Recently in the San Francisco Bay Area it has been impossible to walk down a street without running into (or trying to avoid) someone protesting something. The messages range from concise to ironic, sardonic to flat-out fed up. In the undulating sea of abridged manifestos, there is the rare message so poignant that it demands the sign-bearer’s cause receives deeper consideration. Geoff Oppenheimer’s current exhibit[.....]

The title for Takeshi Murata’s current show—Get Your Ass To Mars—is a command, stolen from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hauser/Quaid character in Total Recall, based on Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.” For the Hauser/Quaid character, what awaits him on Mars is textbook Dick: a conspiracy based on money and greed; instability in memory and identity, or in discerning reality; plus our own[.....]

This year, there has been a laundry list of artist curated group shows, from David Salle’s exhibition, Your History is not our History, at Haunch of Venison, to Jeff Koon’s Skin Fruit at the New Museum and the upcoming Walead Beshty curated show, Picture Industry (Goodbye to All That), at Regen Projects. Each exhibition has its hits and misses in terms of content, style and[.....]

The press release for Jordan Kantor‘s self titled exhibition, currently on view at Ratio 3 in San Francisco, provides readers with little more than a physical account of what the exhibition includes: “several paintings on canvas, some in oil, others in enamel, two looping slide projections,” etc. This type of opacity in the actual content of the show seemed frustrating at first, but after a[.....]