Diverse Findings at NIAD

I was invited by Em Kettner at NIAD in Richmond, California to curate an online show, and this is what I came up with after scouring the NIAD archive with no curational theme or intentions of thematic coherence in mind.

Here is a picture by James Heartsill of what looks to be a house, except it has teeth, and there is a sky and trees and the roof looks like it has a hair cut, and a tongue is coming out like a door mat.  Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, wrote a song called My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains, and that's what this mixed media on canvas piece makes me think of.  We walk around in our heads that protect us like little houses.  We inhabit our bodies.  They are our homes, and we may own them, but they are on loan to us.

This is a ceramic piece by Ann Meade and it looks like a hatted bust with a cat.  I really like the colors here, at least that's what first catches my eye.  Then, after looking at it a bit, I see that the ceramic part of the head looks like it has a nose on the right side of it, making the head facing to the right, so the face looks like it's on the side of the head.  I think that's a little bit cubistic and fun.  The figure just looks happy.  The palette works for me.  

This untitled Jeremy Burleson piece is joyous.  I believe it's a bunch of people on sailboats.  But you can see through the sails, and you can see through the hulls of the boats.  This is exactly how Superman feels with x-ray vision.    I love the shapes of the sails, kind of Christmas tree-like.  

This is Shostakovich's 5th Symphony a la Christian Vassell.  A long while back,  I was looking online for the most popular symphonies of all time, and the website, I forget which one, recommended Shostakovich's 5th, so I listened to it and liked it.  I could relate to it.  It resonated with me.  I don't always feel like listening to it, but there is a place for it in my little beating heart.  So, when I saw this piece, it was a fun surprise.

Records are usually associated with sound, but when you put paint on the record, it covers up the groove/grooves so that it won't play any more.  It becomes a sculpture.   It's funny to think that if you listened to the symphony it would put you in a grey, dark mood, like the color Christian painted the record.  Maybe Christian's artpiece could be considered visually analagous to the experience of listening to the symphony.   In other words, you could look at the painted record and get the same feeling you would if you listened to the symphony.

Maria Dalisay's untitled piece reminds of pictures of the Himalayas I've seen before.  When I see mountains, I think of how small I am and how they've been here on Earth for such a long time.  I pretty much love landscapes and paint them as part of my own art practice.

Peter Harris' Untitled Acrylic on Canvas is intriguing to me because I like the brushstrokes, the change from transparency to opacity, how the blob of red doesn't stay in the rectangle and how there's room for pareidolia like when you see your dog or cat in the shapes of the clouds.  I also like the hazy qualities of the grayish image under the red blob. 

Audrey Pickering's Untitled dry media piece plays with dimensionality funly, in a fun way, in a playful way, a playful but serious way, like Wayne "Pastry Chef" Thiebaud does in his paintings of San Francisco hills.  I also really like how the sky and grass looks like combed fur, as though these houses could be placed on a large furry animal, or the houses are really designed for fleas and they are on a dog.  The drawing seems painterly to me, probably because of the dark base color poking through, creating shadow everywhere the pencil marks are lighter or more sparse.

Jason Powell-Smith's untitled text piece is part of a series of text paintings that remind me of posters advertising sporting events where one team plays against another.  I like to think of AC Transit fighting Muni like gladiators in a giant coliseum, but I suppose that would be rather gruesome and gory.  Maybe they're playing jacks competitively or checkers or who knows.  But it is fun to imagine these contests.  I could also see the people at AC Transit wondering why they must go to battle against the people of MUNI.  Again, this is one in a series, and there are many other noteworthy imagined contests. 

Luis Estrada's untitled piece looks like a mysterious treasure map.   The fact that there's a mystery that's not explained is a lot of fun because then my little imagination can conjecture what is happening.  It makes me think of the Iliad or some such epic voyage even if I don't know if the land mass is a real place or not.  It looks like there might be ships with oars in the water, but I'm reluctant to assume and I'm ok with ambiguity.  I like how I can read on it the names of days of the week as if it were a journal or captain's log.

Heather Hamann's Teacup Ride is a ceramic scene of a pastoral countryside with a path going through it, and on the path is a platter with a tea kettle and tea cups as if they were taking a ride through the country.    What I like about it is the sense of fun and fantasticality of it and that she made it come to life.  She imagined the impossible and realized it through art, moving it a little bit closer to being possible.  I like to imagine that it's an everyday occurrence to see teacups traveling through a beautiful countryside on their own, having a great time, and maybe if you're polite and nice, they'll let you have some tea.

I didn't see the Frida Kahlo show at the De Young

I went to the de Young Museum, but it was closed to the general public because of the pandemic. I went to go pick up my painting from the prematurely closed art exhibition made up of local artists' work.  And so I got my painting, took a photo of it with Frida Kahlo's image on a window and left.

 

While my art was up in the museum, I went there on three different occasions:  alone, with a friend, and with my pandemic bubble.

 

I never saw the concurrent Frida Kahlo exhibit, but I did see some exhibit about artificial intelligence. But I didn't get it.  I didn't get the point of it.  I frequently feel that tech engineers and programmers and that ilk like to slap each other on the back, flatter each other or themselves, and I felt that there was a bit of that in this exhibit.  It's probably because I'm anti-intellectual and willfully ignorant and maybe even unwillfully ignorant that I didn't feel compelled to understand it.  I'd like to talk to an interesting, not boring, person who liked this exhibit, the artificial intelligence exhibit.  I want to know why this was in the museum, what the point of it was.

 

I feel funny, or I feel that it's funny how I didn't ever go into the Frida Kahlo exhibit.  I might have been able to get into it for free on the day I had an artist's pass for the museum because I had a work on display there, but there was a line to get in, and for some reason, I'm not completely and utterly riveted by the story of Frida Kahlo.  I like her, but as with so many things, I'm a bit blasé about her, at least compared to people who seem to love her.  My level of love is at about 7 or 8, and that's based on I don't know what,  the stuff of hers I've seen and what I know about her struggles in her life. I don't really like art that much anyhow.

Even though the museum is closed, you can still look at it from the outside. It is over 20 feet tall and has a tower that looks like a triangle. Pretty much the whole thing is covered in a metal mesh that looks weathered and makes me think of decaying ships wrecked on Normandy beaches in World War 2.

I didn't run my fingers along the mesh, but I should have. I just kind of looked at it and wondered why they put it over the building. I'm not sure it offers any functional advantages, but maybe it provides shade to offices in it by diffusing the light in which case the mesh functions like tree leaves, so that's pretty neat.

There's a sculpture garden on one side of it, and it's pretty nifty actually because the natural surroundings of the sculptures is pretty or whatever adjective you wish to use to describe gardens, alive. The sculptures are all dead, but they are in a living garden.