RATIO 3 - GALLERY 16

31 RAUSCH - FIFTY24SF

RICHARD L. NELSON GALLERY, UC DAVIS

04.27.12

(with assistance from Clare Coppel and Larissa Archer )



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Ratio 3 Gallery : Mitzi Pederson - Ciphers.

Comment by AB: The art of Mitzi Pederson is as delicate, ephemeral, transitory and susceptible as art gets. In the extreme, it's barely even visible. Her main ingredient is tulle, a fine lightweight fabric, occasionally accented with paint, glitter, thin cylindrical wooden rods, and the like. The art is sometimes framed, sometimes hung freely. According to the explanatory, "Pederson continues her interest in playing with perception of presence; the line between something and nothing." So is her art something or is it nothing? One thing for sure-- it's as good a jumping off point as any for discourse on the subject of what art is... or isn't. Somebody's gotta broach it; Pederson most assuredly does.

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Gallery 16 : Alex Zecca - New Work.

Comment by Kathryn Arnold: Lines that at times appear to be strings due to the 3-D nature of they ways they interact. Patterns emerge as ikat weaves and more.

Comment by AB: Alex Zecca combines thousands of perfectly straight multicolored ink lines into astonishingly intricate op-art monuments to compulsion. But wait; there's more. He counts every single line in each piece of art and writes down the totals on the works themselves. He also takes this opportunity to introduce a series of works where he cuts up completed compositions and then collages them into bursts of linearity. I'm in pinkie cam paradise!

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31 Rausch Street : Travis Kerkela - Fromage.

Review by Clare Coppel: Travis Kerkela creates small simple intimate paintings of everyday subjects like teeth and icebergs that get better the longer one looks at them.

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Fifty24SF Gallery : Michael Miller - West Coast Hip Hop, A History in Pictures.

Comment by AB: Iconic images of California hip hop legends from the 1990s like Cypress Hill, NWA, Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and House Of Pain. Michael Miller's portraits and documentary lifestyle photographs of the era are as good as it gets. The show is only up for two days, but you can still buy the book, "Michael Miller Photography - West Coast Hip Hop: A History in Pictures." You won't be disappointed.

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Richard L. Nelson Gallery at University of California, Davis: Dreams of the Darkest Night - Vanessa Marsh and Sean McFarland.

Review by Larissa Archer: Sean McFarland's photographs are dark (and difficult to photograph), but up close, they are quite beautiful and demand scrutiny. They appear to be places that have escaped man's encroachment, overgrown and left to nature's will. However, McFarland specifically seeks out places where the opposite is true-- places where the "nature" you see is entirely fabricated or hemmed in by man's involvement-- an abandoned dynamite factory or an intersection of two San Francisco streets, for which image he manipulates the composition and the lighting to give the illusion that a small grove of trees and grass is in fact a dense forest. His interest seems to be the paradox of the "natural"--i.e., if man is part of nature, then how can we say something he does is unnatural?

Though the quality of untrammeled "naturalness" is a devised illusion, his images evoke the ancient motif of the forest as a place of beauty and danger, the "seductive place that you know you should stay away from but can't" (his words). In his images, you can see why in our history, before flashlights and tended trails and emergency phones, forests were the symbolic land of mystery and rebirth, where you went when you turned your back on civilization, where it was believed fairies and goblins lived, and where nature's real and mythical dangers lay in wait for anyone foolish or bold enough to wander in.

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