When artist Martine Gutierrez opened gift-wrapped packages containing a bag of jasmine rice, a rice cooker and a Princess Jasmine doll and matching costume onstage, I had an epiphany.
The night before at theFog Design + Artopening gala at Fort Mason, I spotted the artist (a Berkeley native now based in Brooklyn) and asked what her talk at the fair would cover. Gutierrez pointed at her T-shirt, featuring Princess Jasmine, the heroine from Disney’s “Aladdin,” as a hint.
During her talk on Thursday, Jan. 20, instead of explaining the work currently on view in her show“Half-Breed”at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, she set up the rice cooker and slowly dressed herself in the costume until she and the doll were a matching pair.
She concluded by cutting the doll’s hair, undressing it and burying Princess Jasmine in a bed of jasmine rice.
Still shook by Martine Gutierrez’s “talk” yesterday at@FOGFairwhere she buried a Princess Jasmine doll in jasmine rice. When asked about the work she said “I think it’s pretty self explanatory.”@FraenkelGallery@ryanleegallerypic.twitter.com/A4MCfmXQkO
— Tony Bravo (@TonyBravoSF)January 21, 2022
“This is the first time I’ve been asked to speak at an art fair,” she said. “To me the idea of standing at a pedestal and giving kind of ABCDs of the work and the dates that it came out felt wrong. I might as well be dead and have someone else do that.”
Events like Gutierrez’s are what I love about the Fog fair and San Francisco’s art week: getting to spend time with artists. Even with many of the parties canceled because of the omicron variant, the first art week since 2020 still offered happy chance encounters with Bay Area artists likeAna Teresa Fernández, Clare Rojas and Brad McCallum as well as opportunities to meet others at show openings around the city.
Here are my highlights from the first three days of art week, which included the Fog opening gala on Wednesday, Jan. 19, and the fair, which was scheduled to run through Sunday, Jan. 23.
Tuesday, Jan. 18
I began my week at Anglim/Trimble gallery at the Minnesota Street Project, where I was emotionally devastated by Palo Alto artist Xiaoze Xie’s epic four-panel painting“Panorama of Eternal Night.”It depicts scenes from the coronavirus pandemic against images of mourning and afterlife from ancient and classical art.
At“Image Gardeners,”on view at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, I met San Francisco photographer Marcel Pardo Ariza, whose triptych self-portrait “Fiera & Marcel encarnándose” was commissioned for the exhibition. The works hang at an angle, a particular challenge during the installation, the artist explained.
隔壁,奥特曼西格尔提出了“屋顶Fire” with new paintings by Los Angeles artist Troy Lamarr Chew II, which depict cartoon characters like Bart Simpson, Roger Rabbit and SpongeBob SquarePants pictured along with images like mashed potatoes, ketchup and a cabbage patch whose names also reference popular dances. When viewed through the Halo AR app, the paintings come alive with demonstrations of each dance.
At the mid-construction launch of the newInstitute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Oakland artist Chris Martin’s inaugural exhibition “Ancient as Time” opened with massive curved sculptures painted with expressions like “The only way out is through” and “P.S. Don’t look back” before giving way to installations of banners featuring his sailor-tattoo-inspired imagery. Martin said that before the exhibition closes on April 16, he hopes to be able to offer real tattoos of his work there, “if we can get the paperwork settled with the city.”
Wednesday, Jan. 19
The new Pier 70 exhibition space offered a preview of the retrospective ofPaint the Void, the mural program founded at the start of the COVID pandemic that funded many of the works by Bay Area artists that enlivened boarded-up storefronts.Simon Malvaez,Nick Sirotich, Yon and Chris Granillo were among the muralists represented, their work given new context en masse.
“We never had the intention of this being a movement,” said Shannon Riley, executive director of Paint the Void. “It’s overwhelming to know we’ve now created over 150 murals and supported over 170 artists, some who never created a mural.”
That evening at the Fog gala, Stanlee Gatti’s 21 Pop exhibition featuring the Arion Press was housed in a plywood cabin with cutouts of letters in real fonts used by Arion. The booth also offered a preview of an upcoming printing by writer-musician Patti Smith and artist Christian Marclay.
Rirkrit Tiravanija丝网的乒乓球桌,“Untitled (tomorrow is the question),” in the Kurimanzutto space was popular for many who took up paddles to play a game. Berkeley artist Masako Miki also made a big impression with her colorful sculpture at Fog featured in both the Cult Aimee Friberg Exhibitions and the Ryan Lee Gallery spaces.
Thursday, Jan. 20
Among the most striking components of Richmond ceramicist Cathy Lu’s new exhibition“Interior Garden”at the Chinese Cultural Center was “Peripheral Visions,” an installation of ceramic eyes in shades of yellow that are meant to evoke the shape of East Asian eyes. They drip yellow onion water into a variety of vessels made in China, ranging from traditional jars and pots to plastic buckets.
“你听说过白色和黑色的眼泪。这is about ‘yellow tears,’ ” she said of the work.
After previewing the Carpenters Workshop Gallery pop-up lighting exhibition at the Saint Joseph’s Arts Society, featuring works by Nacho Carbonell and Studio Drift, among others, my day concluded at Jessica Silverman for the opening of shows by Julian Hoeber and Hayal Pozanti. Pozanti’s work uses a language of 31 predetermined shapes. This latest series represented in “Lingering” was painted outdoors during the pandemic beginning in 2020, giving the shapes an organic feeling inspired by leaves, flowers, waves and fungi.
“I’m very interested in world building,” said Pozanti of her visual language. “As a child I was always making up stories, was very into science fiction. I think I started on it by inventing my shape system. With this work, I’ve been able to express what that world might look like.”
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