Red76 is a multi-artist collective founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2000. The project they conceived for We have as much time as it takes was executed mainly by two of its members, Sam Gould and Gabriel Saloman. Counter-Culture as Pedagogy: Pop-Up Book Academy is a yearlong series of events that take place in a variety of venues. The latest edition of The Journal of Radical Shimming, available for free in the gallery, includes interviews and a counterculture index created for this exhibition. It will accompany the project’s next iteration at the Walker Art Center this summer. Learn more at www.red76.com.

Courtney Dailey: As practitioners whose work ex­ists primarily in the public realm, how do you create a situation to get the greatest amount of people engaged?

Sam Gould: We’ve developed methodologies over time for our publicly engaged, dialogical practices. There are basically four points: clear frames, horizontal space, generative action, and ephemeral distance. Clear frames develop a space that’s very familiar to people: they act as an entrance point; you’re on a con­struction site, you’re entering a bar, you’re going to a copy shop, or a restaurant. It may be the worst restaurant or the worst business that you’ve ever encountered but you understand what it is. Famil­iarity is key.

Nicole Cromartie: But your project for the Wattis, Counter-Culture as Pedagogy: Pop-Up Book Academy, 2010–1 is, by comparison, an unfamiliar, hybrid structure.

SG: I don’t think so. We talk about it as a traveling bookstore. So people are like, “Oh, it’s a bookstore,” but it’s actually a school. We arrange small classes, small sessions, where people RSVP to an open call that’s publicized through various means: word of mouth, flyers, and email. We control the frame through pub­licity, location, and topic.

Gabriel Saloman: I think it’s worth admitting that there’s a degree of fraud in that.

SG: Oh, yeah, it’s a total fraud. It’s a ruse.

GS: But once people are there, we’re not doing this thing where we told you it was going to be a candy house and now we’re going to put you in the oven. It’s not re­ally important that people get the exact experience that they came for. We invite you to this bookstore or construction site, and while we’re here, let’s talk. And it seems innocuous enough that people immerse themselves in it, because they already feel like it’s familiar. They don’t know that they’re par­ticipating until they already are.

SG: Once people get within this frame, we work to level or flatten our au­thority, and to allow them to make decisions through direct conver­sation. At the end of a project, we shouldn’t be there (though by necessity, we start out directing or facilitating). But through our ac­tions over time, we want to divest ourselves of that role; this is the horizontal space part.

Generative action stems from the feeling that I get in a particular situation, like at band practice or at a political rally. Things might be totally inspiring when you’re there, but the minute you leave that energized space, everything dies. So the idea of generative ac­tion is that the activity acts like a battery—it’s the power station that transforms the energy in a room into media, in the widest defini­tion of what media can be: from the Internet, to newspapers, to direct conversations between you and me, even to rumor or myth or disparaging commentary.

Ephemeral distance suggests that this is not the thing you’re after. We are trying to get people to internalize a situation, then trans­form it into their own thing. This conversation/publication/display is not the conclusion. Those are the four points: pedagogical tools that we use all the time.

GS: We create models for action rather than finished, complete ideas. And the intention is to create a proposi­tion that other people conclude. It’s turning the experience of the art situation into a commons over which we don’t claim owner­ship. That’s not to say we don’t have proprietary rights to certain things, and certainly we have privileges that other people aren’t going to have. A total horizontal­ity really couldn’t happen unless people took off and ran with it, without us.

SG: Unless people just felt direct au­thority, and decided: this is mine now. And if that happened, I’d be psyched.

CD: Many of your projects evolve and develop over the long-term, and in multiple places. How can viewers who might encounter the work just once understand your projects in their entirety?

SG: There is no entirety to the project; the project just keeps going. I talk about it in terms of literature: books don’t die. Just because Proust finally stopped writing Re­membrance of Things Past doesn’t mean that the work is over. The work is there as long as people are talking about it and engaging with it, which is a way that you can define any artwork.

GS: That also explains why we have a blog for every project, and pro­duce as much printed media as we possibly can. There are multiple ways that the work moves through the world and ways that the proj­ect can continue to be relevant. We cherish printed matter. Those objects become totemic devices that give us time travel; they give us an opportunity to exist simul­taneously in the past and in the present. They allow us to see not only the things that have changed, but the things that have cycled around.

NC: Your practice is not typically gallery-based, but for this exhibi­tion, you’ll have ephemera in the gallery. Why did you decide to do that?

SG: Because we’re punks. It’s funny to us: we fought so long to get out of the gallery and now we’ve reached a stage where people are asking us to come and do projects outside of the gallery. So, inevita­bly, in our contrarian way, we want to go in.

GS: The new taboo!

SG: The deeper answer is that it per­tains to the project. We’re focusing on moments that find their way into so-called mass culture. We can shine a light onto those objects that build up to create the domi­nant culture. We want to find a way to extrapolate and physicalize our discursive practices in the gallery and illuminate them. We get to say, “Look at this!”

GS: So often, we experience visual work on the Web. Now the gallery is becoming an analogue device. The gallery has more in common with a record player, a slide show.

CD: How does Red76 make work?

GS: Sam develops these initial projects and they expand, depending on what’s appropriate, who can say yes, and who we feel resonates with the project.

SG: There’s a big difference between someone who happens to be involved with one thing that we’re doing, and a real, holistic engagement. So much of what we do occurs “off-stage,” if you will, when we’re just hanging out. The work is based on the affections between all of these people—even feelings of disenfranchisement. There’s been a lot of disaffection and infighting, as in any collabora­tive project, but it’s always based on friendship.

We have as much time as it takes is on view from May 6 – July 31, 2010 at the CCA Wattis institute for Contemporary Arts. For more information see www.wattis.org.

The Great American Novel, Moby Dick, takes on new life at the exhibition of the same name currently showing at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute. The exhibition loosely traces the narrative of the epic (and episodic) tale with each of the three galleries dedicated to the story’s protagonists, Ishmeal, Ahab, and of course, the White Whale, Moby Dick. Thirty-three artists ranging from the established to emerging are exhibited, and a large number consist of specially commissioned works that reflect the artist’s own interpretation of the Herman Melville classic. Among the highlights are Marcel Broodthaers, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Buster Keaton, Richard Serra, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and even Orson Welles. A room-sized replica of the sperm whale has been executed by artist Andreas Slominski, and though a commissioned work (size, scale, and the dried, crumbling, clay material reveal this) Slominski’s interpretation of the harpoons which brought down the White Whale demonstrates his imaginative personal iteration of the novel’s denouement. Also of considerable interest is an eight-foot salt tower by Mexican artist Damian Ortega. Thick, crystal-white salt was rammed into a narrow, rectangular tower made of plywood. The wood was removed, leaving the salt tower to crumble to the gallery floor, an unplanned but satisfyingly rich effect.

The exhibition lay-out is perhaps the most striking part about the show, and it alludes to an atmospheric environment—with walls painted a nautical navy blue and the works hung low at what curator, Jens Hoffman, calculates to be the difference in sea level between the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts and the water level at the exhibition’s home in San Francisco, California. A fully-loaded voyage through historic artifacts, fresh art works, and this classic American tale is an experience worth staying on board for. Moby Dick will be on display until December 12, 2009.

“In order to educate man to a new longing, everyday familiar objects must be shown to him with totally unexpected perspectives and in unexpected situations”. This quote by Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko is especially fitting when describing the work of artist Mitzi Pederson. Mapping extremely formalized landscapes, Pederson’s sculptural forms are made up of found material (much resembling construction debris) and are intentionally placed and arranged throughout the gallery space. For her current show at Ratio 3 in San Francisco, Pederson has created an abstracted city that appears as if it could have arisen from the rough, wooden gallery floor. The show’s title, I’ll Start Again, perhaps refers to the rawness and nakedness of the object’s material make-up. The works themselves, very much akin to the work of the Russian Constructivists, are grounded in roots of formalism, balance, and material. Much like Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin’s Corner Relief (1914-15) – a relief sculpture made of iron, copper, wood, and rope meticulously poised between two walls – Pederson has created a number of balance-based wall works using small wooden boards, string, and nails. Her fascination with geometry, order, and space places her work in line with the architectural model and the modes of structural-spatial relations – shapes and voids created by manipulating the materials draw the viewer closer to inspect. The essential concept of Pederson’s work is a reconsideration of the formal qualities of everyday materials.

Pederson received a B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from California College of the Arts. Besides Ratio 3, she has exhibited widely both internationally and nationally including Hammer Projects, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, White Columns in New York, and at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Pederson currently lives and works in Berlin.

For her installation at Berlin’s Capitian Petzel, Polish artist Monika Sosnowska, in her signature style, emphasizes space through an array of constructed structures. Seven pieces fill the main gallery space, arranged in a line, beginning with the smallest–a metal stool whose legs have been bent so the viewer is actually looking at the stool’s underside–and concluding with a large, twisted sculpture resembling a railing or banister that is mysteriously hung upon a wall. Each of the structures represents an element of everyday Polish life. A picnic table with the seats folded over the table top, a open door and frame lacking a room to walk in or out of, and the cross-section of two walls creating four individual half-spaces that mimic a bar in a small Polish town. The sculptures engage in a dialogue about the former Eastern Bloc’s highly recognizable public architectural and structural elements, which is then accentuated by Capitian Petzel’s modernist gallery, situated along a wide communist-style boulevard in what was once East Berlin. The placement of Sosnowska’s objects in an incongruent line, and their manipulation speaks to a part of Europe still in transition, and an inability, or unwillingness, to forget the lived histories of the past.

Sosnowska lives and works in Warsaw and is one of Poland’s most recognized contemporary artists. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe, including the 50th Venice Biennale and Manifest 4. Capitian Petzel is one of Berlin’s newest galleries. Housed in a glass pavilion located along Karl-Marx-Allee in eastern Berlin’s East Mitte neighborhood, the gallery is a collaborative project of Gisela Capitian of Gallerie Gisela Capitian in Cologne and Friedrich Petzel of Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. Their exhibitions feature a variety of international artists interacting with the unique and historic space.

Upon entrance into Ulla von Brandenburg’s colorful installation entitled Singspiel, one is confronted with a sensation of curious exploration coupled with the particular anxiety of entering the unknown. The labyrinthine structure is made up of a series of solid colored fabrics forming an intervention in space and architecture. These colors refer to the color scale of Swiss Psychoanalyst Max Luscher, who in the 1950s conceived a model for personality types based on specific color preferences. At the end of this vivid and modestly Constructivist structure is a film projected onto the soft fabric wall. The guests–an eerie sense of “being expected” surfaces at this moment–are invited to sit and watch the film. Much like the physical journey of the viewer, the film depicts a slower, black and white journey through an architectural space. Filmed at Swiss architect Le Corbusier‘s famous building Villa Savoye, the voyage of the viewer continues through the historic ramps, partitions, and rooms of the Villa.

Like most of von Brandenburg’s work, Singspiel explores aspects of theater, performance, and psychological states and in this case, takes the form of a somber and still film. As the film travels through the Villa, a series of players appear and disappear, conjoin and separate upon the camera’s direction. The modernist imagery is juxtaposed with classical elements and mechanics of theater and performance, with much emphasis on the fundamentals of Brecht’s Epic Theatre. The transitions among the characters occur through song and the singer’s voice is high-pitched and peculiar, adding another layer to von Brandenburg’s tale. Sensations of melancholy and mystery are present in the film’s final scene which takes place in the house’s garden where the characters appear to be attending a performance of sorts (not coincidentally, they are sitting in stools that are identical stools of the viewer). A pronounced Brechtian curtain is drawn to reveal the players of this story in a sort of meta-situation–a play inside the play.

Von Brandenburg is a German-born artist who lives and works in Paris. Besides film and installation, she works in a wide variety of media including drawing, painting, and live performance.

For their Biennale debut, the Union of Comoros is in participation with a project, Djahazi, by the Italian artist Paolo W. Tamburella. Comoros is a small series of islands located off the coast of Mozambique in East Africa, and Djahazi gets its name from the classic wooden boats the Comoros people used for centuries to transport goods and heavy cargo through the Mozambique Channel and the Indian Ocean. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the international use and presence of the Comoros islands greatly decreased. The djahazi vessel, however, remained a propitious means of transport within the African industry until 2006 when modern freight methods subverted these traditional modes. The boats were forsaken at the docks of Moroni, the main port of the Comoros, and continued to deteriorate on the sea floor.

For the Biennale project, Tamburella resurrected and restored one of the twenty-eight boats found on the sandy ocean floor of the port. With the help of local Comorians, Tamburella restored the vessel to its original state. During the last decades of the djahazi’s use, it was common to see the boats carrying modern cargo containers from large ships to the port of Moroni. As a gesture towards the tradition, Tamburella has loaded a shipping container inside the restored djahazi. In Venice, the vessel is exhibited at the waterfront of the Giardini entrance. As described in the project summary by Octavio Zaya, “[the restored Djahazi] will stand as a metaphor for an ambivalent globality, bringing together hope and despair, hyper-rationalization and avant-garde extravagance, anti-modern nostalgia and exuberant narratives of progress, emergence and emergency…” While these semantics are, perhaps, idealistic, the Djahazi project is a simple and delicate gesture towards the power of tradition in today’s post-modern world.

Despite the tough economic times and talk of a more “serene biennale,” the 2009 Venice Biennale remains a fervent display of blue chip art and its dedicated following. Exhibition curator Daniel Birnbaum has stayed committed to his title of Making Worlds by including both established and emerging artists in the international fair. “My hope is that the Biennale does not merely present fragments of something that has been broken down” Birnbaum has said, contextualizing the Biennale in the current financial market, “but will offer a glimpse of something still to come–if not a new and totally coherent vision, then at least as an emerging plurality of possibilities” (interview with Artforum, May 2009).

The most notable change in this year’s exhibition is the opening of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Formally the Italian Pavilion, the Palazzo houses half of the Making Worlds exhibition and will remain open to the public year-round, providing a place for future, multi-disciplinary projects. To emphasize this new permanence, Birnbaum invited artists Tobias Rehberger, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Massimo Bartolini to create functional spaces within the Palazzo. Rehberger, for his part–a fully functioning cafeteria–received the Golden Lion for the best artist of the exhibition, the highest of Biennale honors. In addition to the Making Worlds exhibition in both the Palazzo and the Arsenale (the former warehouse of the Venetian fleet), the historic national pavilions in the Giardini remained vibrant, and 2009 marked the inclusion of first-time participants Montenegro, Principality of Monaco, Republic of Gabon, Union of Comoros, and United Arab Emirates.

Bruce Nauman’s exhibition, Topological Gardens, represented in the first place United States Pavilion, was additionally exhibiting in two other Venice venues, the Universita Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini and the Exhibition Spaces at Universita Ca’ Foscari. American artist John Baldessari was also a big presence in Venice. Besides being presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award (alongside Yoko Ono), Baldessari’s works and interventions could be seen along the Grand Canal, most notably his photo-mural of an oceanfront which covered the entire front-facing facade of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. In addition to today’s art stars, Birnbaum made an effort to represent emerging and, at the other end, even deceased artists like Andre Cadere and Lygia Pape, whose inclusion supported Birnbaum’s concept of a more complete “world”.

The Biennale will be on display until November 22, 2009 and will continue to host collateral performances, lectures and events until closing.

Arden Sherman: Hi Christina. Thank you for meeting me. Can you tell be about your teaching position at California College of the Arts? What do you teach, exactly?

Christina Seely: I teach undergraduate photography in Oakland, mostly to first years and sophomores. In the fall, I will teach an interdisciplinary class called Metro-Nature for upper level students, which will be fun.

AS: Do you work digitally?

CS: My work uses both analog and digital technology. I shoot analog negatives and have them drum scanned. Because of the size of the print (48×60 inches), I then have them printed digitally. Once I have a file from the scan I prep it in the digital darkroom on my computer like I would in the analog dark room before having the photographs printed as a Digital C-print at a lab. A digital C-print is the same process as an analog C-print. The paper is the same, the processing is the same, but the image is projected onto the page differently.

AS: Can you tell me about your latest series, Lux?

CS: The project is based on the NASA map of the world at night. I got somewhat obsessed with this map about four years ago. I like how beautiful and strange the map is and how the light on the map reflects our presence and indicates human impact and activity through our use of man made light. I noticed that there are three regions that are brighter on the map, the US, Western Europe, and Japan. I then did a lot of research about these regions, and became interested in what the idea of this “cumulative light” means. Not surprisingly, these three regions are the wealthiest and most powerful in the world and use something like two-thirds of the world’s resources and create about 45 percent of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions. This map is from 2002. When I started this project, China was not part of the equation but on a current version of the map it would also be “blowing up”, exploding with light. Fundamentally the conclusion from this research is that this light equals impact on the planet.

Since the dawn of electricity, man-made light has also meant and still does mean many very positive things, like ingenuity, progress, growth, seduction, entertainment and romance, all of which are fundamentally positive. I am therefore really interested in the complexity of the beauty presented in this work.

AS: How are you visually translating these ideas in Lux?

CS: I began photographing the largest cities in these regions at night, literally using the visual information on the map to select the cities. What I focus on when I’m shooting is the intersection between each city and nature, or the land. I place myself in a position where I am back far enough to create a portrait of the city and can show it’s relationship to nature. In this work, I am only recording man-made light and I always photograph after civil twilight ends (which is the hour between when the sun goes down and when it’s completely dark). Because of something called reciprocity failure, (when the relationship between aperture and shutter speed falls apart with longer and extremely short exposures) my exposure times are usually between one to four hours long.

I always over-expose a bit to make sure I get the information I need for printing. But when I am making printing decisions, I take into account how the human eye works and how the brain perceives light. It takes about an hour for our eyes to adjust to dimmer light so our perception of light over long periods of time changes quite a bit. How I see light at the end of a shoot is completely different from how I see it at the beginning. In my decision making I do try to push the prints to cause a slightly unsettling feeling within the viewer. I believe this leads the viewer to further question what they are seeing.

This is Birmingham in England. In a gallery setting the photographs are titled by the latitude and longitude of each city with the intention that the viewer will refer back to the NASA map and reconnect to the broader issue. I mount a NASA map key and have available laminated keys with thumbnails of the work that include the cities’ proper names so that people can identify them. When I photograph, I almost always avoid the inclusion of well known landmarks and iconic buildings.

AS: Why?

CS: So the viewer doesn’t check out. We are so used to seeing photographs of city skylines at night. The mystery left without these indicators allows for a deeper reflection of what is being shown and encourages the action of going to the NASA map to find the city’s identity. This subsequently reconnects the viewer back to the bigger picture and ideas relating to global impact, global culture, global responsibility, etc.

This is Chicago.

AS: This is beautiful.

CS: It’s one of my favorites. It was taken from about fifteen miles across Lake Michigan in Indiana. The streaks in the upper right hand corner are star trails. It was selected as the show poster for The Edge of Intent at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago

AS: Have you completed this project?

CS: I have photographed about thirty of the cities so far and have about ten cities left. I used some of my own money to get the project going and have picked up a little funding along the way. Now, I am really looking to get it finished so my main focus for the last few months has been toward this end. As of now I’ve sold enough work to almost break even and things are starting to get going, so I am really hopeful. Eventually, it would be great to be able to pay the rent, bills and make a living off the work. That of course is the goal.

This is Paris, its one of the only photographs that includes the moon. It was moving in and out of clouds, so registered in this kind of interesting way.

AS: How do you choose a place to photograph when you arrive in these foreign cities?

CS: I do a lot of research beforehand, so I already know where I’m going. I have a contact in each city that helps me scout and I always have someone with me when I’m shooting. I use Google Earth to figure out the lay of the land in each city. I do an image search of viewpoints which typically produces daytime shots that I use to find locations. I usually try to avoid the most popular spots and go to the secondary points. The shooting process inevitably leads to some interesting stories. In Kyoto, I photographed from a temple called Kiyomizu. Every fall, tourists from Japan come to Kyoto to see the leaves change, and the temple lights up the whole hillside of maple trees from underneath. It’s really amazing and absolutely gorgeous. During the shoot there was a dense crowd of people behind me pushing along so my two assistants and I had to protect the camera with our bodies. Before the planned exposure time was finished we got kicked out by a guard because tri-pods were not allowed. It was probably the most stressful shoot to date, which is ironic because the photograph is quite soothing.

AS: The story really adds to the essence of this photograph, and it seems like the back-story or, rather the concept, really supports the whole body of Lux. How much of your inspiration, investigation, and idea are you telling your audience in a gallery setting?

CS: In a gallery I include the NASA key and a statement about the work. In my statement, I emphasize the complexity of the beauty in the work and the back and forth between city and nature. When I lecture, I speak very openly about my ideas and inspiration–I like telling people all of it, mostly because I think being an artist is not only about the ideas being presented but the experience of making the work. While there is no doubt an environmental slant to the work and I have my own strong opinions about our relationship to the planet, something that is important to me is that the work stays very open. A goal of mine as an artist is not to judge or scold through the work and not to be didactic but rather to draw out questions and encourage a thoughtfulness about the subjects I’m touching on.

To me, it’s not as simple as, “we are bad.” It’s a much more complicated problem. So I make very careful decisions to stay away from saying things like “light pollution is bad”. Instead I feel like I am giving my audience tools. I offer them the map and images that are asking questions like, “what does this light mean?” I am very conscious of how I’ve laid out the concept toward keeping it very open.

AS: That’s part of what I am saying about the back-story. Your live experience is really interesting and a part of this body.

CS:It’s also important to let the viewer do some of the work, so I offer a more interactive experience in a gallery space. I have a show up right now in Seattle featuring fifteen of the cities. I did a talk the night of the opening and got to hear about people’s experiences trying to figure out the identity of the cities and their back and forth between being really seduced by the images, and trying to grapple with the bigger ideas and how they relate to the decisions we make daily.

I am also working on a project, Lunar Resonant Streetlights, as a part of a design collective, Civil Twilight. These are streetlights that dim and brighten in correlations with the phases of the moon. When the moon is full the streetlight is dim, etc. It has been an amazing project and supplement to working on Lux. My involvement with the collective, has offered me real insight into the design world, which I never would have gained otherwise. The design world is an incredibly inspiring place right now. Design is becoming more about rethinking what is already there and how to get people excited again, in our case, how to reconnect people to the cycles of nature, for example. It’s becoming more about shifting our relationship to objects and ideas. In general, I am really interested in getting people talking, problem solving, and thinking about where we are in relationship to the planet.

AS: You are really setting up a visual discourse about the influence and impact of Western society on the world.

CS: Attitudes both in the US and globally have been rapidly changing, especially the attitudes promoted by Bush Administration compared to those of our current government. The streetlight project probably would not have received the same attention four years ago. We are in a really interesting time, and I am glad to see Lux as a part of this dialogue. It’s been a great experience traveling and speaking with individuals in all these cities about the project. Last year I received a San Francisco art commission; the economy then fell apart, and they lost all their funding. The comission was supposed to entail a very public display of photographs from Lux in City Hall and in bus stop kiosks around the city.

A major goal of mine is to make work that is accessible to the public so the average person can engage in the dialogue or simply appreciate the images and get something out of the message. I do see one of my roles an artist is to make my work function in different worlds.

AS: You sent me a link before this meeting, as part of an initiative that I am working on to bring another dialogue into my studio visits. You sent a video of a lecture by Benjamin Zander, Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, and his inspirational talk on potential and possibility. How does this impact your teaching and your artistic practice?

CS: The idea of slowing down and nurturing is really important to me. I really liked how Benjamin Zander worked with the student in the video. His philosophy, which I agree with, is that everybody has incredible potential. There are always other real life, day to day things that get in the way of expanding this potential. So how does one find a way to nurture and find space in our lives for it? For me teaching is in form with my artistic practice, and I want to draw out the potential in my students. It’s really lucky to be able to go to art school, and, especially in undergrad, it’s hard to see how much is right in front of you. So I try and help students realize how exciting it is to be able to have this time to just think and make. It’s really an amazing time. The thinking that goes into being a teacher keeps me grounded and connected. I really love being able to teach and to make my own work and I aim to perpetuate Zander’s philosophy in both endeavors.

In a world where tabloids trump real news, artist Rachel Kaye embraces celebrity culture through the reappropriation of paparazzi images into her own medium. She creates paintings, drawings, and sculpture that mimic a world washed by fame, excess, and money. Exhibiting at Triple Base Gallery in San Francisco, Kaye’s solo show, The Colony, draws its name and concept from the early-twentieth century Colony Clubs created for New York socialite women. Her work moves amongst the social circles of the fictional Blair Waldorf from the television series Gossip Girl, to a portrait of Wyntoon, William Randolph Hearst’s secret Northern California hamlet, complete with colorful gestures alluding to the famous murals of Willy Pogany, that are painted on the cottage’s exterior. Kaye’s painting technique is reminiscent of her famous contemporaries Elizabeth Peyton and Hernan Bas–figurative, representational, and, as described by Triple Base, “loose and whimsical”. For The Colony, Kaye has curated the arrangement of her works in a salon-style display akin to a way that they might have been seen at the real Colony Club. She has also made sculptures of paper mache–almost mockeries of the sculptural ornamentation of the wealthy–and a bubble-gum pink ottoman invites guest to lounge and enjoy the glitz of the fabulous world of the rich and famous.

Rachel Kaye received her BFA from California College of the Arts in 2004 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. The Colony will be on view at Triple Base until March 22, 2009.

The landscape photographs of Michael Light and Christian Houge are simultaneously austere, reflective, and, as described by the Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco where they are currently exhibiting, bleak. The interesting combination of two distinct photographers creates a specialized viewing experience within the large warehouse-like galleries at Hosfelt. Michael Light lives and works in San Francisco and focuses his practice primarily on the American West. Christian Houge is a Norwegian artist grounded in the documentation of his Arctic homeland. Carefully shot from a self-piloted airplane or hired helicopter, Light’s images of the Sierra Nevada region, Southeast California and Phoenix, Arizona present a still life of manufactured landscapes set in the sage-brush fields of the American West. At the opposite side of the gallery, Houge’s work displays slow exposed panoramas of snowy white fields lightly dotted with man-made scientific instruments. Together, their work engages the viewer in a conversation that speaks to the vastness of the earth’s surface, humanity’s deep impact on it, and the overall balance of the natural world with that of the constructed.

Michael Light and Christian Houge will be in view until March 21, 2009.

What would it look like if you compiled fleeting images from some of the most popular film moments onto a painted canvas? Artist Jim Gaylord shows the viewer this point of view in his solo exhibition Cliffhanger at the Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco. Moving away from the more collage-like paintings of his past, Gaylord’s latest work carefully marries his interest in film and the history of painting, and the result is a collaboration of recognizable imagery and colorful shapes in variety of painting techniques. Combining the brushwork of abstract impressionism with the psychological limbo of the Surrealists and the ambiguity of conceptual art, Gaylord’s paintings and prints reflect an artist who is informed of those who preceded him as well as by a vast popular culture which¬† surrounds him. Titling his work such things as Study (Braveheart + Jackass: the Movie + Cloverfield + Last of the Mohicans + Home Alone 2), Gaylord gives credit to his sources and influences as well as providing the viewer with an acute lens with which to understand his creative process. Among the eleven works on view at Gregory Lind Gallery, the most noteworthy is a set entitled Final Destination 00:15:11:22 and 00:15:22:07,¬† paintings highlighting a convergence between some sort of outer-space video game and a crude oil fire, evoking a feeling of playfulness and cultural despair.

Cliffhanger will be on view until March 14, 2009.

Empty parking lots, finely manicured grass on the side of the highway, construction debris in front of an erecting shopping center, and a Walgreen’s drive-thru pharmacy are typical sites of everyday American life that are often overlooked. Longstreth draws attention to these under recognized and uninviting real spaces, questioning notions of consumerism and constructed landscapes. Clocking myriad hours among the highways and byways of a vast Americana, Longstreth has captured inevitably overlooked suburban settings in numerous photographs (compiled in appealing book form at Gregory Lind Gallery). Extracting ideas from his photographs, while not necessarily painting them verbatim, Longstreth’s flat color block and geometrical lines enhance the simplicity and loneliness within these structures.l

In Small Town In-Ground, a cool blue public swimming pool sits, patiently waiting to chill off neighborhood families on a hot summer’s day. Simple geometric lines outline the built concrete structures while trees in the background assure a patina of a life lived closer to “nature,” and the dichotomies of painting styles Longstreth employs speak of the manufactured in conjunction with the natural.

One work of particular interest is of a newly built shopping center, much like any Wal-Mart or Target seen in Anytown, USA. The building is depicted from the front, and the stucco facade is carefully highlighted with strong lines with each pillar and chip of paint emphasized. A pile of construction debris lies in front of the structure, orange cones peeping out from behind dirt mounds, adding color and life to the benign scene. The painting is satirically titled Rome, and it edifies Longstreth’s conception of America as a great empire imploding from within. The sad and sullen emptiness that exists in Longstreth’s spaces speak to an American dream gone flat.

All It Is is on view until January 31, 2008 at Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

In the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, a paper is folded lengthwise into sections. The first player begins the drawing, extending the lines of the image just beyond the fold in the paper. The second player continues where the first left off, and so on until the paper is filled. The final result is akin to Frankenstein’s monster, a creation defined by the sum of its parts: a true collaboration.

NAIL, a collective comprised of California College of the Arts (CCA) curatorial practice students, took inspiration from this model during the conception of the exhibition, Out of Order, at PLAySPACE Gallery in San Francisco. In response to only the artwork directly preceding, each member of NAIL invited one artist to contribute a specific piece to the exhibition. Like the Surrealist drawing, the result of this curatorial game was brought to light once all of the artworks had been selected. Out of Order refers to the new ordering that became visible during “the great reveal.” In addition to the literal reconfiguration, the title also reflects ideas of disjointedness, fracture, and impropriety that appear in the artworks. Included were Bay Area emerging artists among others more established, like Sun Ra, showing in a variety of mediums. Conversations, both thematic and formal, arose among the thirteen discretely-selected works. Splintered landscapes, unearthly vistas, unconventional humor, obsessive craft, and creative collaboration converge in PLAySPACE Gallery. The feature was collaboratively written by Katie Morgan and Arden Sherman.

Hopped up on a large dose of genetically modified corn products, artist Jon Brumit has created a bomb shelter-meets laboratory in the project room at Steven Wolf Gallery in San Francisco. Appropriately titled, Monsanto’s Workshop after the biotech company Monsanto, which specializes in chemically hybridizing seeds for agricultural use, Brumit pokes fun at serious issues through his mixed media installations. Plastic grocery bags are recombined into a parade-float-balloon-like corncob-esque sculptures that, with the help of a fan, appear to be breathing and moving as if they are alive. The trash to treasure modus operandi which Brumit employs speaks of environmental disasters and human complicity. Brumit’s interest in sound art is seen in all his work, and in Monsanto’s Workshop he has displayed a radio transmitter that has been altered with corn residue and appears to be dysfunctional, broadcasting fuzzy post-apocalyptic noises. The whole project room looks as if a natural disaster has occurred and the occupant was taken from the scene or had to flee in a mad dash. A workshop table is covered with plastic corn cobs, nine-volt batteries, hot glue guns, light bulbs, and old coffee cups resembling a mad scientist’s desk covered with dollar store inventory.

Brumit is an artist who does not fit inside any box, constantly changing his works, installations, and projects. They remain on the border of humor, social activity, community, and faux pas. Brumit has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe, with radio programs being broadcast all over the world. He has shown at Chelsea Art Museum, deYoung Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and presented Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Brumit received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and currently lives and works in Chicago.