Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Sam Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Fraenkel Film Fest
Fraenkel Gallery & The Roxie, San Francisco, CA
July 9 to 20, 2024
What is a film that has had an impact on you? Not necessarily your favorite movie, but one that has perhaps shaped you, moved you, or changed you. This is the question that Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco’s renown photo-based gallery, asked 10 of its represented artists including: Robert Adams, Sophie Calle, Kota Ezawa, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Martine Gutierrez, Christian Marclay, Richard Misrach, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Carrie Mae Weems.
From July 9 to July 20, the gallery will present two films per artist a night—ranging from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) to Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957)—and all proceeds will support The Roxie, a historic San Francisco’s theater.
The gallery’s expansive considerations of “the photographic” feels like a natural stepping stone to exploring film and cinema. While watching Carrie Mae Weems’ picks, Wild Strawberries (1957) and Moonlight (2016), back-to-back I recalled flashes of Weems’ use of light as a symbolic gesture or to create a cadence. The quieter mission of this program is also to foster a collective in-person art experience with the community around us. Not only does this series allow a rare glimpse into the inner-worlds of some of the gallery’s biggest names, but it offers the unique opportunity to experience this with others.
Reflection: How does art and cinema impact the way we live our lives, or the way we see the world?
Magicians less prone to mental disorders than other artists, finds research
Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA
July 18 to August 23, 2024
Opening simultaneously with the SF Art Book Fair, Magicians less prone to mental disorders than other artists, finds research explores ideas of social decency, aesthetic narrative, and the limitations of image. The exhibition features the work of Justin Caguiat & Rafael Delacruz, Merlin James, and Rosalind Nashashibi, curated by Quintessa Matranga.
Art and artists have long been shrouded in mythology of the troubled genius, of a kind of parallel inhabitants of reality—being in the world in a literal way, similar to anyone else, yet different entirely in a more epistemological sense. While this is a notion that I have come to detest, Magicians seems to almost parody this stereotype. Instead of regarding artists as magician-like mythological figures, the exhibition treats the works themselves as kinds of microcosms where reality is made and re-made; Nashashibi reworks the myth of Oedipus to question the contemporary role of legendary narrative, while James uses the iconic traditional of seascape painting by “cannibalizing” older, extant works on canvas. Exhibiting artist Rafael Delacruz also recently had a conceptually and materially complex solo exhibition entitled Xerox at Cushion Works featuring paintings, photographs, and projected images. Within Magicians, Delacruz is set to present a collaborative work with fellow exhibiting artist Justin Caguiat, blending their shared material interests, and an interest in representing narrative. Though abstracted through vibrant and meticulous brush strokes, the feeling of the everyday is somehow captured.
While I wonder if the ultimate effect of recalling art historical tropes and narratives does more to uphold than truly dismantle or question them, I am interested in how the work included in Magicians less prone to mental disorders than other artists, finds research find their way into contemporary conversations around narrative, the mundane, and creative (in)decency.
Reflection: What kinds of possibilities does exploring art historical narratives and tropes in a gallery setting (as opposed to a museum or institutional setting) offer? What are its limits?
Rose D’Amato: Mission Chevrolet
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA
August 7 to December 15, 2024
One day while riding the crowded bus home with paint covering my pants after installing a new exhibition, a man asked me “eres pintora?” He told me that he has spent his life painting houses, but specialized in designing and painting signs, even showing me some of his latest projects. I began noticing each and every hand-painted detail on the signs and parked low-riders along 24th street in the Mission, and how there were fewer and fewer as I went further from the Mission. When I first saw Rose D’Amato’s exhibition, complete_machine, at House of Seiko in 2023, the same dedication to craft and the community from which it emerges became transmuted into painting and sculpture.
D’Amato is set to open a new exhibition, and perhaps her largest, at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) titled, Mission Chevrolet, in the museum’s Art Wall space. Calling upon the localized cultural significance of the unearthing of a historic, hand-painted Mission Chevrolet Service billboard, the exhibition seeks to simultaneously preserve and celebrate the city’s Latinx culture of lowrider aesthetics, sign-painting, and artistic labor through a kind of remixing of the billboard’s form. Being a second generation pinstriper and sign painter herself, D’Amato’s larger body of work is a vital preservation of this kind of creative labor, adapting it into new forms and new spaces like the museum. Her work is dynamic, meaningful, and imperative to the Bay’s arts and cultural scene, and I truly cannot wait for what this exhibition brings.
D’Amato also recently opened an exhibition, Everybody Knows This Is Someplace, alongside fellow sign-painting and textile artist Jeffrey Sincich at Gallery 16. While primarily concentrated on the two artist’s work, many of the artists’ Bay Area creative peers are also included in the exhibition, capstoning the exhibition’s feeling of home and its innate diamond-in-the-rough, do-it-yourself attitude.
Reflection: What is the role of museum institutions in supporting localized arts and culture? How far does it extend?
Final note: I have wavered back and forth within my own ability to “stick with it” in the art world. It is a hard business emotionally, financially, ethically, and, at times, can make everything feel just apocalyptic. Having the push to keep going out and seeing things, to keep meeting new people, and to keep learning from others has been painful at times, but has ultimately helped me make a home in the Bay Area for myself. I saw a Charlotte Eriksson quote that said, “It’s July, and I have hope in who I am becoming.”
In the dense heat of July, in its long, pregnant days, I hope we may all be able to sit back and enjoy it. July is a time of fullness and I hope we can all take it for all it has to offer. Thank you Variable West and all of its community for asking me to slow down and to stick with it.