An Idea of a Boundary

I went to the show, An Idea of a Boundary, at the SF Arts Commission Gallery in San Francisco on Van Ness, across the street from the city hall and next door to the opera theatre.  We had a hard time finding parking and were about to go back to Oakland where I can afford to live because of rent control when wham, suddenly, just like that, in the wink of an eye, the bat of a bat eyelash, surprisingly, we found a parking space on Fell street and walked 10 minutes to get to the art show inside of the building, not outside.

Jackie Im was the curator, and I met her, and she is nice, and that's pretty much all that matters.

For starters, all the artists were women, so automatically, it's better than any show of men, but I didn't sense any misandry.

Here's a bad drawing of the art entitled "Yoke" by an artist.

 One piece was called yoke, and I forget the artist.  It was a construction out of metal and I forget what else, and it was a designed object with color and textures and shape, standing about 4 feet tall.  I guess it was just that, a designed object.  My friend liked it.  It didn't tickle my fancy.

This art is a projected moving image on a wall.

Another piece was a video projected on a wall in a nook/room of its own.  I didn't go into the room to experience it up close.  I looked at it and then kind of looked back at it as I was walking around the larger room since you didn't have to go into the small room to see it.  If curiosity is a sign of intelligence, this blog is semi-intelligent.

The woman was standing up against a wall, at least that's what it looked like since her projected image had a shadow.  So, it played with the idea of the wall as a reflective surface to project light and images onto as well as an object with physical properties like mass and volume and sense of humor.  In other words, it was a physical object.  The illusion of a wall was projected onto a wall.  Metaphysical is this?

Davena Semo made this art.

One piece with which I resonated or that engaged me was a steel thing.  I don't know what the word is, but it looked like mesh that was definitely in a steel frame over a reflective surface.  Please just look at the photo of my drawing.  My friend noted that on top of the mesh patterned steel there was a reiteration or repetition of that shape, just like repetition and reiteration that occur in nature and in art.

This piece was neat because it gave me a feeling, had some kind of mystery, tapped into my reptilian brain, my lower brain functions.  If I were this artist's art teacher, I'd kick her out of the class and give her money I don't have. 

I have to admit that I met her, and she was nice, and so I'm essentially just glad-handing and kissing ass here.  But I did like the piece.  I couldn't put it on my wall because I don't think it's decorative, but a museum or collector might like it.

A. K. Burns art, "Before the Wake."

Another artist in the show whose work I remember is A.K. Burns, and I remember it because one of my friends is fascinated or obsessed with pareidolia, and so I'm now happily well versed in it.  She probably didn't intend it, but I liked to look at the spirulina glued onto photos of Glen Canyon pre-damnation, finding faces and objects in the blobs and splatters.  I found what looked like a gargoyle in one and a rubber duckie in another and a really good image of a man's head in another.

Only now in writing this does it occur to me that a dam is a wall.  "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," and let the river and canyon live.  I read about the dam and can't make up my mind if it's good or bad, so the art sits in my brain telling me about the earth before humankind started controlling rivers.

Here are some rounded, red bricks in bags on a piece of canvas.

Another piece of art sat on the floor.  It was a bunch of mesh bags holding red bricks made into big, round, river stones, shaped by waves or water or something.  I think they came out of the San Francisco Bay located in California.  And, well, I lost my train of thought, but, it sat on the floor, so you had to make sure not to trip on it.  The round, redness of the brick-stones was unusual, and the mesh bags kept them together and were see-through, so that you could see the "bricks",  and the canvas was white and had d-rings on it, and I guess I didn't get it, or I wasn't supposed to get it.  I mean, I know that the bricks were in a wall, but what's the point?  Walls are washed away, eroded by time?  They are temporal?  Wait long enough and you can put a wall in a bag?  We are all  just prisoners here?  Of our own device? (Eagles, American Musical Group)

Here is my hamfisted idea of a boundary.

Here is my piece which isn't in the show.  It's a wall of wine boxes filled with the blood voluntarily given by migrant workers.  I paid them $25,000.00 each for their blood, and as a gesture of good will, I will be donating my blood to Migrant worker blood banks as often as I can in the next 25 years.


There were more pieces of art that I liked, but I don't fully remember them and don't want to write too much for my short attention span.