Monday, January 29, 2018

Beth Krebs' Candy Land at Recology


Here's a screenshot of Beth's Instagram account.

I went to this show and stood around, looking at the creations.

Beth Krebs made three dimensional work out of packing styrofoam, styrofoam bowls, packing plastic, motors, golf tees, plastic straws and other things people put into recycling or trash in the city of San Francisco.  

Her creations looked like various identifiable objects or unidentifiable objects or colorful sculptures that my brain tried to make sense of or enjoy.

I watched her video on her instagram account which shows her at Recology talking about her residency experience.  She said she's disgusted by the waste created by the human species but that she tries to be empathetic toward that species when making art from their waste.

I also talked to her in person at the show, and she was very nice.  If my memory serves me well, she said kind of the same thing as she said on her video.  She wanted each creation to have some kind of spirit or life in it.  I'm not quoting her.

Also on her instagram are pictures of her art from the show.  See the screenshot above.

I'm kind of a green freak, hypocritical at times, so I too felt disgust when seeing all the styrofoam waste.

So the show is kind of a mindfuck because it's playful but disgusting at the same time.


This artwork was made by Beth Krebs.
Above is a picture of a stack of styrofoam about 10 feet tall.

Below is a styrofoam sculpture made out of styrofoam.  And by the way, "styrofoam" is a dow chemical brand name.  The technical term for it is EPS which stands for "expanded polystyrene."  Hooray for chemicals!
This artwork was made by Beth Krebs

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Jennifer Brandon and Jay DeFeo: Photographic Works

I liked this show in general.  Maybe two pieces in it didn't do anything for me.  It was fun to just look at the pieces.  I don't know why, and I'm not sure I care why.  I'd say that the whole show is about reflected light and its perception.

Jennifer's work is what you see first, and it takes up a lot of space, most of the room is filled up with the size of her work.  Jay's work is smaller.  Pretty much every single work by both artists is monochromatic stuff, shapes and textures represented in two dimensions.  Polychromatic work sometimes offends me, so it's absence from this show left me unoffended. There was a vitrine or whatever you call the art display with the glass that holds work in it.  That held some 3d stuff that the artist or artists used as source material, I believe, and some 3d works.

The man who ran the gallery had his two kids with him, and the one kid would say what the art looked like, "This looks like a cactus.  This looks like a mountain."  And he said, "Come over here, and I'll show you what it is."  "Here" was the vitrine.

How the show will improve my life, I don't know, but there were a lot of nice people there, and the show was hung exceedingly well.

As always it's nice to see the superior art of women as opposed to the inferior art of men.  Even though Jay DeFeo lost one of her teaching jobs because of criminality, her soul was more evolved than any man's.

I took some photos with my camera and then drew the photos.  Here are the drawings.

This is a Jennifer Brandon work of art.
This thing, opus, oeuvre, creation has subtle shapes.  I don't know what it is.

This is a Jennifer Brandon work of art.
This thing is all subtlety.  If you look at it long enough, you start to see it.  It's like some weird story about who knows what the fuck.



This is a Jennifer Brandon work of art.

This was kind of neat.  Broken glass patterns.  Like the invisible patterns we feel but never see in our lives.  Here is a poem I made about this work of art.

my heart is broken into one hundred quadrillion pieces
like safety glass
when a golf ball hits it
because
some dumbfuck was teeing off on a hill overlooking the freeway


This is a Jennifer Brandon work of art.

These three go together because they are of the same subject.  I know what the subject is, but I won't tell you because I don't know what the subject is.  This group of three struck me as lacking controversy.  I can't see people going to war over this grouping of photos.

This is a Jay DeFeo work of art.
I think this was a photocopy.  I like it because it's like looking at clouds and every other natural thing with form and shape that reflects light.

This is a Jay DeFeo work of art.

I liked this one.  It looked like an explosion of paint.  I'd recommend this to people who like art.

This is a Jay DeFeo work of art.

This one looks neat as a drawing.  It's interesting how these works translate to drawings.  This is something that interests me.  I don't know what this work is about.  I don't get the feeling it's about an emotion, but I've been wrong before.  It seems like some kind of observation, like in humor when the comedian says, "Did you ever notice how when you put two shapes next to each other, it changes the way you see them."

Is the stuff in this show art?  I don't know.  It's made by people, so I'll say yes.  It involves manipulation, interpretation of images and control of light and form.  Sure, it's art.