Catharine Clark Gallery : Timothy Cummings - Last Call; Sandow Birk - Selections from Ten Leading Causes of Death in America; Andy Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth - Blood, Money, and Tears; AfterLifers - Walking and Talking (Exten-dead version) by HalfLifers (Anthony Discenza and Torsten Z. Burns).

Comment by AB: In the front gallery, Timothy Cummings whips up a fresh blood-curdling batch of zombies, ghouls, and those who love them. Watch out-- they're comin' to getcha. On a higher level, his art speaks to the dead-zone fate of inaction. Put the two levels together and what do you get? High lowbrow. In related news, those of you who insist that zombies are misunderstood will likely take solace in the video "AfterLifers" by Anthony Discenza and Torsten Z. Burns (playing in the video room... naturally). Other show highlights include a fully loaded syringe chandelier by Andy Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth, and of course, Sandow Birk's outstanding artistic didacticisms, this time discoursing on leading causes of death in America-- he never fails to satisfy.

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White Walls Gallery : Adam 5100 & Michael Genovese.

Comment by AB: Adam 5100 trends progressively nonrepresentational with his accomplished intricate stencil works. Good stuff. Michael Genovese, meanwhile, applies old fashioned scratchboard techniques to aluminum plates with baked black enamel finishes. Unusual and worth a perusal.

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The Shooting Gallery : Erik Otto - The Sea of Change.

Comment by AB: According to the prospectus, Eric Otto's current show is about those moments immediately following change. His last show was about the "eerie calm" that immediately precedes change. So there you go. Maybe his next show's gonna be about change itself. Hey-- it could happen.

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Yerba Buena Center for the Arts : Bay Area Now 5 Opening Night Party.

Artists: Maria Antelman, Elaine Buckholtz, Joshua Churchill, Brian Conley, Ala Ebtekar, Ana Teresa Fern?ndez, Donald Fortescue with Lawrence Labianca, Misako Inaoka, Jonathon Keats, Edmundo de Marchena, Ian McDonald, Praba Pilar, John Roloff, Paul Schiek, Erik Scollon, Leslie Shows, Ginger Wolfe-Suarez and Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe with poet Moira Roth, Canan Tolon, Lauren Woods. Curated by Kate Eilertsen and Berin Golonu.

Comment by AB: Bay Area Now 5 (aka BAN 5) is the 5th triennial celebration of vanguard Bay Area talent in the realm of visual art. And your assignment for this exciting episode, should you choose to accept it, is to assess and reflect on the offerings in terms of what makes the Bay Area a unique place to create art (past, present, or future), why it attracts so many artists, and additionally, to contemplate how and where the Bay Area is positioned along the vast continuum of innovative endeavor. Then again, if you just wanna enjoy the art, that's OK too.

So how does it all shake out? Well, we got the cultivated levity of Jonathon Keats' "Honeybee ballet," the campy philistine lewdity of Edmundo de Marchena's Jell-O-esque erotica, an angular strip of ersatz dead grass lawn with occasional indentations that hangs from the ceiling so low you practically have to crawl under it (whatever that's supposed to mean), the inventive abstracts of Leslie Shows, poignant installational disquisitions on Iraq by Brian Conley and on the environment by (not sure), a hypnotic cool blue room by Elaine Buckholtz, a sweet painted yesterday/today hanging San Francisco wall map by Alison Pebworth called "Third Street Phantom Coast" (plus adjunct audio - curiously, Pebworth is not on the roster of participating artists), and there's all kinds of other stuff too.

The art ranges from arcane to in-your-face, occasionally either infested or artificially buttressed with excesses of cognitive construct, and offers little for anyone who has any expectations of seeing anything approaching "traditional," but the overall bottom line upshot is decidely worthy. Yes, I gotta say I like it. Oh... almost forgot... saw a superb live cello piece by Joan Jeanrenaud, performed while pedestalled in the midst of a dramatic commanding translucent multi-screen multi-channel video installation courtesy of Alessandro Moruzzi.

Anyone who wants to help ID artists, please email me .

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Addendum:

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