrealism in that way: that it takes things that we would think to be so dissonant in our world as we approach it and puts them together in humorous ways"

To that end, language continued to be a wealth of inspiration. Her early exploration of visual puns, such as a "Standing on Your Soap Box" with wax legs perched on a collection of soap boxes or "Lip Service" using a tea service cart, reflects her own sense of humor:

"I was taking images and language that I was interested in and giving it a new way of looking at it in the physical world [...] I think part of the humor comes from that how you can mix up what you already know and what you know about what you're seeing"

Goldfarb's odyssey had eventually brought her back to the Bay Area, where she would study in the San Francisco Art Institute library. She discovered that, Marcel Duchamp, had given a lecture there and decided to apply for Masters in New Genres:

"I really did want to think and make things that were beyond any one particular material [like glass]. I was interested in making things that were about thinking about things"

At SFAI, Goldfarb studied under Paul Kos, Tony Labat, Sharon Grace, Doug Hall, Werner Klotz and John Rapko. While at SFAI, Goldfarb met David Ireland with whom she developed a close relationship and later became his assistant for four years:

"I'd spent two months in Kenya when I was 21 and David's connection to Africa and his meditative yet grounded approach to making art resonated with me. We'd often have tea at his house, 500 Capp, which reveals David's way of working and is also filled with African artifacts. We became great friends and I loved his irreverent sense of humor"

For her latest series, Goldfarb considers this phenomenal consciousness, or that of the raw sensory experience, by displaying a monochromatic field of color. Making some reference to Kazimir Malevich's black squares, Goldfarb's pieces initially appear to be non-represenational:

"I don't think about the color [in terms of classical] emotional responses to color. I think it more has to do with a cognitive response." 

However, as a viewer looks closer, the object that Goldfarb has photographed may become apparent, triggering access consciousness to retrieve stored information to name the object:

"I take very ubiquitous objects, everyday objects. It's important actually [that] once you do recognize what the object is within that color field that it's an object that is easy for anyone to wrap their mind around [...] It's important that they're everyday objects because it relates to language in this way - that when there's the moment of identifying, or accessing, what it is that it's a simple thing that's recognizable to most people."

In a way, Goldfarb has always know that there was something funny, and slightly arbitrary, to the words that we use. She has honed in on the mechanics of language and perception to explore how art can expose gaps in visual perception just as a homophone can reveal a gap in language perception:

"What excites me about this work is that there are different ways of seeing the same thing and that it can oscillate back and forth between different ways of seeing. It is about the act of seeing."

Rebecca Goldfarb shows regularly at BaerRidgway Exhibitions and currently has work on display at Steven Wolf Fine Arts through August 22.

Weekend Guide 7.16.09

I'm back from my two week summer vacation and it's good to be home to catch up on what's happening around the city:

Openings and Events

Joui Turandot at Fort Mason on Thursday, July 16 5:30-7:30pm

Ongoing Shows

Mike Kimball at SOMArts through July 25

Leslie Morgan at Zonal through July

Brian McDonald at Dolores Park Cafe through August 4

Dale Eastman and Philippe Jestin at Gensler through August 14

Phillip Hua at Micaela Gallery through August

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

Weekend Guide 7.1.09

Fire up the grill and calculate the optimal bun-to-hot dog packaging ratio - Independence Day is here! Before the fireworks start, here's a few other shows to catch:

Openings and Events

Phillip Hua at HANG Art on Thursday, July 2 from 5-8pm

Phillip Hua at Micaela Gallery on Thursday, July 2 from 5:30-7:30pm

Ongoing Shows

Leslie Morgan at Studio Gallery through July 12

Leslie Morgan at Zonal through July

Dale Eastman and Philippe Jestin at Gensler through August 14

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

Weekend Guide 6.25.09

Grab your lipstick AND your Harley - it's Pride Weekend in SF. Don't forget to fly your colors when you checkout the colors from these local artists:

Openings and Events

Katie Gilmartin at Under One Roof for "Print Kissing" benefit on Thursday, June 25 from 6-8pm

Ongoing Shows

Katie Gilmartin at City Art Gallery through June 27

Erika Meriaux at Aspect Gallery through June

John Haines at CIIS through June

Leslie Morgan at Studio Gallery through July 12

Leslie Morgan at Zonal through July

Dale Eastman and Philippe Jestin at Gensler through August 14

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

John Wentz

We've been on a little bit of a hiatus here at Arteaser, so thanks for sticking around. I met up with John Wentz at the Palace Hotel some time ago, where we bonded over Donald in Mathmagic Land and I got the story behind his "Adaptive Radiation" series.

Some might argue that science and religion do not mix, but they do have something in common - they both tackle big questions, albeit in very different ways. For John Wentz, both modes of thought were influential to his art as he grew up in the East Bay, attending Catholic school:

"When I was growing up, my mom [...] went to nursing school in Fremont, but we didn't have a lot of money and she couldn't afford day care, so she took me with her and she would give me her anatomy books to draw to keep me busy"

While drawing from anatomy books may have been a more subtle driver, Wentz recalls comic books as a conscious source of inspiration to draw. Although he did not realize it at the time, the comic book stories had a spiritual appeal:

"First thing I remember was drawing [...] I remember my first two comic books were Spiderman #6 and Batman #4, and that just really sparked [my interest in] drawing. [...] Comic books kind of served that side of me, that religious side"

After graduating high school, Wentz lived a transient life for a couple years, but was always drawing. Fascinated by questions of faith and spirituality, he considered pursuing a religious life, but came to other conclusions:

"I actually wanted to be a priest for a while - I went back to that, the religious thing - I wanted to be a Buddhist monk... Then I wound up studying world religion and [...] I realized that role of comic books, how they kind of serve in a lot of ways that function. They have the same archetypes as you find in any great hero myth [...] I realized it was a modern day mythology"

Eventually, Wentz decided to pursue a degree at the Academy of Art after seeing a friend's progress. Ever the rebel, he quickly learned that his first choice of majoring in Illustration was not for him and switched to Fine Art:

"To me at that point it was like, 'Oh, somebody telling me what to do? No, I don't want to do that.' It was that simplified for me so I immediately switched over to Fine Art"

Traditionally a pen and ink draftsman, Wentz first began painting while working at Tower Records, where he air-brushed album cover posters in large scale. While at the Academy, his instruction was in more traditional oil painting and after graduating he regularly sold his work. But before long, Wentz had another crisis of faith, as it were, and temporarily ceased to paint. A chronic insomniac, Wentz eventually saw a documentary on late night television on the Caves of Lascaux:

"Looking at this cave art - which was completely beautiful - in an area that probably at that time you risked death going in there to see, let alone make that art, [I couldn't help but start] thinking about who they were making it for, why they were making it, what compelled them to make it... There didn't seem any hesitance in it, but they were risking life and limb"

Meanwhile, Wentz had been reading Carl Jung and found his ideas about archetypes the collective unconsciousness very interesting with regard to the common experience he had observed between religion and comic books. Finally, Wentz had an epiphany while observing the chronic chatting, texting, and tweeting of his fellow San Franciscans:

"The essence is communication. We did it back then [with the cave drawings], we did it before language and now we're still finding ways to communicate. No matter what kind of technology springs up, we find a way to communicate through it. So that coupled with the Jung book just brought me back to comic books"

Having restored his faith in painting through a combination of cave drawings, psychology readings, and communication habits, Wentz began work on a series of paintings exploring comic book archetypes:

"The first paintings I did in the series were very illustrative of [Jung's concept of a mythological vocabulary]"

Using familiar comic characters, Wentz combines the comic style and realism. He used his adolescent nephew as the primary non-comic subject, representing familiar coming-of-age challenges:

"He turns to video games. When I was a kid I turned to comic books [...] So it was a nice contrast: it was dialogue between our childhoods, it was a dialogue between realism and pop art or realism and comic art. But it didn't make sense [if I put it in a specific landscape]. I wanted it to be a dialogue between just the two of them"

Like the cave drawings on stark, rocky surfaces, Wentz orients his subjects on largely blank, white surface to keep attention on the dialogue. On this approach, he was influenced by the golden backgrounds in Byzantine art, seen on a trip to Italy:

"The environment is all gold and the idea behind that was to tell the viewer that these figures were in a spiritual realm [...] If I put them in this all white background, that would maybe also hint that this is in a psychological realm, this isn't a real place. This isn't even a comic book. It's a blank slate"

The Byzantines' use of sacred geometry was also influential, particularly as Wentz began to move from the smaller, graphite early pieces to larger paintings with greater compositional demands. Technically, he had first encountered the idea in childhood watching Disney's Donald in Mathmagic Land, but recalled the concepts while teaching an anatomy class for the Academy, which included using the Golden Ratio:

"I started thinking about anatomy, [and asking], 'Well, what's the anatomy of a painting?' If I could strip off the flesh and the muscles, we have the skeleton - that's our foundation [...] Where would [compositional elements] be located? That got me back into sacred geometry"

That sacred geometry had historically been seen as a means higher powers meant that it solved not only an aesthetic question of composition, but also fit with his mythological themes. Wentz began plotting the shapes that echoed the shapes of the figures in the piece:

"What I wanted them to at least kind of look like, if not represent, would be mythological stories. Like something you would see in a cave or would see inside a pyramid, where you just see these characters on a black space interacting with each other, that has some kind of meaning to it [...] There is a formula to this hero story, to the myth"

Keep watching the Arteaser Calendar for future shows featuring John Wentz.