Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Hayashi Wilder, Emily Small, Jade Ichimura, and Renée Reizman pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Max Ernst at the Transamerica Pyramid
Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, CA
July 17–December 14, 2025
In the nearly hidden park at the base of the Transamerica Pyramid in downtown San Francisco, you can find twelve bronze-cast sculptures by artist Max Ernst, made alongside his partner, the surrealist Leonora Carrington. Escaping escalating political tensions in Paris, Ernst and Carrington moved to a village in the South of France in 1938 to continue their practices and work on these sculptures. Their house thereafter became a meeting point for many surrealist artists and figures passing through their village.
I walked around the park and imagined these pieces guarding the artists in a place on the edge of war. Human forms morph into animals, animals into mythologies, mythologies into sprites of the city. They wear crowns, slide into fountains, catch fish in their mouths, and dance. They are playful among the redwood trees planted at the base of the building—I think they’re speaking with each other, co-conspiring, gossiping, guarding, remarking on how very strange each day can be. Spend an afternoon here, confer among spirit and species.
Reflection: Does sculpture carry memory with it? Are they remembering now?
Weather and the Whale
Institute of the Arts and Sciences at U.C. Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA
May 29, 2025–March 8, 2026
Weather and the Whale is the culmination of a two-year collaboration between contemporary artists and marine ecologists working at the Friedlaender Lab at UC Santa Cruz. The exhibition seeks to articulate markers of climate change—instances where it can be located in the world around us—through two axes: weather and whales.
Inside the Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS), sounds from Sharon Daniel’s Distant Early Warnings and Mia Rollow’s Moontide Divination echo throughout the tall exhibition spaces that are adorned with illustrated diagrammatic research. A viewer can trace themselves through the history of the United States’ legislation of whaling to the effects shipping has had on marine life populations, and the migration of flora and fauna to new areas, aligning with the forced migration of native populations in the Americas. The exhibition is almost too ambitious in its breadth. It is the show’s developing methodology that seems remarkably successful—pairing artists whose primary method of conveyance is through the visual and experiential, with scientists who cull together the most urgent findings in our changing environments today.
On my way out, I was stopped by Christine Howard Sandoval’s display of images of linguistic papers by Californian native language scholar Robert Oswalt. His notes mix with dried fauna, possibly from his garden in Berkeley. The work ponders whether language and landscape need each other. If, particularly in Indigenous languages, the two cannot exist individually. I think about the thesis of interdependence that this exhibition as a whole hypothesizes.
Reflection: Evoking Oswalt’s own words: “Was the garden a space in which to enter the language? And the language in which to enter the land?”
DJ Meisner: Second Body State
Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, CA
August 2, 2025–September 27, 2025
Second Body State references the out-of-body state participants entered during “remote viewing” experiments in the 1970s, conducted by the Defense Intelligence Agency. During these experiments, participants listened to guided meditations called The Gateway Tapes.
DJ Meisner listened to these same tapes each day over the course of 19 months, and the artworks on view are a result of that. The artist has “baked” down a handful of photographs on plastic and suspended them away from the wall with a managerial system of black clips hung off coiled metal arms. They remind me of shrinky-dinks, those translucent, colorable, bakeable, shrinkable sheets of polystyrene from the 2000s that brought me hours of fun as a child.
They quite literally expand from the second dimension and into a kind of third state. The images are mysterious: over-exposed, closely cropped, and seemingly pulled from a greater narrative—one that the artist reflects might only become legible to him as life passes away from his time with the tapes. In the quiet corner of Minnesota Street Projects that Bass & Reiner occupies, I feel like a noir detective, wondering if the silver sheeting covering the door to the gallery, recalling security blankets, is also part of the show.
Reflection: Are some of life’s most satisfying answers better as mysteries?