Square Cylinder San Jose Museum of Art Best of 2018
Coal + Ice @ Fort Mason
Function of a citywide series of climate-related events designed to showcase California's pushback confronting Trump, this sprawling exhibition of A-listing documentary photographers cast harsh lite on the follies of Hydrocarbon Human, linking mining and the consumption of fossil fuels to ecological breakdown, poverty, mass migration and state of war. If deniers could be compelled to see this exhibition with their eyes pinned open up a la Clockwork Orange, maybe we'd exist looking at a unlike time to come than the ane nosotros now confront.
Linda Connor and Zhan Wang @ Haines
"In this ode to history, human and geologic," Max Bluish wrote, "Connor displays photos of ancient spiritual sites, petrified bodies from Pompeii, re-photographed century-one-time glass plate images of the night sky, and photos of geologic sedimentation. Zhang presents stainless steel sculptures cast from stone formations. The inspired pairing stands equally a potent reminder of the primordial forces that take shaped both the World and human consciousness."
Duane Michals @ Crocker
One of the kickoff to seriously challenge the dominance of the decisive-moment approach to photography, Michals, over five decades, clustered a body of work that continues to resonate. This show, comprised of portraits, shows Michals operating with the alacrity of a street photographer, still finding (or inventing) approaches that seemed tailor-made to each of his many subjects. Together, their names read like a who's who of 20thcentury American culture. To January 6.
Frankenstein's Birthday Party @ Hosfelt
Given the unsettling character of the art sometimes seen in this space, it made perfect sense to consolidate representative samples on the occasion ofFrankenstein's 200th birthday. "The subject thing," wrote Justin Manley, "is heavy, and its combination of fantastical grotesques with artifacts of real-life atrocity requires fortitude and a morbid curiosity. Determined visitors are rewarded with a bear witness of beginning-rate artworks assembled with inspired curatorial vision." Artists included Alan Rath(whose career retrospectiveopens February 16 at the ICA); Patricia Piccinini (whose electric current exhibition runs January 26); and Tim Hawkinson.
Udo Nöger @ Dolby Chadwick
Udo Nöger'south paintings should make you shiver. Their interlocking circles and totemic shapes — rendered in a near-monochrome color palette and set up atop what appear to exist water ice flows, frigid waters and overcast skies – issue a distinct arctic. They hang in mid-air like fever-dream visions, palpably existent, all the same remote — like what I imagine the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton saw when he and his coiffure were trapped for months in polar ice, seeking an escape route to solid land while contesting frostbite and snow incomprehension. These works are production of an elaborate and original painting process, designed to actualize low-cal and to disguise the means by which it's captured and shaped.
Printstallations @ ICA
Printmaking rarely aspires to monumentality. Its history is largely one of small, intimate works.Printstallationsblew by that convention with works spanning large tracts of wall and flooring infinite, all displaying unique processes. Highlights included Meghann Riepenhoff's "dynamic cyanotypes" – montages made from low-cal-sensitive newspaper covered in
sand and doused with seawater that credibly evoked the ocean; and a photograph-derived woodcut of a state highway overpass past Beth Howe and Clive McCarthy that came close to inducing vertigo through the strategic removal of visual information.
David Shrobe @ Jenkins Johnson
His pictures posit a kind of Dada-informed Antebellum Postmodernism, one in which black men and women, swathed in mismatched, makeshift garments, appear as tangible apparitions, sending out veiled letters about their psychological makeup and their place in a hierarchy not of their own making. In this fictional universe, art-historical arrows point astern to Picasso'south borrowings from tribal fine art and forwards to contemporary artists like Titus Kaphar and Michelene Thomas.
Eames @ Oakland Museum
No design team has had a greater impact on the American psyche than Charles and Ray Eames. You may non knowthem, but you surely know their work, in item, those molded fiberglass chairs that became instant icons when they were introduced in the mid-1940s. What also you may non know, but what the exhibition makes clear, is the stunning range of the couple'due south inventions. Their output included cutting-edge graphic blueprint, experimental films, propaganda efforts on behalf of the U.S. State Department, and, most of all, model houses that stand up as the epitome of Modernist design, if not the apotheosis of mid-century America'due south materialist aspirations. Robert Atkins' review puts it all in context. To February 17 .
Cult of the Machine @ de Young
Unbridled optimism. That is what we saw looking at the early years of the 20thcentury through the eyes of the Precisionists, a group of between-the-wars artists who took every bit their subject industry and its supposed splendors: skyscrapers, automobiles, suspension bridges, factories and the like. This tour de force of an exhibition, organized Emma Acker and reviewed by Mark Van Proyen, brought into sharp focus the distinct parallels between the naïve hopes of the Machine Historic period and the wide-eyed outlook that accompanied the growth of the Internet – earlier it became the handmaiden of Large Information.
Rube Goldberg andContraption@ CJM
These intertwined exhibitions explored modernity with fat dollops of humour – slapstick Jewish humor. Goldberg's legendary cartoons poke fun at the absurdities of American life, peculiarly those arising out of newfangled gadgets that were supposed improve life, but didn't; whileContraption, a companion exhibition curated by Renny Pritikin, featured works by contemporary tinkerers (Bernie Lubell,Sheri Simmons), alongside those of painters, photographers, sculptors and conceptualists, all whom challenged notions of progress.
Art and China after 1989: Theater of the Earth @ SFMOMA
China'due south quick leap from agrarian poverty to industrial superpower upended the post-Cold War globe order, bringing with information technology unprecedented levels of social, political, economic and environmental upheaval. Operating inside this environment, artists exposed the emerging fissures, placing Prc and the art made therein at the center of the globe'southward contradictions. It's hard and sometimes painful show, just essential viewing for anyone seeking insight into the People's Republic. To February 24 .
Monica Lundy @ Nancy Toomey
The one-time adage nearly ignorance of history condemning united states of america to repeat it appears to exist a driving force behind the work of LA artist Monica Lundy. She's devoted the past nine years to examining the fates of incarcerated women, turning archival photos into portraits on paper that attempt to reclaim lives marred or destroyed by injustice.Deviance:Women in the Aviary During the Fascist Regime, was based on a trove of photos culled from the archives of the Sant'Antonio Abate asylum , a psychiatric hospital to which women were involuntarily committed during 20 years of fascist rule (1920 to 1943). The paintings add a fresh affiliate to the creative person's ongoing exam of the night corners of women's history.
Kara Maria @ Catharine Clark
These activeness-filled Popular Surrealist-leaning paintings explode like fireworks.Loud, garish and hyperbolic in the extreme, they show endangered creatures perched or roaming unmolested amidst scenes of catastrophic disarray, lost in a cacophonous universe in which everything we take for granted has become dangerously unmoored. The commotion appears to go out these creatures unperturbed, indicating that they are unaware of their fate. To look is to be both a witness and an accomplice.
Way Bay @ BAMPFA
How to present 200 years' worth of Bay Area art from the museum all-encompassing holdings? Building on the expansive multi-disciplinary arroyo taken in musem's 2016 re-opening exhibition, Architecture of Life, curator Lawrence Rinder mined the the museum's
mixed works from all eras (and all media) together in ways that defied chronology and category but fabricated intuitive, poetic sense. The evidence included paintings and sculptures by outsiders and insiders; works of arts and crafts and design; objects long held (but rarely displayed); and works of recent vintage. The impact? "Like kids after a Saturday triple feature," wrote Maria Porges, "nosotros stumble out into the sunlight, dazed and enchanted past everything we've been shown."
Ramekon O'Arwisters @ Patricia Sweetow
During an artist's residency at Recology (the SF urban center dump), O'Arwisters looked at how crocheting could transform broken ceramics into something new. His experiments produced a suite of fantastically foreign and securely beautiful objects. Presented on pedestals of unfinished wood, the sculptures comprise ceramic shards into fabric-based forms crocheted in a wild diverseness of colors and textures, proving notwithstanding again, how 1 person's trash can, in the right hands, become another's treasure.
Al Farrow @ Museum of Craft and Design
"It'south non possible to walk into Al Farrow'sDivine Armamentwithout feeling both awe and soul-deep dismay," wrote Julia Couzens. "The hatred that religions can breed is the claret-soaked footing upon which Farrow constructs models of mosques, synagogues, cathedrals, and reliquaries using munitions—a perversely incongruous counterpoint to the gospel of peace, beloved and tolerance we hear coming from pulpits." The highlight and centerpiece of the exhibition is Farrow'southward re-creation of the White Business firm: "Like a massive architectonic skull, it issues a bone-chilling, silent scream: the sound of democracy disintegrating." To Feb. 24 .
Al Farrow: Bombed Mosque, 2010, guns, bullets, shell casings, forty x 56 10 34 ¼ inches
Ned Kahn @ Bedford
Seed Vortex is so massive that it confounds our sense of scale. Its slowly rotating steel disc,
covered with 100 pounds of shifting, siding mustard seeds, dominates this mini-retrospective of Kahn's piece of work," wrote Maria Porges. "The shushing whisper of the seeds and their constantly shifting patterns is enchanting enough to justify a visit, merely six other smaller sculptures ringing the Bedford's idiosyncratic circular gallery build on the experience and further Kahn'southward intention to get viewers to think most the forces of nature past inviting hands-on contact — a deviation from the usual don't-touch situation in public spaces."
Canan Tolon @ Anglim Gilbert
Canan Tolon's paintings are wild, kinetic, technically impressive and critically self-aware," wrote Elwyn Palmerton. "Each appears to be congenital up off of a staggered filigree which is then
modified and obscured in incremental stages which approach chaos while retaining a stable underlying structure. This gives them sense of whirling energy that seems, paradoxically, hyper-controlled. They resemble Andy Warhol put through a Constructivist or Futurist blender set to "fragment and churn," which might suggest, too, something of their attitude towards modernity or postmodernity…Nevertheless, she gives it her own spin, shifting the ratio of irony to sincerity towards the latter while retaining the quality of probing intellect."
Phillip Maisel @ Gregory Lind
This is one body of piece of work that absolutely cannot be understood in reproduction. It demands a face-to-face feel. "Though ane tin say this is required for all art, wrote Maria Porges, "in this case, this assertion is more than a fatuous truism. Maisel assembles photographic images into still lifes in shallow space, onto which boosted collaged elements are added — creating diabolical shifts from 3 to two. The outcome is a trompe-l'oeil subtlety that toggles betwixt flatness and space, between concrete objects and images of those objects.
Lava Thomas @ Rena Bransten
"The subtle and not-and then-subtle transformations in Thomas' drawings," wrote Mark Van Proyen, "achieve the powerful effect of reaffirming and elevating the personhood and dignity of their subjects,"those being12 African-American women arrested in the Montgomery, Alabama bus
cold-shoulder, and whose mug shots served as the source fabric for the serial. "Every bit a general rule, law photographs deny and subtly cancel the dignity of their subjects past fixing them to a graphic surface similar so many specimens of real or alleged wrongdoing, as if to say, "don't be like this person." Thomas reverses this outcome by showing how the dignity of a person can rise above the indignity of official allegation, in effect putting the law on a kind of esthetic trial."
Tim Hawkinson @ Footstep Palo Alto
Hawkinson'due south art, writes Mark Van Proyen, "seems freakishly homespun, but at the same time
very concerned with the question of what it means to make art in a postal service-genome world in which each of u.s. have get minor monsters of Frankensteinian provenance." Here as before, Hawkinson usespoveramaterials to bring "a science fiction sensibility to the interstitial space betwixt sculpture and installation," the result existence an even more pronounced blurring of the line separating realism from Surrealism.
Dinh Q. Lê @ San Jose Museum of Fine art
"On the morning of the 10th solar day at ocean, I awoke to the sound of 
that old man asking for help to push button the young man'due south dead trunk into the water." Those words, spoken past a former Vietnamese boat person, are scrawled across the back of a snapshot — i of hundreds in Dinh Q. Lê's installationCrossing the Further Shore, the emotional magnet and centerpiece of his exhibitionTrue Journey is Return. Battered and yellowed and loosely stitched together into boxy enclosures, "they show, writes Patricia Albers, "what fine art can do and politics can't." To April 17 .
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David M. Roth , Squarecylinder's editor and publisher, compiled this yr-end roundup from reviews written by:Marker Van Proyen,Maria Porges,Robert Atkins,Patricia Albers,Max Blueish, Justin Manley, Julia Couzens,Elwyn Palmertonand…himself. Cheers to all those higher up and to the many donors and advertisers who, in the by year, helped brand Squarecylinder possible. If y'all like what you read in that location's a way to back up it:
Source: https://www.squarecylinder.com/2018/12/best-of-2018/