Claire's Contemporary

 Nothing Stable Under Heaven is a group show at the San Francisco MOMA, being held from March 3rd to September 16th, 2018. It combines the work of various contemporary artists across an array of media, most notably photography, sculpture and video, to present the hidden turbulence of the present. Technology, politics, war, social and environmental issues that run through our current reality are a few of the subjects these works examine. The ultimate result of these works is certainly unstable, giving the viewer a clear but almost dizzying presentation of the complexity of our world.   View of the first room in the exhibit.             The show was presented in a large, moderately lit environment with white walls, light wood floors and a high ceiling that gave it a feeling of openness. The space was partitioned so one could be guided through the exhibit easily and the works could be grouped together appropriately. The first thi...

Most art students at Sacramento State have probably been introduced to Ben Hunt; he's our technician, he gives us our studio safety talks, and can be found around the art-sculpture lab to answer questions and hear out concerns for our quirky building that holds most of the art classes. However, not every student is probably familiar with his art- and I realized on March 15th, when he gave his talk at our university, that this is very unfortunate.   His talk showed the progression of his work and all of the ideas, influences, and journeys that have gone into his installations and sculptures. Ben began his talk by discussing the painting "Triumph Over Mastery" by Mark Tansey, and how he took the content- Michael Angelo's Last Judgement being painted over in white- to be about the importance of art history. A fascination with history continued to be a theme throughout the art he showed. One of his earliest works was an installation that dealt with memory- personal ...

In downtown Sacramento, two wonderful shows of contemporary artists are being held in nearby galleries of the B. Sakata Garo and the Tim Collum galleries. While both artists work in differing media, style and purpose, they both offer great examples of the character of contemporary art. The first show I visited was titled Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form: Meditations on the Heart Sutra, featuring the work of William Ishmael at the Tim Collom gallery. Ishmael, an artist local to California, creates work with a range of materials from paint to plexiglass that explores and attempts to understand Buddhist philosophies. This show, as suggested by the title, explores a concept he found in the Heart Sutra- that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. The work tended to have an earthy, weathered appearance, with rough texture and earth-tones, and this went well with the rustic bricks of the gallery. There were, however, smoother, cleaner looking works, which were generally allow...

This past Thursday I attended an artist talk at the Manetti Shrem in Davis by   sculpture artist Diana Al-Hadid. Al-Hadid got her BFA in Sculpture and BA in Art History at Kent State University and her MFA in Sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University. The art she makes tends to be highly detailed large scale installations that resemble complex architecture and landscape that seem to defy gravity in their use of negative space. Her presentation chronicled her work from the beginning of her education to her current projects and offered insight into her inspirations and thought processes behind her art. One of her earliest influences was visiting a cave in Lebanon. The experience of being in an enclosed space made by nature as opposed to people stayed with her. The drippy, earthy aesthetic of cave walls and the idea of space shows up a lot in a lot her work. One of her first installations as an undergrad was a cave of paper plates that also took influence from the Halloween ...

From February 12-16, the R.W. Witt Gallery at Sacramento state hosted In The Pink, a show of sculptural works from my fellow Sacramento State student, Tiffany Boddeker. Boddeker creates sculptures that are both delightful and disturbing. The works playfully combine soft materials like string and pantyhose with rougher materials like planks of wood and metal strips or wire. The result is often strange, presenting uncomfortable forms, with bulging tumor-like shapes, fleshy colors and strange textures that sometimes resemble insects or bodily growths. The first thing I saw walking into the show was the little bug-like creatures that scattered to my left. Resembling little globs of mud that sprouted spindly wire legs, they had an animated feeling to them In their poses; one was even caught in the act of what appeared to be climbing the wall. They were creepy, like an infestation of spiders, yet strangely adorable. Continuing into the gallery, I was faced with...

Last Saturday, February 10th, I had the chance to get out to the B. Sakata Garo gallery in downtown Sacramento. There I was introduced to a collection of recent paintings and drawings by artist Ryan M. Reynolds. The majority of his works could be divided into three categories- freeways, yards, and scenes of people in nature. In the freeway scenes, cars, signs and buildings travel into the canvas.  The cars are painted with rough, patchy strokes, alternating in direction and size. The effect is something like a vibration, a sense that these cars, though not  tightly rendered to capture the curvature and smooth surface one might think of a car having, have a visual truth to them. The road is painted with the same feeling. They both rumble, like a freeway would. The world around the cars and the road is painted far more simply in broad strokes of color. The signs are indistinct, the buildings even more so. Again, it captures the very real but not literal quality of how...

January 22 through February 9th, The Else Gallery held the show All Exaltations: Meditations in Sculpture, featuring the works of Sacramento State's sculpture professor, Andrew Connelly. More than a simple display of sculptural work, this show was an interactive experience. It was dark inside the room, but full of illumination. Shadows cast by the elevated bells move up and down the walls along with the colorful glowing symbols that shine atop them. It felt like stepping into an artist's silhouette drawing of a city at night. Each bell sits atop a metal frame work, shaped to evoke the image of significant buildings that create the cityscapes of the United States. Weaving around the buildings of the little city presents you with an invitation to interact- a simple wood and cloth mallet hangs from each tower, each a little moment of tenderness in an exhibit of mostly heavy metals and bright lights. Still uncertain, I asked if I was supposed to hit the bell. It w...

Christine Sun Kim Pictured: Christine Sun Kim on left, myself on the right. Christine Sun Kim is an artist who works in drawings, installation and conceptual pieces that often use sound or ideas of sound from her perspective as a deaf person, as well as ideas related to ASL and deaf culture. This past Thursday, I  attended her talk at the Manetti Shrem Museum in Davis, California. Her work, as she introduced it, deals with sound, communication, and space in society. A lot of the way she approaches sound in her work deals with how it can be understood without the ears- she listed things like time, things and experiences as being a type of sound. I was perplexed at first, but as she shared her works, her ideas became clear. One of the pieces she described involved shipping a sound recorder across a large distance- resulting in 24 hours of sound as the package was shipped. She played  a sound clip and signed along with it. The idea seemed to me that the sound was...