Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Jaydra Johnson, Brittney Frantece, Blessing Greer Mathurin, and Quintessa Matranga pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
The Blinding Light: Raven Chacon, Ishan Clemenco, Manon de Boer, Claire Fontaine, Isabel Nuño de Buen, Carlos Reyes, and Ana Vaz
Curated by Diego Villalobos
Slash Art, San Francisco, CA
January 11 – April 19, 2025
The gallery looks closed. Pages from the San Francisco Chronicle cover the floor to ceiling windows and doors. I wouldn’t have known if this was from a recent paper or from archived copies had my boss not identified a large photo of a smiling elderly man prominently filling the left side of the door as her very recently deceased uncle.
Inside the gallery, the broadsheets continue to fill the space, covering the floors from wall-to-wall. Shoe covers are required to enter, and dogs, if you have them, have to be carried in. I aggressively stamped each foot into the automatic shoe cover dispenser, enjoying the tingly sensation of the elastic snapping across my ankles as the booties were secured. Not sure what those contraptions are officially called, I looked it up on google. The ULINE catalog description for the device offered this scintillating description: “Protect your client’s $1 million house or the most sensitive laboratory or data room.” Feeling a little devastated by the voluminous Advil-blue Polypropylene booties now covering my extremely supple kid-goat leather ballet slippers, I entered the space.
All these theatrics are of course in service of Claire Fontaine’s Newsfloor (San Francisco Chronicle) (2024-2025). You catch glimpses of recent events as you cross the room. Headlines from the campaign trail, interspersed with articles on food, sports, and movies, all flattened on one plane. The context destroys the clean slate of the gallery but does not destroy the rest of the works in the room. If anything, the rest of the artworks seemed to gain something undefinable just by being able to share the space with all this noise and still break through. They were like oases in a sea of chatter.
The rest of the objects in the exhibition are equally elegant, playful, and timely. Carlos Reyes’s twin lampshades with arching brushed steel bases centered in the room is my personal favorite. Each lamp has a light bulb grafted onto a power source in either San Francisco or Caguas, Puerto Rico. San Francisco’s energy flows strong and consistent while Puerto Rico’s struggles to illuminate. Despite the distressing blow to footwear, I recommend this show.
Reflection: Can you write a TV show that combines a $1 million house and the most sensitive laboratory?
Dream Story: Max Xeno Karnig, Nicolas G. Miller
House of Seiko, San Francisco, CA
February 8 – March 15, 2025
Dream Story includes four very petite oil on copper and oil on aluminum paintings and one bronze and steel sculpture on a pedestal, centered in the space. The exhibition took a 1926 novella by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler as a starting point from which the two artists, long time friends, could collaborate. The novella, also titled Dream Story, inspired Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
The paintings and the sculpture conjure imagery of the theater. Curtains, stages, Venetian masks, and lithe naked bodies fill this world. The bronze work is composed of three different 13th century style carnival masks, evenly spaced and aligned by the eye holes, in succession, on a pedestal. The deliberateness of this offering is what makes it feel fetishistic, not the symbol of the mask. The masks cover more of the face as they go back. The first mask just covers the space around the eyes, the next mask covers the forehead, and the third covers part of the nose too. A painting of the domino mask, the thinnest of the three -covering only the space around the eyes, hangs nearby. It is also the smallest painting in the room. It’s fetishistic in its exacting, and miniature nature, more than in subject matter.
I admit I came into the room a little biased. I feel a bit allergic to any mention of Eyes Wide Shut in an artwork, press release, or exhibition. It seems overly mined by contemporary artists. My hesitation is that when you reference another artist’s work, even if it’s a movie, the result is always watered down.
Despite thinking that these works might be leaning on Eyes Wide Shut a bit too heavily for aesthetic absolution, I appreciate that this subject is fun. Plus I heard all the paintings sold.
Reflection: Favorite Christmas movie?