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Thinkers about photography sometimes work on the problem of whether a photograph is experienced in the way it was intended by the image maker. In some contexts, a mismatch is deemed a failure, but in others it is simply another dimension of experience in communications and may have what we often call "its own life" independently of the imagist with no presumed value judgement of good or bad. But implicit in viewing is that there will be a reaction to what is seen, and that raises the question of whether the imagist also intended a certain reaction or instead was not concerned about that. This aspect of the matter quickly dives into ethics and into whether the image has one kind of value or another when viewed. The matter of intention can also be complicated if there is no distinction known between the imagist knowing what it is and the viewer knowing what it is. Necessarily, viewers get the final word, because an unseen image is useless until it is seen. This asks whether the "responsibility" for what the reaction includes is mostly or even all on the viewer. In those ways, we realize that "responsibility" is a wholly different discussion from determining what kind of image is at hand. Here, the idea of mode is most useful because it concerns how the image was produced, and it supports an exploration and discussion about how one mode or another can be knowingly instrumental as expressive options for the image-maker. In this matter, "truth" is not an important topic; instead, how visual facts are "created" as material and then treated as image elements is the distinguishing concept. We might even press the issue a bit more rigorously by saying "visual artifacts" instead of visual facts. A visual artifact can mean (signify) different things to different people; yet there is also some degree of commonality established when a community agrees on a conventional meaning for a certain artifact and, further, desires the convention to be the default offer by the image-maker. The maker, particularly an experimental or innovative one, may or may not attempt to satisfy that convention.

The new documentary "The Stringer" refutes over 50 years of celebrating Nick Út's authorship of the iconic “Napalm Girl” photo from the coverage of the Vietnam War. Since the film saw its public release at Sundance, passions pro and con have been running very high about its accusation that the prize-winning photo was credited to the wrong photographer. But most of the controversy is fueled not by the facts the film presents. Rather, it is that one side wants to believe the accusation is true, and the other wants to believe it is not true. In a time when viral disinformation is a norm, the film as a documentary faces a big challenge: does its "evidence" at best merely prove what we want to believe, or does it instead just prove that we can’t know? NOTE 1. What price, Glory? Real athletes work hard, doggedly, to get to a point where they can do something special. But for most athletes, that special moment surfaces rarely, and by surprise, leaping out of an ongoing stream of committed but "just the usual" effort. Sometimes, out of nowhere, the athlete arrives in “the zone”; everything is clicking, the hard is easy, and the success comes, but not accountable to anything done differently. For most athletes, finding themselves in the zone just once, ever, is enough to justify all that came before it. It's a moment of self-actualization that transcends all other judgments and all lesser tries afterwards, too. It’s the achievement of a lifetime. It happened and can’t be taken away. And with luck, there were witnesses. Like athletes, we photographers shoot endlessly and hard, and can go through such moments. The great part for us is that a “personal best” picture can hang around long after its initial moment, so the number of witnesses to it can just keep climbing. And the more witnesses there are, the better that “best” becomes, all to our credit. Vietnamese photographer Nick Út, credited for the amazing image popularly known as “Napalm Girl”, had such a moment in 1972, and that moment became permanently glorious. Út was declared the 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner for photojournalism, and the winner of the World Press Photo’s 1973 “Photo of the Year”. Decades later, he is still feted for it, on the record and in live appearances. Copyright: the Associated Press But if we believe the claim made in the documentary, Nick’s real achievement may turn out to be that he won a lifetime of rewards for one score that wasn't his. Casting doubt on whether Út actually took the shot, the film could stop the ongoing celebration that he has enjoyed, and his glory could be taken away.   Game Changers The provenance of “Napalm Girl” has not been questioned by anyone influential for decades. Legendary Horst Faas, the Associated Press (AP) chief of photo operations in Saigon who published the picture in 1972, is thought of as the AP’s journalistic and business hero of the time, racking up numerous industry awards for the news wire service and setting quality standards for peers. The whole point of a “wire service” agency such as AP is to tell truths as news , so logically there is a continual and confident invitation to all comers to validate its sources. Faas set the publication credit for the photo to Nick Út, along with the formal title of the image, “The Terror of War”. Upon its release by the AP, the image revised the course of history. A gruesome, unforgettable scene of unjust and unnecessary human suffering, it crystallized the horror that motivated the US anti-war movement and tipped public tolerance, leading towards finally ending US involvement in Vietnam. What the public has taken for granted, then and now, is that an attribution by the Associated Press is beyond reproach.   But in the documentary “The Stringer” , a deep investigation triggered by a 2022 tip from a witness in 1972 argues that this decisive, career-defining moment for the photographer Út wasn’t properly his moment at all. It has embroiled him in a controversy that could revise his personal history as dramatically as the image revised the course of the war.   Business as Usual In the news business, reporting something isn’t "news" if it isn’t saying what you haven’t already heard. But mistakes are not hard to come by. In the rush to get the word out, journalists can stumble: what seems at first to be right can get undone by a closer and longer look. Retractions, on the other hand, can be pretty hard to come by. If breaking news seems to have its footing in a gray area, the public is still the beneficiary of being alerted that something warrants inspection, which creates some leeway if not approval.   A news agency  such as the AP is unlikely to apologize for trying, above all, to get a profoundly shocking news image such as “Napalm Girl” distributed asap. and on its own, the image has never been suspected of being anything other than truthful. That end rationalized whatever the means were. In contrast, although “The Stringer” showed explicit diligence in the film makers' pursuit of evidence, it is treated by many among its audience as an ambiguous film about an ambiguous event. This could surely be a sign of the times. Our contemporary culture complicates the controversy over the film's central accusation. We are saturated with fabricated  imagery, beginning with programmed television, and then (in order of increasing artifice) commercial film, social media, special effects and digital editing tools, and generative “deep faking” A.I. We  are used to fully embracing that artifice even as we, ironically, hold a heightened skepticism of it. It's today's convenient practice of a "suspension of disbelief". This makes it easy to ask why the film's concern about authorship is even important. After all, given how important the image was, who other than photographers ultimately cares about which photographer took it? Perhaps Út, an AP employee, did not make that picture: but so what? And what if the AP chief editor Faas intentionally credited the picture to an AP employee, namely Út, rather than allowing a non-AP freelancer (aka “stringer”) to be recognized as the originator of the picture? After all, if Faas did that, well, it was both possible and tolerated. Against that,  photography's original core value proposition is being factual. It is a claim made more credible through scrutinizing a photo's sourcing of the information it presents. In the case of crediting "Napalm Girl", the film questions that credibility, looking into the matter as being a breach of ethics by both the photographer Út and the AP. This is where the elaborate mechanisms of public demand -- including recognition, awards, and rewards -- surface as central to both the notion of wrongdoing in the film and the excited controversy over the film. If Út is stripped of the credit that drove his ongoing celebrity, the implication immediately arises that he conspired to perpetuate a self-serving fiction at someone else’s expense. Yet half of the film audience is willing to discount the evidence. Among Út's supporters, he is not found innocent, but he's not found guilty. NOTE 2. The Evident versus the Apparent The problem with ethics  is that usually they are circumscribed by context. In 1972, AP’s standard procedure for crediting and releasing information may not ever have exceeded what was at the time acceptable in public and business as practice. Said differently, no one at the time may have considered AP’s decisions and actions to have been irresponsible . On the other hand, if either or both Út and Faas knew that falsely crediting the picture to Út would deny the true image-maker of significant earned benefits, then the false crediting was immoral, regardless of any other circumstances. Based on what "The Stringer" offers, how would we know which is the case? Well, in fact, both things can be true, and arguably that is the version of things that finds the most support from the limited evidence generated so far, whether by the accusers or the accused. The storyline: first, multiple photographers were on the scene when the village of Trảng Bàng was bombed with napalm, but only one of them is the true source of that “decisive moment” picture, "The Terror of War". Then there is ambiguity in the chain-of-evidence drama of how the negative was delivered from the photographer in the field to, eventually, AP's Saigon bureau chief Faas. And finally, there is the intentional distribution of the image which required Faas to break a standing AP censorship policy, but as a result pumping the AP and Út up to the pinnacle of its business and society's rewards. Paralleling that plot of three decisive points is a three-part formula for justifying the usual story of what is believed to have happened. There is first the reputation of the photographer’s known talent; second, the motivations of the editor; and third, the public’s desire to be informed. All three of those influences -- talent, motivation, and desire -- are presumed to be positive and benevolent , unless proved otherwise. Of those three matters, the most important one today is the third one, the audience's influence on information. Increasingly, today, the audience prefers what it wants to believe  over what it needs to know, the recipe for myth-making and propaganda. That makes the controversial reception of the documentary even more ironic: the subject photo of the film was important precisely because it pierced the propaganda that supported conducting the war fifty to sixty years ago. Meanwhile, the filmmakers believe this documentary pierces the propaganda of Nick Út's celebrity. We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us It seems almost quaint to spend so much time on one bit of possible misinfor mation. But today , we are fully submerged in an Era of Disinformation -- the intentional use of information to fabricate an unproven illusion of reality. Beyond mistakes or imagination, fabrications posing as truth can go further, exceeding any individual's personal tolerance or recreation, such as with propaganda. The danger : the excess risks becoming socially disruptive. As the Washington Post would put it: "Democracy Dies i n Darkness. " In poly-cultural populations like ours, bias, discrimination, manipulation, and repression are collectively a destructive toxin. Yet we accept more and more fabricated information anyway. That acceptance also fosters a demand for it, one that overlooks the risks. As an audience, do we take responsibility for our own demand? In that perspective, what “The Stringer” ultimately accomplishes is to tweak the public about its own complicity in the controversy over whether the right person got the credit for the photo. NOTE 3. Public Opinion on Trial "The Stringer" prosecutes. But the AP and its anointed photographer defend. Let’s review the case. First, the Photographer: if Út didn’t make the photo, it is possible that he knew he didn’t and refused to say so for fifty years. Yet there is some possibility that he honestly believed he did make the picture.  Proving one or the other of those things now is a newsy drama that can overshadow the other issues (below) at hand, but either way it doesn’t weaken the historical importance and acceptance of the image in the public eye. Second, the Agency: it has resisted, but not stonewalled, the pressure for transparency about its role and processes. The question is, if the AP in 1972 did not know who took the picture, would that have prevented it from being released asap as news? If the answer is yes, then a best-guess attribution, a plausible one, can be argued for its merit in supporting the public interest with the release. But there’s no reason for AP today to say that someone other than Út (in this case, freelance photographer Nguyen Thanh Nghe) made the photo if they don’t believe someone else did. The only evidence that matters is evidence available about conditions in 1972.   But in this court case, there is a third party, the Audience. This film's current controversy concerning honesty about authorship exists in a current climate of fabricated information being normalized, and wherein belief is preferred over facts. As a society we are increasingly guilty of attributing value to information only when "proof" supports our preference -- the basic formula for myth-making. In our culture, marketers and politicians know that all too well, and literally spend billions of dollars a year to keep us predisposed that way. Against that condition, journalism’s challenge is to somehow still work as intended, presenting factual truth. Bu t in a culture where perspective is driven by marketing and ideology, can truth avoid being subordinated? NOTE 4.   Conclusively Inconclusive A big revision of history is a news event. Often, the newsworthiness of the revision is that it exposes what was thought to be truth as not being the truth. With "The Stringer" we confront what we thought about photography, about news itself, and finally about ourselves. The basic role of photography is usually presumed to be recording discovered facts, bearing witness. When what it conveys is intended to be news, its credibility is in the confidence that it is re-producing facts. In evaluating the reliability of news, the key has always been to "consider the source" -- we want to know how the facts were obtained. With news we factor in both the investigative method and the investigator of its facts. But also, the more impact the news has, the more we tend to credit the source as being special. In this dynamic, it is easy to assume that only special people are capable of breaking special news, as if the news would otherwise not come to light. With "The Stringer", the special protagonists are the "Napalm Girl" photographer (in this case, whether Nick Út freelance photographer Nguyen Thanh Nghe) , the photo editor Carl Robinson, and the photo publisher Horst Faas. In the story within the film, each of them is called into question. We first deal with that as a need for more facts. But whereas news uncovers facts, documentary creates narratives. The power of facts is not just in being verified but in what they affect . In contrast, the power of narratives is in how they convince . As documentary, photography goes beyond the basics. It is expected to find a story in the facts, or even to make one. And we expect the story to be convincing. However, a major problem today, and going forward, is that we cannot presume that information in a photographic image is factual, and it gets increasingly difficult to verify. Stories can be even more suspect. “The Stringer” arrives at a time when both journalism at large and documentary photography in particular, face unprecedented challenges from information technologies, ones that present reality as synthetic, as an end product more than as a beginning condition of truth. Less a certainty, more a story. More an effect of of mediation than of medium . But even without that problem, “The Stringer” is challenged to argue facts in a most believable way. It toils in the problem of truth, but it depends on the nature of proof. It's a film that wants to revise history. But the film wants its facts to sell the story, while we in the audience want its story to sell its facts. This burden falls on the film's investigator (and originator) photographer Gary Knight. On the surface, "The Stringer" appears to be an exposé -- Gary Knight's story of how one person stole from another and was celebrated for doing it. The allegation and its possible veracity is dramatic news. But beneath that surface, the drama in the history is not about the photograph or the photographer. I t is about the way they both were used. The way they were used broadens the message of the film: it is about photography as a medium and about making news, in both cases about the nature of "truth". NOTE 5. The reality of appearance We expect journalism (at least through research) to get the facts that become the material of a documentary's narrative. Photo-documentation -- a practice of capturing facts -- has been a fundamental support for documentary narrative that positions journalism's stories as reusable fact. It is the two-way interaction between fact-finding and storytelling that explains how photography is a medium . But, as procedures, documentation and narrative are now each called into question by the film. That is despite the film's detractors accusing it of being the very example of what it aims to attack: a fabrication driven by suspicious motives. The film's presentation of facts clearly raises questions about whether, and how, we can trust the news. Its facts argue that in 1972 potential breaches of ethical news practice may have happened– due to competition, racism, politics, money, or power. (Check all that apply.) The story in “The Stringer”, whether its specific accusation is true or not,   portrays our vulnerability to such influence. Its relevance today is that those conditions are persistent, and so is our vulnerability. Left unchecked, they transcend any one case or event, and run deeper than any particular communication channel. In the film we are shown the resulting harm caused. We see the loss of opportunity, the denial of rightful recognition, and a resignation to a meager and obscure life -- that befell the photographer who possibly was denied due credit. And we don't need to amplify the facts much to suspect underlying bias, discrimination, and manipulation. Now, in reactions to the film, the backlash to the very idea of such exploitation damages others in the story as well, with longstanding friendships and reputations at the top of the at-risk list. NOTE 6. Authorship, Authority, and Authenticity It is important to hold on to the value of "Napalm Girl" as truth-telling, even if the editorial process that authorized its release was flawed, and even if the person claiming credit doesn't offer convincing evidence of being the true author. We don't know what would have happened if a different photographer, and/or a different publisher, had come out with this picture. But the documentary's call to action is not to convict Nick Út nor the AP for their past. Rather, the AP's final pronouncement on the film's accusation is that they can't prove it is false but they also can't prove that it's true. This conclusion is unacceptable as a status of any future journalistic work released by AP as news. The overall importance of the film is mainly cautionary: that accepting such failures of ethics and practice actively undermines the journalist's mission, and when that happens, there will be significant negative consequences. Even more essential, as "The Stringer" Executive Producer Gary Knight commented in a recent live interview, journalists are neither elected nor appointed by the public -- and yet journalists are expected to hold everyone accountable. That can't work if journalists don't show that they hold themselves to the highest standard of accountability. This makes determination of authorship required in principle; it is about the practices, not about the image. But what we most need to embrace about the film is that its focus on authenticity in truth is a two-way street; both the journalist and the audience are responsible. Who are the mediators of truth going forward? Together we need to demand authenticity in both sides of the matter and determine how we can embed it into the rapidly evolving future. So far, today' conditions, including culture and technologies, are even more likely to make news work unreliable or to cause damage. How are we to take responsibility for preventing that? Postscript #1 Quoting a line used in a 1944 column by George Orwell, "history is written by the winners." Postscript #2 The most significant reaction so far to the findings in the film is the perfect clarity of the World Press Photo Foundation. It declared the photographer of the picture to be anonymous; but the award it gave is about the photo, not about the photographer, and is unchanged. Postscript #3 The documentary photography of the American Civil War is most famously credited to Matthew Brady. Yet we know, over 160 years later, that 15 or more different photographers had their work credited to Brady, including two very famous ones, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan. We also know today that a photograph so influential that it was banned in China -- the so called "Tank Man" picture -- was thought to be pro-Chinese propaganda by its initial authorized Chinese distributor, but taken as anti-Chinese propaganda by its non-Chinese audiences worldwide, causing the Chinese government to attempt to eradicate the image post-publishing. Title inspired by the album "Blues and the Abstract Truth" by saxophonist Oliver Nelson, recorded in February 1961 for the Impulse! label.

Imagination is an operational mental ability. We know that mental functions rely on other deeper factors, mainly an intact biological organization. But imagination isn’t like hunger; it is like breathing. In practice, the ability to imagine has no essential requirement other than to pretend -- to pretend that something IS, CAN BE, DOES or CAN DO.  It carries no requirement for proving feasibility or plausibility. And outside of some need to influence a relationship between separate people, there is no required credibility that needs to be communicated. What this boils down to is that, beyond biology, it is very difficult to identify what could prevent imagination other than ignorance or a complete lack of motivation. Conversely, it makes sense that in a given context, knowledge and incentive  would be preconditioning success factors for imagining – particularly significant in imagining for desirably influential purposes.,   We attribute value to imagination when it creates an awareness of a possibility, condition, or presence that isn’t currently or expected to be “actual”. But that means the essential usefulness of the term “imagination” is due to it referring to something that is recognized. Recognition is part of deciding what to include in the exercise of pretending, and also part of deciding what to accept among any effects of pretending. Having said “actual”, it’s worth also checking off “virtual” in the discussion. Going to its Greek roots, virtual refers to characteristics (virtues) that “enable [something]  to perform excellently its proper function.” This relates to  the idea of “essentials” – the defining characteristics of any type  of something to identify something meaningfully in type, we need to know certain things about it but not necessarily everything.   As a matter of perception, we pick up on enough evidence of characteristics to conclude that we know what it is we are perceiving ,and furthermore whether it is present in a physical, not just mental, way. But in its mental presence, a form of a recognized thing is a concept, and a concept can be more than enough to cause us to take action. Equally important is that a concept does not need to be typed. It only needs to be remembered, such that it can be reusable in future pretense. Imagination is conceptual experimentation. The knowledge aspect is important in two ways. One, the most interesting thing about imagination aside from its entertainment value to the imaginer, is that it can originate and present ideas that may have relevance to other people because of what is already real to them . And two, there is relevance to other things, derived from what is already learned. Different kinds of knowledge bring different ideas for consideration in relation to what is already deemed  interesting to dwell on.   But the real distinction of its value starts with the fact that the thing recognized is not “actually” present. It is imaginary. For example, a spill on a floor can be perceived as a spill with no concern for what it might suggest otherwise. Under examination, however, its initial presence may begin to be cognitively reconsidered  – familiarities, contradictions, or other comparisons suggested by things already known or present. Recall, associations, and juxtapositions are extremely common elements of actively imagining. Here are two imaginary constructs that we can call “bikers”. The stain is compared to a memory of something known, and key characteristics are portably applied to something else to create a new instance of recognition. The fish on a bicycle is irrational as an actual probability but conceptually we know that a bike must be externally powered and that living things supply power, so the association is meaningful “logically” even though not “rationally”.       In another example, each of these two things shown below can be either a “chair” or a “table”. With each of them, the identification in “recognition” is driven by the conditions of the circumstance in which the item is considered. Imagination connects perceived characteristics of what is present with characteristics of something else known that may not even be actually there. In other words, there is a co-incidence – a concurrent incident of more than one thing.    Such a coincidence can be a precondition of imagining, but it may also be an effect of imagining. Preconditions are not causes; and effects are not necessarily intentional. Emergence is a useful way to refer to one way that imagination can be catalyzed, but it is not the only way. Composition is a powerful and intentional demonstration of imagination. The idea that imagination is inherently emergent is not always a true case. It is not the general case. It is a special case. In practice, imagination must not be quarantined by a hyperbole of a particular kind being taken as the only kind. In the same way, productive environmental coincidences must not be taken as a definition of “imagination”.  As an idea, imagination refers to something mental, and claiming that anything other than a living being has a mentality is simply taking some dynamics of the non-living physical world as a metaphor.

Six Takeaways from a Sextet Gray Loft Gallery  stands out usually due to the artistry of its top-tier show layouts One navigates a Gray Loft show multiple times because of the many conversations owner Jan Watten creates among the works on display. But for those who move quickly this week (Saturday 11/8 ) , the gallery features an important departure: a show both chosen and hung by the six participating artists themselves. This is a group of women who have been working together for quite some time, bringing the full meaning of “studio” to their practice and ambiance. We see, in their current show “Aligned” , that Gray Loft’s offer to us presents both the authority of the women as a group and the openness of the show’s highly varied ways of being appealing. My takeaway, which settled in on my third viewing, risks being more of a proposal than a finding. The dynamic of group interaction among artists is something already studied deeply enough as to leave little room for new insight. But what I wanted to dwell on is what, within the diverse works, indicated something unifying that evolved from the togetherness of the women Here I’m fast-forwarding to what I decided to keep looking for. My best phrasing of it, but perhaps still in testing, is ”iconic feeling”. In the show we find six different strategies for having an image take us to something visceral, recurring, and definite that we don’t even need to label. We just see it and recognize it, not mostly as language, not mostly as emotion, but in some third way holding meaning. That said, we’re here to talk, so… here we go. There is no linear gradation in the collected works from one strategy to the next. We have the gestural energy in Kim Cardoso’s deceptively calm pieces; an aching profundity of Dobee Snowber’s emblematic (perhaps existential) crafted snapshots of Womanhood and Home; and Lisa Levine’s comic affection for free-forms and traditional motifs using each other. And there is Anne Rabe’s meditative hunt for simplicity in nature’s creation of complexity; Dee Tivenan’s abstraction of pattern from space; and Valerie Corvin’s invention of space from primitive, abstract signs. At the show, there is no reason for someone else to confine themselves to those points of view. But in seeing features like that myself, I find it easy to imagine these artists all recognizing some balancing act in each other’s works --  and appreciating the nuance of their respective personal awarenesses -- beyond the kinds of attraction that they can whip up as the skin of their images.   Gallery Hours: Saturdays 1:00 - 5:00 pm and by appointment 2889 Ford Street #32, third floor, Oakland CA 94601 Third Floor - not wheelchair accessible.

Most of the time, there is a practical reason why cameras would be preferrable to a pencil or a computer: creating a visual record. Records exceed the notion of "documents" in that a record is always attached to a concern about something specific, not just a view of it. And it is that concern that feels disrespected by the notion that a visualization of some event or condition thought to be relevant might not be reliable as a source of their real-world facts. We go through this any time there is a measurable distance between the existence of what we're concerned about and our direct witness of the concerning thing. And early heavy anxiety over the trustworthiness of an image is 90% based in achievable optical resolution, and only 10% in why it was made. Ever since the screen was invented, and at least since the paintings of Seurat (pointillism) and Lichtenstein (Ben-Day Dots), we have been able to generate images that resolve to whatever they showed because we had control over where any dot went - comparable in labor basically to weaving. And having enough automation to make dot rendering nearly effortless hasn't changed much of anything. It's just that the dots are now nearly microscopic and extremely easy to individually reposition any number of times by using instructions that run on computers like calculations. So in effect, with our new instruments for generating an image, more emphasis is placed on us who play them to be able to prove that we are the decision makers, the instructors that programmed and approved the display. The credibility of the imagemaker, per the maker's expressed intent, is what is at stake. A.I. generation itself is completely indifferent to anything other than its instructions. The more we are willing to accept the maker's explanation of why they made the image the way it looks, the less it matters to us that the maker has fabricated the image without recording being a part of the process. In light of all that, the future value of photographic recording will be significantly altered in situations where recording's proxy for direct witnessing is not necessary -- not required to establish sufficient acceptance of something's appearance as a support for our concern. We can also get a strong fix on when the requirement is not negotiable. The proxy requirement is high any time our concern is expressed by saying "IF X, THEN...". In that formula, with which we build our idea, a visualization of X is subject to having its fidelity to something actual being verified. But if viewers don’t have a particular concern, then the value of the image is left to however much the viewer is interested in whatever way it provokes them. But if viewers don’t have a particular concern, then the value of the image is left to however much the viewer is interested in whatever way it provokes them. The usual way to anticipate that is in terms of where the viewer chooses to go look, and why. For example: In this picture, incentives, expectations, and inhibitors are seen related to each other. But their overlaps also suggest that what crops up in one area can mistakenly be evaluated in terms of another area. As a simple example, treating hearsay as if it is the result of research is easy to do if we are not openly cautioned against doing that.

Artificial Intelligence works on some things that are so fundamental to creating information artifacts that in some ways it represents the only thing other than the internet that matured the true importance of digital computing. Anything that an electron can provoke can be presented through the brute effectiveness of an on/off switch, and computers can manage that at microscopic levels at the speed of light. Visualization, then, is simply a matter of how hard the computer can work. No matter what data it confronts, computation experiences nothing like complexity; it experiences only endurance. But what it tries to do is always a reaction to instruction, and instruction comes from people. The most important thing to understand about an instruction is that it is about a way to do something , not a description of a result. As a formula, an instruction to compute the value of "pi" -- divide the circumference of a circle by the diameter of the circle -- is breathtakingly simple but the result is staggeringly complex. This suggests why a computer, which can handle instructions that are thousands of steps long, can generate information of virtually immeasurable complexity. In our natural experience of data that we sense, our minds are comparable in capability to the supercomputers of AI when it comes to generating rich outputs. In effect, the mental output is "ideas". Then, in order to transmit ideas from one mind to another, we communicate. The communications are called "expressions" because their transmission means they are pushed out of the mind. Any instance of expression is called a "statement". Seeing is that we call our ability to comprehend what we sense from looking. When we look at information, we interpret how its appearance tells us what the mind behind the statement intended to express. Below, the graphic is a way to describe how any visual statement might relate to an experience that has generated a mental awareness of something. It proposes that there are four fundamental types of expressions: the idea (the mental formulation of something drawn from sensed data), a version of it, an instance of it, and a condition of it. This description also asserts that multiple types of expressions may combine as contributors to a given type of statement, For example, an indicative statement includes both an idea of something and a version of it. Also, a symbolic statement contains both an idea of something and a condition of something. Within such overlapping, there is also the dynamic of one thing provoking the next -- a symbolic statement may be a case where the condition of something spawned an idea of something else. As people who visualize things, we can always consider beforehand what our intent and opportunity is to shape and communicate information in communication. We can proactively consider what we want to emphasize, and why. And with this same perspective on identifying imagery, we can interpret existing visualizations analytically, taking stock of what kind of influences it seems to want its statements to exert. Said differently, the visualization contains within it the cues about what it wants us to pay attention to more or less.

SF MOMA Fall 2025 Source: https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/fortuna-and-the-immortality-garden-machine/ The word conjure   neatly accounts for how a lot of art works. But what is it? I’m confident enough in my education to say that this AI-generated summary of “conjure” stands well for what I mean: To conjure means to produce or create something as if by magic, or to evoke a memory or image. The word's etymology traces back to the Latin verb coniūrāre, meaning "to swear together" or "form a conspiracy". This original sense of a solemn oath or agreement evolved into the modern usage of performing magic or calling spirits, and later extended to metaphorically create something, often from nothing, or to summon a strong image or idea to mind.  In that description, the point is that we may experience something on the surface that is not attributable to an explicit means. But being unseen does not mean absent. It’s interesting to review what might qualify as the explanation of something’s emergence. A concept, a deal, a formula, a motive – such things can, without our knowledge, be the origin of what we experience, by somehow prescribing what something’s expression can be like. When we have an artist’s statement of why they generated the artwork as displayed to us, we might judge whether that reason is in itself valuable enough to us to want to embrace the artist’s work. But another thing can happen: our consideration might instead be of whether we buy that there is a connection between the aesthetics of the presented form and the “reason” the artist gives for it. We’re asked to bundle the idea pursued by the artist and the motivation for it together and shrink wrap that as the artist’s “Intent”: the important “what” with the important “why”. Then the intent conjures the work. *** Walker’s SF MOMA installation – which furthers the museum’s role as a gallery  – is a theater-scaled tableau of very stylized but differing characters, both female and male, all played by robots. Highly charged by portrayed distortions or apparent violence, many of their bodies appear to have emerged, ashen and zombie-like, from a bed of boulders that feels (for me, perhaps not for you) greatly like a coffin filled with coal. Rendered entirely of black and white materials, the characters are mostly mannequins but one or two are more clearly “statue” sculpture. This difference is not in itself necessarily important, but statues don’t move. Most of the time, most of this work’s figures are not moving and in that stillness we are impressed more by how statuesque they are. We contemplate their body language and read into it what presumably is going to be the link between Walker’s intent and her effect. In the parlance of semioticians, the figures are “iconic”, relying on resemblances rather than earned symbolic associations. However, in this work’s arena, one figure of uncertain gender, centrally positioned among the group, slowly rises and descends, ambiguously either impaled or attached, on a pole that either displays the body like a trophy slaying or complies with the figure’s desire to get a ride up to heaven. While most of the figures invoke a sense of the sluggish “undead”, this one is the most highly animated, its legs and arms flailing in slow motion. The effect is that we are in one moment seeing someone in agony, but in another moment someone in childish joyriding, and finally even potentially a sexual on-the-back surrender, whether consensual or not, to a more powerful but invisible presence. The wide range of interpretation invoked by this figure somewhat models the overall potential for drawing meaning from the installation. Another of the figures, an iconic hostess of the tableau, stands separated from the rest and holds what seems for a while to be an unbroken gaze of inspection, magnetically holding order in place, the “right” places. It is tempting to read this figure as a stand-in for Walker herself, and that continues even when at last this overseer begins to move and eventually points to her own eyes. Then, that gesture acts as an invitation to consider what we ourselves are seeing or not seeing. And in counterpoint, the most sculptural of the figures is a man who sits among the other figures but does not move and is facing away from the group, as if refusing to look at them. One can also sense from the man’s posture that the entire tableau is being imagined by him, the visualization of that dream being on display in the funereal ring of stones and cabinetry that takes up most of the space behind him. If we identify this posture as a psychological separation from the rest of what is going on, then it is not difficult to consider whether he is a proxy for ourselves or whether we are meant to have a more purely historical sympathy for his envisioning. Is he a tormented survivor, or perhaps he is the Devil? *** The most obvious parallel to this overall presentation is Dance, and furthermore the notion of Dance Theater. In general, what “theater” adds to dance is an environment, a setting, that communicates a narrative context of the dancing, either explicitly or by implication. Having robotic mannequins moving in slow motion through a scripted choreography of gestures is the single best description of the dynamic logic of Walker’s presentation. Not just by coincidence, I left the installation thinking about Kabuki. As cited in the online text Kabuki Dance Definition, History & Terms:   What is the origin of kabuki dance? Kabuki dance originated in Kyoto, Japan, around 1600 in the early Edo period when Izumo no Okuni formed a dance troupe with all women. In 1629, due to connections with prostitution, the government banned women from performing kabuki. Adult men ultimately replaced women in kabuki dance and theater, and this remains the custom today. That is, theater has a complex history that is artistic, political, and in other ways constrained culturally. Likewise, I’m comfortable with the description generated by using Gemini AI to pinpoint Kabuki’s distinctive features, such as this one: Emotional resonance through storytelling:  Plots often centered on historical events or everyday life, pitting human emotions such as love and revenge against societal morals. This created powerful dramatic conflicts and tragedies that resonated with the audience. After a heavy, tragic story, a purely dance-based act might be performed to provide a lighthearted feeling.   One mission of much theater is to find ways to either disrupt or exploit those constraints to generate new forms of theater. The cultural layering of Walker’s piece includes the contrasting “period settings” of apparently the 1800’s or earlier (the “Past”) and current era automatons (the “Future”), with the understanding that the future might primarily reiterate. the past. This is an idea that descriptively fits Walker’s creation with no hint of irony or deception, regardless of her intent. But also, among various other implications, one is that the Past reduced Black humans to being virtual automatons in the period’s dominant culture, and by extension that implication raises the question of whether today’s culture still continues to do so likewise. Copyright: Photograph © 2024 Fredrik Nilsen, All Rights Reserved The hints of resurrection, abuse, and rigidly defined togetherness do not immediately correspond with the notion of immortality or timelessness, much less relief from effort, that Walker’s title for her work and the interpretation offered officially by SF MOMA’s show marketing. Walker names this bleak undated scene a “garden”, the evident recall of suffering “intelligence”, and the confrontation with it “respite”. There is no particular reason to read those cues as something other than irony. But SF MOMA asks us to do otherwise: Walker’s Gardeners evoke wonder, reflection, respite, and hope… I think this contradiction is a significant issue. As drawn from the dictionary publisher Oxford Languages , we have this definition of irony: a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character's words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character. The problem this exposes at the Walker show is that while the “characters’” portrayals are pretty straightforward as meaningful content, we don’t have a reason to believe that the characters are unaware of their plight. What SF MOMA’s statement expects to do is to tell us, the audience, what meanings to be aware of, but with little to account for it. Rather, it is already enough to take Walker’s own titling of the piece as being explicitly ironic and furthermore leaning towards sarcasm as the rhetoric of her instructive aesthetics. This in no way devalues the impact of the work; rather, it amplifies its status as being intentional critique – an actually timeless function of art.

Pete’s Story Say the name “Escovedo” in Oakland, and right away there’s a chance that music starts playing in your head. It features beats that ruled before hip hop, and when it first came to Oakland it lived as well outdoors as in a club or on the road. Between today and its arrival in the 1920s and 30s, evolving from the confluence of Black and Mexican musicians, Latin Jazz gained and held prominence in its own social milieu and in the larger public sphere. But one of its most important local figures was oddly atypical of the outward celebrity and exposure of the music and its successful makers. Peter Michael Escovedo, born in 1935, recounts in his lengthy memoir My Life in the Key of E  an unbroken course starting in the private life of family, and weaving precariously in and out of the fortunes and gauntlets of the music industry – alternately propelled by his wife and children and pulling them along in tow. Photo © 2014 Malcolm Ryder Recognized as one of the major icons of his musical form, “Pete” constantly demurs and instead insists on appreciation for the accomplishments of his children as artists. The memoir’s tone has a blend of matter-of-fact resignation to being smaller than life with no self-pity but also serendipitous uplift with little ego. That makes it somewhat astonishing that his inner spirit – an authentic humility – did not somehow attract far more social support of his business, as it did cultural. Photo © 2025 Malcolm Ryder But his telling of the story does nothing less than announce the grace and redemption of hard work and a kind of genius of his self-knowledge – the engines of his music life. This makes his own accomplishments as a recognized musician both exciting and poignant. He won major music industry awards including Grammys and for Lifetime Achievement, and he was deeply entrenched in the worlds of Carlos Santana, Lionel Ritchie and Prince, but his own deserved fame never prevented failures that were more important to him – not having a long-running club and a house permanent and large enough for holding his full family as a home.   Despite that, he persevered and now is 90 years old. His secret?  “Grounded” is a word that easily comes to mind, with Pete being a role model. This idea plays two ways when we visit the current show of his visual art at The Grand Gallery in Oakland’s Jack London Square. We know his music life was intensive; so looking at the collection of vibrant colored paintings and elegant line drawings, it’s hard to not ask, “when did he do all this?”  Show and Tell   It turns out that, in his own words, Pete turned to painting to help relieve the stress of being in the music business. What we see in the paintings is his focus on his internal life, the private one, dedicated to celebrating his love of his family members. They are portraits but are based on an iconic portrayal, one that makes them almost symbolic to us as well as emotionally essential to himself. Going from figure to figure, his style’s vocabulary finds the same virtues again and again in his subjects, making the images both distillations and celebrations of how they are meaningful – and grounding – to him. We also learn from his memoir, as well as from friends of his family, that while his very famous daughter, percussionist Sheila E, has always been very much in his life, it was his other daughter, actress and artist Zina Escovedo, who further convinced him to pursue his painting as much as he might music. Speaking about her own work on Instagram, Zina guides us: “When you look at my art work, take a moment to feel an emotion. What do you see in the abstracts or paintings of music, would it be joy, sorrow, confusion, ...”  This reveal of her own sensibility as an artist points easily towards Pete’s footing in the emotional underpinnings of abstraction. The current exhibit of his painting includes several venues concurrently. The Grand Gallery show in particular comprises works that are more recent and have an important difference from his earlier works. Those earlier ones were, in our usual parlance, more expressionist and seemed to be more about experimenting with a range of ways to gesturally represent emotion and ideas. And individual earlier pieces seem concerned with holding together more aspects of a moment or memory than are tackled in the now more straightforward iconic style displayed. Viewing the Oakland exhibit's works, there is a quick association of the flatness, drawing, and color of its figurative abstraction with the well-known outcome of Picasso’s and Matisse’s exposure to African art. But while that older “Primitivism,” echoed in these new Escovedo works, is both attractive as form and also politically loaded as appropriation, we can appreciate that in three particular ways Pete's work transcends that outdated label. In one, the maxim holds that “good artists borrow, great artists steal” ... For artists, the meaning of this is in understanding how other artists' work is valuable to cultivating their expressive capabilities, being more about making  than about results. In a second: Escovedo’s emotional authenticity links his images directly to the narratives of his personal experience. Those experiences are truths, not fictions, not mimicry of decorative symbols, and not mere visual theater about things he knows. And third, in visual art, natural figuration is as old as pictures are; but conceptual representation, the intent of iconic images, came equally long ago. Its purpose of representing the spiritual and ideal is the common thread that Escovedo picked up for his newer work. Noting that, the curation of the works suggests some exploration of how much abstraction is a goal or instead is a language; a destination style, or instead a way to get to the work’s completion. This is highlighted when we compare the black and white line drawings on display right below the paintings. Without color, the drawings are far more minimal than the paintings. But the drawings immediately make us thoughtful about how and why colors were chosen in the paintings, which we see largely share the line work of the drawings. But the paintings show subtle variety and possibly evolution, as well. In a couple of paintings, we can see this line drawing having subsided to being just the edge of two different colors touching each other; in that way, the contrasting colors do the “drawing” in the image, hidden in plain sight. Another intriguing touch is in how Escovedo sometimes leaves the eyes in faces without pupils while in others the pupil appears but almost symbolically, as a triangle rather than a circle. This choice can be the difference between the figure feeling more distant, timeless, and observed, rather than the figure seeming to be an observer and more emotionally engaged in the moment – whether with the artist or with the viewer (ourselves). But undeniably, when there is a face before us, we always look at the eyes and experience whether we can look into them as well. Portraiture always holds the option of showing someone the way they want to be seen or the way that the artist wants them to be seen. In this case, knowing how much Pete feels his own identity through his relationship with the family members, his dedication to presenting those members becomes a kind of self-portrait, too.

At Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland What’s In A Name? The title of this show, Beyond the Frame, immediately gets us asking questions. Is the frame physical, or metaphorical? Actual or virtual? Is the idea about what is new, outside of the familiar? Or what is presented outside of what is conventionally allowed? A Celebration of Large-Scale Art, the subtitle for the show, then helps out: size matters . Now we know that what we’re looking for is an experience that size creates, which otherwise might not be offered by the work. One of my favorite riffs on this is “breaking” the Fourth Wall of theater: making the audience a part of the “reality” on stage by extending the action into the seats; it breaks through the imaginary wall left where the opened curtain has vacated. This is exciting because the stage creates a psychological  space large enough to contain us, and then that space gets even bigger and envelopes us. Got it; this exhibit’s subtitle tells us to be on the lookout for how works at large scale create a psychological space larger than ourselves. And as the central feature of the show, the artworks generally use a canvas or board so large that its original literal function as a working area for the artist turns the artist’s creative effort into a performance. As we “read” the work and follow the effort, that performance then projects the emotional and conceptual space into which we go. But hold that thought. What comes with the first few seconds of standing in the show gallery is a different emphasis. We hadn’t been told in advance that it is surveying how visual abstraction generates this emotional and conceptual space, even in the figurative work on display. Now, in the following, by investigating the variations on that theme, I’m flirting with making the meaning of “abstraction” less clear, not more. But I will say that all the works lean towards a certain effect in common: the work viewed is not “about” some other experience; the qualities of the work’s presence is  the experience.   Appearance and Reality So, what is this presence about? So often, abstraction generates an effect that we might for personal reasons call “beauty”; but that characterizes the finished object  that we’re calling artwork. More interesting, I think, is our awareness of what is going on in the work’s space and is coming out of it – which sees that object as an instrument  used by the artist to convey something. In other words, this is focusing more on the intent of a work as a “medium”. A medium is a channel that allows and helps transport something from one “place” to another one. We distinguish different mediums by how they get that done. And here the medium carries the artist’s concern to us. The artist picks and uses the medium and its characteristics, instrumentally. In that sense, what I noticed in this show is that abstraction facilitates what I’ve called the artist’s performance, and it’s the performance that connects us to the work. Throughout the show, we can peruse the varied “performances” of the artists along with the size that lets them do it. The Art of Work For example, few things convert a static image into a dynamic one as does the way a line, even with no intention of representation, triggers our impulse to follow along with it. This is directly comparable to the idea of a melody in music. Likewise, multiple lines can co-exist in ways that mutually affect how each is felt while followed – whether harmoniously or not. John Woods’ works remind us that drawing generates a sense of simultaneously creating a space and navigating it, finally inhabiting it. But a line’s work can of course segment that space into figures, or shapes, such as done by Christine Ferrouge; and while that line mainly sets edges (boundaries), it can also make the figures animated.    Wood Ferrouge  The common denominator there, in the drafting and figuration, is that line in the work is gestural , and gesture can be very attracting because it can be mimetic, evocative, or both. In Ferrouge’s pieces, gestural line makes body language  deftly indicate the kind of moment that is seen, but scale makes that gesture more physically equivalent to our own, generating sense memory as the kind of space we then inhabit. We might be more familiar with this phenomenon from sculpture, but here it is in the 2D imagery of the wall work. The other set of shape-sensitive work, by Judith Foosaner, also exploits what large scale offers, but in this case the effect is telescoping in on something, which makes it bigger in our field of view. Figuration here is abstract on the level of icons – shapes that have just enough information to point out something we are already familiar with. That creates orientation for us. But in the zoomed-in view, order and pattern that may normally miss our attention are revealed, and this revelation brings the energy of a small epiphany – that quietly, if not secretly, we are part of some greater plan in life’s organization. Foosaner Color of course also gets identifiable jobs in the exhibit. One, as seen in Simone Simon’s work, is as an indicator of spatial depth, inherently referring to light as a dimension of the real space in our living experience. But another job is to just be a form of energy that infuses us. Even if we don’t know who first said that red is passionate or yellow is joyous or aqua is soothing, most of us have no quarrel with given colors corresponding to given feelings. And here the color’s presence is not about solving the problems of a frame’s influence on image construction. Rather, it invokes a condition that we know makes a boundary meaningless to our encounter. The work’s size amplifies the presence of the color, which creates the psychological space we enjoy: empathy. Simon Manrique Meanwhile, in work by Javier Manrique a far more textural, nearly tactile handling of color as lines creates an all-over coverage of the surface, and like Simon’s ethereal work, needing no reference to borders. (Sidebar: I can’t resist noting that smashing textural  and tactile  together gives “textile”, and now I have more homework to do. But I defer to Manrique’s own artist statement on view – come read it at the gallery, or online here .) In two other cases, works by Michael Shemchuk and Mary Ann Leff bring the technique of contrasting two different scales within one piece, suggesting that differing scales already have differing built-in effects. It’s not news but again the work is not about  the experience; rather it is the experience. This time, one set (Leff’s) intentionally does show a preoccupation with the frame’s influence on the construction of the piece. From within the available area, some of the pictorial elements, usually the larger ones, get to reach the frame while other smaller ones usually do not. This is a simple drama that we can lean into, and the framing, like staging, does not restrict as much as it focuses attention. That attention further suggests things that aren’t even there yet or that could happen. The other large works, by Shenchuk, deliberately compare big sharply defined rectangular areas of somewhat industrial color coverage against small, ragged areas of apparently indifferent spontaneous removal. But mostly the work projects both occurrences as “intentional”. Due to large scale, each artwork in this set immediately echoes urban streetside walls, invoking a narrative that the piece wants to specify yet shows no attempt to make captive to time or place. Given all that, the even distribution of the “blemishes” on the surface of the works approaches parody but goes back to the aspect of seeing the artist performing the work. Leff                                                                   Shenchuk Finally, there is work that yells “free jazz” to me – an intentional refusal to direct the evolution of the piece in any way other than by reacting to (visual) discoveries that occur along the way. This work, by Dulama LeGrande, harkens back to the color line work I initially mentioned by John Wood. But in comparison, LeGrande’s is dedicated to being unrestricted in shape, color, or any aspect of form, in an exploration about what effects are possible, rather than about what is possible from a given effect. LeGrande Walking the Talk The dialogue between the sets of work by LeGrande and Wood is captivating and reminds us that the arrangement of all the works in the show purposefully get them engaged with each other, generating more layers of experiences for us. It rewards second and third looks at everything. Consequently, the more time you spend within the gallery’s walls, the bigger the show seems to get. This is exactly why you want to be actually standing among the collected works, on land not online. The show, in progress, remains mounted at the gallery  until March 8th.   --  Malcolm Ryder   Images included: excerpts of all works courtesy of Gray Loft Gallery and the artists. Artworks represented: property of the designated artists. All rights reserved. A special note: in a show like this, many things ranging from theater to conceptual and performance art, to flash mobs, graffiti, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly filter through the mind. Thanks here to artist John Wood, who in sharing our ideas about drawing and museum going, discovered and burnished our mutual appreciation of the idea of performance in art making, reflected in this article.

By any reasonable measures, Bill Weber is one of the Bay Area’s most established artists, celebrated repeatedly over many years and phases of work. His astonishing family history, spanning Germany, Missouri, and California, parks the listener in locales as diverse as Hearst Castle and Brentwood; and it weaves among people with names like Peralta, Dali, and Benny Goodman. At the drop of a hat, he’s opening one of many albums of memorabilia, unreeling the story. Most well-known himself as the surrealist artist El Gallo , his far wider range of skills coalesces in one of the most interesting yet unsurprising things about him: the ability to render images of spectacular realism, which accompanies his powerful imagination for things people have never seen before. Sitting alone at his gallery in the quiet afternoon before a First Fridays storm, he at first escaped my attention entirely, his demeanor lacking drama almost entirely. The space we enter to find him, though, radiates with his energetic attachment to a vast array of works (including his own) and to the artists behind them. The Grand Gallery, at 560 2rd Street, looks out over Oakland’s Jack London Square towards Alameda. And inside, Weber looks out over an excited community of over 30 artists, most of them long-termers with some hosted more on a month-to-month basis. https://thegrandgalleryoakland.com/artists/ Weber’s inner architect has come out: he has organized the space in a way that simultaneously creates numerous distinct areas perfect for two or three viewers, while leaving each of the areas feeling open to all of the others. Generous daylight from Oakland’s sky pours into the gallery’s large front glass facade and somehow manages to reach nearly all of the spaces despite the separating walls.   The variety of works is intensified by the artists wanting to use the available space to the maximum extent possible, and to offer more for sale. But those close quarters work out well because of the sheer variety of ways that the work is interesting. A seasoned curator, Weber instinctively manages  the wall allotments as easily as he does the floor plan. This is not about himself. His own presence in the gallery is clearly more about what he does for the artists than what they do for him. Grand Gallery is itself his latest work. Attached to Studios 11 Oakland, which is already a “family” of its own, Weber seamlessly extends that vibe into the larger street front area. It’s a combination of artists’ self-curated exhibits in a space that is more like a gallery made of multiple open studios, not of open studios trying to be galleries. Further strengthening support of the artists, the setup makes it clear to visitors that they are invited to look for the artists’ works in sizes and formats that make purchasing easy. No less important is seeing that the artists inspire each other’s quality and even use their works to show their awareness of each other. Works may clearly echo each other’s style; more literally, one artist will have a piece done in homage to another artist, such as with Ron Norman’s drawing honoring Bill Sala showing on an opposite wall. There are many ways to appeal to visitors, of course. Photography spans views of history, celebrity, and places. Paintings and prints explore the medium for its potential with materials, content, and ways of having impact as objects to live with. Books for sale wed background and narratives to the artists’ curation. The location is potentially brilliant. Access by foot, bike or car is completely unrestricted; and being minutes from Jack London’s other offerings make a gallery visit an easy choice to make when putting together a multi-activity solo, date, or group outing. Being at a good gallery is a special event, but getting to a good gallery easily makes the visit an especially attractive special event. This makes Grand Gallery a significant point of reference in the East Bay arts ecosystem. Numerous arts organizations, city government departments, entrepreneurs, and arts venues are working on learning what each other knows, to crack the code of revving up post-COVID arts engagement. They need affordability, safety, and sustainability in addition to compelling work. And not surprisingly, in these tough times, artists themselves are leading much of the resilience and revival. They are finding spaces, creating events, targeting probable attendees, and networking socially to develop a more constant anticipation, across communities, of new things in the works and of new works within reach.   Like Weber himself, artists bring a blend of realism and imagination to their efforts. But the key issue is longevity. On a case-by-case basis, some will make a discovery that has staying power, some will be too site-specific to reproduce elsewhere, and some will have the stamina to keep trying new things as conditions continue to change around them. Facing all that, Grand Gallery readily strikes me as a cooperative business development environment. For that, it already has some special practical advantages, but taking note of it is not meant to suggest that other organizations are not serving that purpose as well. Rather, the current environment of the art community suggests an increasing importance of galleries seeing artists as development partners. Grand Gallery is one way that galleries can model their effort.     Story and photography, including the portrait of Bill Weber: by Malcolm Ryder, In the photos, all works shown or excerpted are property of their original artists. https://thegrandgalleryoakland.com/artists/ Disclosure: I have exhibited work at the location covered in this article. - M. Ryder   East Bay resident and artist  Malcolm Ryder  is a photographer and writer creating and critiquing visual art as well as managing organizations for visual artists. He is the principal arts writer of Art About Town from Oakland Art Murmur . He exhibits across the Bay Area, publishes images online at  www.malcolmryder.com , and runs the multi-year collaborative art project Oaktown Pictures, at  https://www.oaktown.pictures  .

Photographer Steve Molnar knows quite a bit about places that most people wouldn't call their usual habitat. But through his pictures, having seen what he shows, we carry away a sense of being captured by the places just as he was. Molnar is known for work that is journalistic, following his instincts and concerns for people who live in some remote places without much attention except from each other. But this go around, his sixth at San Francisco’s 60SIX , he offers a meditative survey of the Mojave Desert, begun twenty years ago and boasting strong lasting power as a revelation of richness in what initially might seem severely sparse. Because the photographer is also an accomplished master printer chosen by other demanding photographers to render their work, it’s fair to call attention to the variety within his own set of 30 or so images on display. We get several distinctive ways of seeing, all anchored in a flair for making selected surface detail and graphic design equally significant in a way that makes the depictions not just economical but elegant. Their effects come forth partly due to the sequencing and grouping established by the gallery’s owner and curator, mixing different kinds of views. The effect expresses the photographer’s own investment in exploring the environment with what I would call emotional generosity. But for the purpose of this discussion, I’ll take some liberties, regrouping things to underline some specific thoughts about effects achieved by Molnar’s image craft. Early on in my tour of the gallery, there were pictures with motion, lines and shapes in a design that helps one understand nature’s activity, like Amargosa Dunes No. 1  (below) and perhaps a masterpiece in the show, Kelso Dunes No. 3 (withheld here; come to the gallery - through February 6th, by appointment ) . These also quickly announce his use of graphical abstraction as a character in the location on par with any standing object. Amargosa Dunes No. 1 And as if to press this notion even more, in images such as Desert Tracks Eureka Dunes  or Mesquite Flat Dunes No. 1 , he elevates the intrinsic abstractness of the desert expanse by making it the entire field of his picture, on which he places small etched figures that feel like drawing. This effectively converts the abstractness into the stillness of space punctuated over time. Mesquite Flat Dunes No. 1 The gallery notes tell us that Molnar shoots only in film and meticulously prints the work himself in gelatin silver format. Here in December of 2024, the availability of ultra-hi-res digital cameras argues definitively against any notion that film is categorically a more faithful medium of image capture. But what this note imparts is that when a photographer chooses a certain type of film, it is a critical aesthetic decision akin to choosing specific papers, inks, colors, and so on. Molnar’s choices are not specified, but that too is good: the “trade secrets” of his materials are like the prestidigitations behind his magic act. It’s simply more interesting to not know what they are than it is to know. That takes us to the next observation, in which pictures like Kelso Dunes No. 4  or  No. 6  hammer home that Molnar in general does terrific things to paper. You give him a piece, and it comes back like this: Kelso Dunes No. 4 Or this: Searles Lake And now, we’re sensitized to much of the grounding in his other scenes, where more evidence of action moves the shots into the subject matter of life on these locations. Wind Erosion is a vigorous example: Wind Erosion The proliferation of objects almost immediately gives us a sense of where, vicariously, we stand in the location and draws us into it, but there is still some ambiguity about scale. This makes some of these pictures suspend us, the way two magnets at the right distance from each other can hold each other in place. We can choose to believe that we are either near or far away. But the unchanging picture itself actually sets us up for both decisions, simultaneously. There are over 30 photographs on display, and careful juxtapositions established by curator Gwen Terpstra bring different views close together in an emphasis on Molnar’s versatility as an imagist in this desert setting. That heightens the emotional energy of participating in his exploration. In my visit, this settled into a kind of duality where his use of scale sometimes drove towards intimacy and sometimes towards spirituality. One does not need to choose between them, though; the tactile and the ethereal amplify each other. That synergy is most pronounced with the numerous Pinnacles pictures, each offering monolithic, iconic figures against a blank sky, in postures that show them as surveyors and masters of all they see. Monumentality comes with dramatic size included, but these pictures argue that the vastness of the open space asks for something big enough to tame it. It means here that the hills and mountains seen in the background of many pictures have dutiful help from these “natives” for holding the desert in place. They're not just standing there; they're doing something. Trona Pinnacles No. 5 But what about our place in it? By the time Molnar gets us close enough to really touch things, the scene has become a stage of things that look and feel like they are assuming gestures reflecting us to ourselves. And in what even counts as foreshadowing his sensibility in human documentary as well, the desert images begin to move into storytelling. Joshua Trees All images above: (c) Steve Molnar, courtesy 60Six . Malcolm Ryder is a photographer and critic based in Oakland, CA where he also publishes for Oakland Art Murmur and is a board member there as well as at the East Bay Photo Collective (EBPCO). Info: malcolmryder.com/contact

Judson King Smith at Transmission Gallery August 1 through September 14   I got to Judson King Smith’s current show the day before  his planned public reception. Transmission Gallery’s handout flyer accompanying the exhibit had to substitute for the artist not being there with me, but it went like a guided missile to the thing that should aid me the most: Smith’s central idea. Slightly reworded: all that we know about ourselves occupies just a moment in the passing of time.   The show flyer prepares us to experience that concept from all of the works. We then look at the pieces on display, each one of them indeed clustering multiple historical references (whether personal or public); each one in effect collapsing time. But that effect makes us wonder. Is any given work telling the same story as the others, or instead telling its own story? Well, the list of titles of the works in the show reads beautifully on its own, like the table of contents in an anthology of various  poetic allegories. It argues for separate meaningful stories, which sets us testing the success of the works in that way.   The style of substance Smith’s pieces are complex constructions rich with representations, not abstract elements or gestures. Their density is a very consistent feature across the works. This gives us a first impression that their style has the same meaning across the collection. The uniformity supports each piece's status as an example of the central idea. It’s fair to say that in  in some collections , especially in abstract art, style is itself the subject, and each work intentionally explores that same subject. Their various ways of blending the same constituent effects are like multiple proofs that the observed style does generate meaning, as if style is a fully functional grammar that some people already know or with enough effort will discover. In that way, the initial overall impression of a work is a "statement" by the work, affiliating it with the others. But on closer look, an opposing second impression forms, that each work intends to use its particular details to go beyond the group's common grammar into a separate statement, its own narrative or story, whether its title is prescribing it or describing it.   The telling form Smith’s sculptures, which are assemblages of many, many parts, have the interesting character of being more like a story when seen from a distance, and being mostly a collection of pregnant facts when inspected up close. But our overall sense of the works is equally informed by both points of view. How does that work? More like wall pieces than free-standing structures, each piece presents a composition showing us what it wants us to know from pretty much a one-sided view. We zoom in on it to pick up what is mostly a psychological depth in the details, and then zoom out again to resume considering if their arrangement in the given case is telling us something distinct from what the other works do.  Above: details from three separate works, and the fourth lower one illustrating an overall crucifix motif. Assembly lines Smith’s compositions are sophisticated and yet seem readily improvised. Many of the details appear not because other details logically require them to be included, but instead because they conveniently help realize larger formal patterns or shapes. The strongest comparison I can make is to dreams, infamously populated by things that in waking memory didn’t belong to each other but show up like appropriate furniture in assigned times and spaces of sleep’s improvised script. Just as we have long been fascinated by “dream logic”, a Smith's work can fulfill us aesthetically by how the different effects of its elements become formally associated in the flow of form being performed, a stream of subconsciousness. Smith’s “performance” is in the huge number of decisions that we see he made in adding one thing to another. His decision might seem convenient, or strategic; emphatic, or nuanced; funny, or poignant. Angels, astronauts, talismans and arbitrary detritus can be equally important, because they each can point at a distinctive time-stamped frame of mind. And while his personal choices might seem idiosyncratic, many of them make (or use) references that cross different cultures. That reference, which provides the sculpture’s psychological depth, won’t necessarily determine where Smith decides an item is going to be used in the structure. Rather, composition seems to get the first nod, then the included item’s resonance as an emblem gets to poetically do its thing. I’ll admit that one could argue the opposite; but come to the show and see for yourself.   In the house The title of the collection, The House of Miraculous Recovery , could itself be read several ways . Implying a powerful place, does it mean that recovery is miraculous, or that remembering miracles is what’s going on? Can it be both? Sure, why not? The visceral presence of the work puts a less binary spin on it. We enjoy how a piece winds up intuitively feeling like it makes sense, even despite what might seem just opportunistic or unexplained choices of the observed components. This invites the apropos thought that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”   But I was struck more strongly by a different aspect. Like the Tardis in the famous science fiction series Dr. Who, any given piece of Smith’s work, and likewise the whole “house” of them in their assigned corner of the gallery space, is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.