Geras-Tousignant Gallery : James Scott Geras - Fixation.

Comment: Curious colorful mildly perplexing fashionesque photography featuring fresh kicky offbeat poses in unanticipated situations. First show of Geras's photography in five years.

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Lisa Dent Gallery : Hank Willis Thomas - Unbranded, Reflections in Black by Corporate America.

Comment: One of my favorite gallery gambol diversions is reading nothing about the art, artist, or show until AFTER I see it. That way, with no cue cards, no hints, no hype, no preconceptions, totally ignorant, I formulate opinions, impressions, and conclusions entirely on my own. Me vs art. Then I read the brochure to see how well my take matches the artist's intent. Here, the match is pretty good. Hank Willis Thomas's photographic images clearly concern Black stereotyping (which I get), but the best part is how he makes his point (which I didn't get). He takes magazine print ads placed by major corporations, extracts out everything but the visuals, and we see how big business really sees Black people in America. It ain't particularly enlightened, and it tells us plenty about ourselves and our culture.

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Ampersand International Arts : Jennifer Kaufman - No Way of Knowing When This Song Began; Andy Vogt - Redensified.

Comment: Jennifer Kaufman says in her statement that she creates her scratchy rangy abstracts with both hands, each working at different speeds. She goes on to describe her process as an action oriented stream of consciousness, at times involving "chance and recklessness," at times involving her entire body, especially with respect to her large format works. OK. You got my attention. Let's see the video.

Andy Vogt hits the dumpsters, collects plaster lath (thin wood strips that were used to hold plaster in the old days, pre-sheetrock, always discarded during home renovations), spruces 'em up, saws 'em up, and reconfigures them into precise secure durable cleanly constructed floor and wall pieces, or in his words, "re-crystallized skeletal incarnations of a system that has been frozen in suspended animation." Hmmm. How about this? Call it cryogenic carpentry.

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Ratio 3 Gallery : Ben Peterson - You Build It, We Burn It.

Comment: Ben Peterson essays on eco-terrorism and land degradation in drawings and sculpture, pointing up, among other things, absurdities of construction like indoor rock climbing walls, for example, where builders compromise an outdoor environment to build an indoor environment to mimic an outdoor environment. Makes sense, right? Anyway, Peterson's pencil and ink drawings are eminently architectural so I'm thinkin' maybe he went to architecture school or something, but he says all he did was buy a couple of books at Home Depot and learn how to do it himself. Bright fellow.

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Mission 17 Gallery : AS IS - Video and Collections by Katherin McInnis.

Comment: An ode to that venerable resale emporium, Thrift Town , king of the corner at Mission and 17th Streets. The show immortalizes Thrift Town "finds" such as a belt with buckle that says LEFTY, originally purchased for 59 cents, laying limp on a shelf along with a toy banjo-like contraption. The tie-together is a wiggy meandering video documentary exploring pretty much every conceivable aspect of contemporary secondhand lifestyling.

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Space Gallery : David V. D'Andrea - Stephen Kasner.

Comment: Dark brooding ominous art for the most part. Stephen Kasner's paintings are kind of an abstracted updated version of Albert Pinkham Ryder's (one painting is even called "Pale Horse" - "Death on a Pale Horse" is the name of the Ryder painting I linked here). David D'Andrea goes more symbolic and representational with his detailed drawings. Two distinct styles that blend nicely together.

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Caldwell Snyder Gallery : Paul Balmer - New Work.

Comment: If you called Central Casting and asked 'em to cook up an art opening for you, this is what you'd get-- fashionable attractive well-healed tasteful conservative hipsters chatting it up in a slick spacious bright light interior. The art? Well, looks like Paul Balmer aestheticizes (or maybe anesthetizes) the walls with the same gimmicky skyscraper painting over and over and over again. But hey-- check it out-- red dot heaven. Go figure.

OK. I'm done figuring. This is a good example, perhaps a smidge oversimplified, of how a cohesive coherent theme keeps the contestants in the game. Balmer makes the same point thirty ways, tedious but clear. Nobody goes home clueless; nobody buys art they can't understand. I'm not saying reduce art to pablum; I am saying that for the greenhorns, provide simple entry-level statements. Remember-- always be considerate of people who like art so much that they take time out of their busy lives to see your show (no matter how little they know about what they're looking at).

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Jack Hanley Gallery : Scott & Tyson Reeder - French Thoughts.

Comment: I enter the 389 Valencia gallery. Scott Reeder, dressed like a flower, hangs precariously from the ledge above the gallery door, flailing wildly, babbling incoherently, while onlookers respond with uneasy laughter. Tyson Reeder is at the opposite end of the room, ensconced in a largish hollow white pedestal, his nose protruding through a small hole cut into one side, blowing nasal melodies into an amped up microphone. You'll be relieved to know that both artists survived the performance.

In case you wanna buy something, there's paintings made with mops and brooms, a tie-died poodle, a ceramic vase, drawings, watercolors, a surprisingly sturdy painted wood 2 X 4 sculpture by Scott Reeder (my favorite), and a 20-minute video of the brothers playing themselves as old men, way way off in the future, tottering about, napping, and painting clumsy art using bricks and potatoes instead of brushes. From Caldwell Snyder to this, all in a matter of minutes. Ping me.

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The Shooting Gallery : Tattooed Portraits - Paintings of Artists With Tattoos, A New Series of Paintings by Shawn Barber.

Comment: Shawn Barber paints up a series of portraits, the two stipulations being that every sitter is an artist and every artist has tattoos. Some paintings show the artists plus tattoos, some show only the tattoos and their corresponding body parts, some show tattoos with abstracted backgrounds, several show tattoo applications, and more. There's plenty of body ink surveys; this one is exceptional-- a personal interpretation and intimate look at how artists ornament themselves. The book, Tattooed Portraits, New Paintings by Shawn Barber (9mm Books, San Francisco, 2006, 112 pages) is available at The Shooting Gallery for $29.95 and online at the 9mm Books website.

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White Walls Gallery : Streets of Chaos.

Artists: Coro, El Mac, Dan Quintana, John Brosio, Akira, Graeme, David Choong Lee, Brett Amory.

Comment: Revised updated contemporary urban version of Social Realism -- let's call it Urban Realism-- treatising everything from the hopeless homeless to directionless drifters to corner stores to security cams monitoring empty hallways to fast food boredom to nameless streets in the middle of somewhere that are totally nowhere. A compelling look at life on the lean side...

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