Potentially Atemporal at Turpentine Gallery in Oakland, California

James Pederson painted this painting.

There were only two women in a show of ten people, or there were only two people with traditionally women's names anyhow, so it could have been much improved had there been no men in the show.  And the curator was a man, but he did a pretty good job considering his gender.

I met Sean Heiser, the curator, and he used some terms I don't remember, terms such as "formally abstract" or "abstractly formal," and he used other terms, but that's the one I mostly remember.  Or maybe he said "formal abstraction."  I wasn't formally distracted, but I didn't remember a lot of what he said.  Or maybe I didn't fully understand it. 

He showed me all the artworks, and told me the show was based on or a play upon the New York MOMMA show, The Forever Now:  Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World.  And I quote the New York MOMMA website ad copy:

"Forever Now presents the work of 17 artists whose paintings reflect a singular approach that characterizes our cultural moment at the beginning of this new millennium: they refuse to allow us to define or even meter our time by them. This phenomenon in culture was first identified by the science fiction writer William Gibson, who used the term “a-temporality” to describe a cultural product of our moment that paradoxically doesn’t represent, through style, through content, or through medium, the time from which it comes. A-temporality, or timelessness, manifests itself in painting as an ahistorical free-for-all, where contemporaneity as an indicator of new form is nowhere to be found, and all eras coexist. This profligate mixing of past styles and genres can be identified as a kind of hallmark for our moment in painting, with artists achieving it by reanimating historical styles or recreating a contemporary version of them, sampling motifs from across the timeline of 20th-century art in a single painting or across an oeuvre, or radically paring their language down to the most archetypal forms."

In my simplistic, obtuse and unsubtle mind, this all means to me that you can do whatever you want to with the work of people from the past.  You can build upon what others have done.  You can take your influences and be an artist with them.  You can be an artist and use your imagination.  Something like that. 

The work in the show was good.  Peter Klett, a man, made a multi-layered framed thing with a framed thing I could see underneath a transparent material, maybe mylar or something like that, and there was what looked to be a print of a romantically styled flower painting under the mylar too.  And then there was a painted shape on top of the mylar.  If I recall correctly, this was somehow referencing computers where you could have tabs open on your browser, tabs with art from different cultures and times all in the same convoluted browser, mixy browser, a mixie uppie browser.  If you don't understand my gibberishy description, maybe go see the f#cking show yourself, wise gal.

Willy Carpenter, most likely a man,  made a designy mostly 2d thing using stuff from Home Depot, and maybe it was designed using a computer.  He also had a paintingish, collagish, decoupagish resiny thing of a beer can floating.  This was maybe my favorite of the men's work because I'd rather not say. 

Brett Flanigan, a man I know,  made a designy thing out of security envelopes which were mostly bluish on a white background.  Brett uses a lot of white backgrounds.  Supposedly, this security envelope thing referenced computers, or I'm out in left field.  He made another thing called "Refraction" or something like that, and I remember this because I kind of know what "refraction" means.   It means when there is light and colors, and that's what I saw in Brett Flanigan's piece, light and colors.  Understanding calmed me down.

Lilia Banrevy painted a canvas with a triangle shape cut out of it, and it looked designy and was kind of fun because of the missing part of the canvas.  I dare her to remove part of the stretcher bar next time.  Most of the time, when I see stretched canvases, they don't have holes in them unless they've been damaged.  So this instance of a canvas with a hole in it was unusual because Lilia intended it to have a hole in it.

Andrew Luck, a man, had two pieces in the show, and they were as good as a man has ever done, but they were new and different so I was afraid of them because i'm not an adventurer like Amelia Earhart.  I only walk the tried and true path that's more travelled.

James Pederson, a man, made some pieces with big texture, painty with sculptural aspects to them, and I liked them ok.  but I'm sure they have more merit than or deserve more merit than i'm giving them.

Christopher Regner, a man, had one of the longer names of all the artists, and made 2d stuff that wasn't my bag.  I liked it ok, but it didn't suck me in, or I didn't get it.  It might have been too masculine for me.

Sandra Schmidt, a woman, made a strong showing with her emotionally passionate and thoughtfully layered square paintings.

I believe Sean Weber, a man, made the paintings of cars, and those were differently nice.  I don't get out much to see art, so they were different to me.  They have a style, so I'd say they were stylized.  I'm not sure you could say they have a fashion, moreso they have character.

Peter Puskas, yet another man, made what I would consider to be expressionistic paintings.  I consider them to be expressionistic because they are gestural and express the feeling of his arm's movement while it's painting.