Search Results

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.

The Gray Loft Annual Color Show, 2025 Some colors pop, some shout. Purple? Purple wells up. Perhaps quickly like a stain, or slowly like a bloom pushing its way through to the front of the line. But quietly. Or, it’s already there in plain sight, but like high heat on a kettle’s skin. If it touches you, it makes an impression fierce enough to make just the memory of it almost as strong as touching it again. Or, sometimes purple is smothering, wrapping your mind like velvet. It feels good, if you can still breathe. Purple can seem superficial. We think of materials “wearing” a color to take on a character. But purple flips the script: it wears its material. Daytime, it chooses wood or glass. At night it chooses steam. In the afternoon it prefers powder. It chooses the material to let it feel the way it wants to feel. For purple, it’s the self-centeredness, the narcissism, that somehow makes it welcome. Then when it shows up, it upstages you but it has great ideas. Sure, it acts like it wants to know what you think, but its question is rhetorical. “ Don’t you think it’s better this way?”  And sometimes it will have decided on its own to just show up uninvited, because like a bruise it thinks you ought to pay attention to something. Well which is it? Okay, maybe I’m pressing too much. After all, few things are more subjectively experienced than color, and no one thing I’ve said so far might be what you usually think. Being there   At Gray Loft Gallery in Oakland’s Jingletown district, the venue’s 7th annual color-themed art show, PURPLE! , is predominantly for photographers. The show’s announcement promises a survey of the beauty, emotion, and symbolism brought by the color. We go there anticipating the different strategies that the respective artists chose to pull that off. The curators, Jan Watten and Ann Jastrab get the individual works on the walls into conversations with each other, amplifying, clarifying, or just riffing on the possibilities that the image makers found, or created, for the color to do its thing. The exhibit of each picture is a three-way dance of why the artist dropped a frame on or around purple; why purple made the rest of the image make sense; and what the curators, Watten and Jastrab, thought purple was doing there. That typifies why a Gray Loft show is, overall, usually on another level of artistry itself. Apparent but not obvious... Quite a few of the images feature purple as ambience. It’s fair to say that in those works, the purple is about a mood, a dream, or even about the subconscious. Based on our ease of identifying what is there, they each show something we might say is “real”; but it is slightly distanced from “normal” by another layer of experience, the filter of the color. What we wind up engaging is that distancing – not that extra layer, nor what is behind it. In other pictures, purple is expressive by calling special attention to the presence of something in the view, as if to say “Did you realize that this [whatever] is in this place?” Its effort is to reveal how something is made or how it has presence. It’s as if the scene in the picture was subjected to a blacklight. After all, it would be surprising if a photo show about purple did not include some good bit of Ultra-Violet enhancement, right? And that sends the big message that apparent reality is not the only way that reality can be grasped. Of course, there is also a contingent of images that really are just celebrations of something being purple - and of our indulgence in that. Whether what this presents is natural or manufactured, purple’s direct sensory stimulation of our nervous system happens on some fetish spectrum from the shock of the new to the seduction of the familiar. But here, in a sanctuary of aesthetics, we’re not talking about pain versus comfort. The gradations are more like flavors. You can equally love what happens on either end of the span – the exotic or the customary – and cater to your own preference at the moment. A mosaic of the found and made, the contemplated and the celebrated, excerpted from nearly 70 works on view. ( www.grayloftgallery.com ) Aesthetics segues into the thing where the color tells us what our feelings are. But which came first, our feeling or the color? It’s not that far from blue to purple, and in that short distance how do we jump from, say, soothing to passionate? Why does that difference even exist? Do passionate people see more purple, or does purple make people more passionate? The answer is that we use colors to communicate feelings. Sometimes the feeling is one we already have and we color-match it; but sometimes instead it is what feeling we want to have and we color-explore. And, in “conversation” with ourselves or with others, we don’t necessarily need to know whether the color or the feeling came first. Like learning a language, we start out not knowing the association of some sounds to some meanings, but once we do know, we stop thinking about that and just enjoy the use. The association becomes symbolic and we just run with it. Symbolic color? Same. I feel compelled to acknowledge that designers, marketers and advertisers traffic in that knowledge pretty vigorously. In our times, our normal visual literacy has been quite generously built with photographs exhibiting designed images. Consequently, we probably all know a lot about color already. This is pretty important, I think, because we all come to art shows bringing what we already know, even if what we hope to experience is something more. Sometimes a great notion... In that regard, one of the most ambitious things an artist can do is create work that somehow extends the conventional meaning of symbolic elements into new meanings. And another ambitious thing is to successfully make something newly symbolic, whether as a more public visual language or as an intensively private one. This could be using purple to give us a new idea about something; or the work might aim to give us a new idea about purple itself. We might see it in some given work, or it might emerge from some group of them. At this show’s opening, Ann Jastrab, Jan Watten’s partner curator, very generously pushed Watten into the foreground of the visitors’ attention. But they were a great team. As you go through their show, what emerges is the curators' work in exploring and amplifying our chances not just to see exceptional individual pictures; they cultivate our opportunity to contemplate and even experiment with our own sensibilities about color. And that is why there is an exclamation point in the show’s title. Gray Loft Gallery Exhibit in conjunction with the inaugural PhotoCarmel! Closing Reception: May 10, 5:00 – 7:30 pm

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.

Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland March - April 2024 In a part of the U.S. where diversity is one of the most prominent social features, the East Bay in California increasingly feels more like the real destination of the Bay Bridge than just one of its two anchors. But historical arrivals of peoples of African descent need not have had any earlier stop in San Francisco before arriving in Oakland or its contiguous neighbors. There are many ways in, and the land mass taken up for habitation is surprisingly large to survey. Scholars of migration note that multiple communities form at the resting points of a diaspora  (dispersion), and we naturally wonder what cultural features survive the trips and still represent the origin throughout the various new grounds. Do we see it in art? Well, the nature of art means that knowledge of both the old and the new  of people’s experiences will get representation that is meant to communicate. So when we go visit any art gallery participating in the Richmond Art Center’s annual Art of the African Diaspora  event, we are likely to encounter a range of experiences both historical and current.   Those experiences also vary across one’s attention to memory, identity, desire,  and discovery . It is tempting to see that “attention” as a  four-part storyline about diaspora, one that is a recurring theme spawning endless variations. And the story can be one individual’s story or a story of a whole community. Importantly, as one of the annual event’s several satellite galleries, founder Jan Watten’s Gray Loft Gallery in Oakland’s “Jingletown” district ( www.grayloftgallery.com )  is virtually one of the communities that are formed of African American artists who have arrived in the East Bay.  Eleven of these artists went on view together there in early March, for a stay deep into April. Gray Loft shows continually distinguish themselves by the way the works are positioned to resonate or even reveal each other’s inner workings. Watten, who curated this event, is masterful with arrangements that illuminate connections and themes. And an additional dimension this time is the reappearance of several artists who exhibited different work at this same event one year ago. At the opening, that allowed the show to also host conversations between artists and visitors about how the artists’ recent experiences, both in and outside of art, became new works that turned corners, or dove deeply, from their previous ones. More than any particular pieces, those inner workings are the star and subject of the show. Artists of course are always their own first audience and are deeply responsive to the work they have made real. As their next audience, we viewers have first impressions that are not necessarily the same as those reached by the artist; but all of the artists here made the work of finding expression a work-in-progress that we could join now. So, what does that mean, work in progress? Several of the artists spoke about how their work allows for open-ended meanings. We are intended to not just receive a meaning but to help decide it. In some work (Cynthia Brannvall), vintage materials become both social critique and anthropology, neither excusing the other, while pulling us into an active conversation. And in one prominent other piece (Malik Seneferu), ritualistic craftwork assembles found objects into a form that oscillates between being an object exposed to us and a persona felt by us. Brannvall: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Another artist (Arthur Norcome), compared to a year ago, found a deceptive fusion of assertive flat design and understated expressionist color space that now projects room-like emotional chambers. A not-so-obvious correspondence here is between those works and some large abstract expressionist works done by an artist (Anna W. Edwards) who came from a long journey in external urban landscape to her current concentration on her internal spiritual landscape, which she offers to us as a place for ourselves. Three more groupings (Ray L Haywood, Jimi Evins, and Dawn Rudd) show their artists’ decision to take elements from within earlier more complex paintings and grant those elements the freedom of being soloists apart from their previous roles in group performance – a simplification that triggers intensity through our intimacy with the gestures, while we also imagine making those gestures ourselves. Some works that are more like drawing (Kelvin Curry, Dulama LeGrande) initially seem highly contradictory of each other, one with a quiet orderliness and the other an energetic rawness. But they both have refined their way to personal and somewhat glyphic iconographs that are holding a story in place rather than organizing space. We “read” these as much as see them. LeGrande: Self Portrait as a Temple   Storytelling, meanwhile, has more overt display (Chuck Harlans, Tomye Neal Madison) in works that, unlike most of the others in the show, are specifically illustrating people. We can feel their commonalities, and our connection – or perhaps biographically, measure our current distance and differences. Harlans: Ghana – The Jamestown Girls Considering the sweep of subjects and expressive strategies, the show’s major statement is that the diaspora naturally expands migration into exploration and exploration into diverse values. But in turn, this says that the human spirit on the journey of the diaspora is a rich spirit.   All the more notable that at the opening of the show, numerous artists spoke of the most recent few years as a time in which something that gained especially high priority in their endeavor was finding Joy.   The Art of the African Diaspora exhibit at Gray Loft Gallery opened March 9th and closes April 27th, 2024 at 7pm. See more of the works online at www.grayloftgallery.com during this time.   Malcolm Ryder, an Oakland-based Black photographer and critic, writes about art at www.artdotdot.com and particularly about East Bay art at Oakland Art Murmur’s Art About Town, https://oaklandartmurmur.org/art-about-town/

Gray Loft Gallery, August 2024 (Note: see the terrific thumbnail gallery of artworks in this show at grayloftgallery.com while reading this review…) A real tree person doesn’t just see trees; and not even “the tree ”…   For a real tree person, it’s always my tree. But when I show someone else my  tree, there’s always a chance that they just aren’t going to “get it”. What’s worse, the one thing all of us tree people begrudgingly know is that trees can do without us, yet we can hardly do without them. Far beyond curiosity, we’re in unrequited (?) pursuit of their love. Well, it’s okay. The “love” we seek is usually inspiration – being inspired to have the tree’s grace, or dignity, or power, and some of its purity of innocence, along with the bonus of some kind of beauty. Something like that. That’s why, although Gray Loft Gallery’s new show “ Among The Trees ” explores what a tree is “about”, the key word in its title is among – which makes the show about us. What is it like to experience trees? What does that experience tell us about ourselves? And why does that realization so readily turn into a deep connection with them? Of course, as an art show, that’s not only what the event explores. It’s just as much the case that  curator Jan Watten’s sprawling selection of paintings, photographs, and mixed media examines how the artists variously get the artwork to express what they care about. In that expression, there is a dialogue. On the one side: trees heightening our experience as being part of nature ourselves. And on the other side, the artists, using tree-like forms to mean something even when we are absent.   A Language of Nature For all of the artists, “making a tree” involves the most abstract matter of representing something.  What does something need to look like in order to get called a tree? While any real tree, like a fingerprint, is unique in the specific arrangement of its details. But the images in this exhibit are by and large far less documentary than impressionist. They don’t want to explain the experience; they want to invoke it. For some artists, creating an image of trees is about the most concrete act in visual art:  making a mark. In this case, drawing the mark on a blank surface puts the artist in the exact position of the tree itself; the mark’s essential purpose is to branch outward from its beginning, and its underlying life force need explain its decisions to no one but itself. But when portraying a tree, there is no single particular real-world instance of one that defines “tree” for all the others. An image that we invent from scratch as a “likeness” of a tree can have just as much psychic authority as would an exact copy of an actual tree. A few of the show pieces - an assemblage or mix of selected parts, as done by Lorrie Fink and Marsha Ballan - are literally object lessons in this. But then curiously, a photo by Tony Bellaver achingly projects the same thing in an opposite and literal way, by emphasizing what we feel is missing from what is shown, and known, as a tree.   The Substance of Style While the variety of imagery in the show covers many different techniques and moods, those numerous distinctions don’t leave us thinking of the show as a big collection of different things. Instead, soon enough, we’re there thinking of a tree as one thing that has a tremendously imaginative range of ways to show up, when given half (or even less) a chance. Still, there are a few rough groupings of work, distinguished as below by features which, however, some pieces also overlap or combine. That’s a good thing, like being served multiple flavors to work with in a fine meal. About half of the show consists of works exploiting a distanced point of view, in which the spread of branches across the view is the subject matter. From those works, one thing that kept echoing in my mind was the famous phrase “architecture is frozen music.” Each such work is in effect a snapshot of a narrative, of something getting from one place to another. These highly gestural works hold a tension that comes from knowing that the displayed forms did not occur to be about us, yet we trace them especially to get a feeling, a feeling that we want to believe they also had. It’s as if to finally say that all trees dance. On the other hand, there is Jen Cranes’ close study of single leaves and Cynthia Brannvall’s installed real branch segments. Superficially they have almost nothing in common with each other, but they both wind up offering experiences of the same thing: not distance, but intimacy. What comes from the closeness is a heightened awareness of how we ourselves are structured - a mix of free informality constrained by rigor. And although featuring just parts of a tree, these pieces give a distinctive idea of what, both as an experience and as an artifact, can be considered “complete”. Regarding completeness, it’s interesting that very few of the works in the show had any strong interest in bark (!) Artistically, however, that is notable because of how much of the show’s work, without the additional detail, is more visually abstract. The abstraction functions to make the images more graphical.  In turn, that makes some of them more directly gestural, and in that way more emotional; while in other images, it leaves more room for us to “fill in” our own predisposed emotions, adding them to the works as if we were busy making the pieces ourselves while looking. Also, from that abstraction, we find works having trees with a monumental presence, their bold mass keeping them standing firm, beyond time. That can bring out our humility in knowing we are ourselves so impermanent, which is usually a strong feeling even if brief. But in most of these other works, we don’t get a mood from the tree. Instead, we find trees giving the work’s pictured space a mood, in a theatrical way. In effect, the artists have worked to elicit drama from the stillness of the trees. And finally, in certain works, we find emphasis on the trees “giving life”, a crucial solace for our times, and due to the threat of losing them, one having political urgency. On Your Walk It seems unfair to pick out just two of the many fine pieces in this exhibit, and you’ll leave it with your own favorites, possibly many. But one of the most unusual of the works is a show-stopper hanging piece by Sarah Grew featuring dozens of transparent images suspended on wires, that together practically offer an index to all of the other works in the show. The best word to describe what this intensity conveyed to me is “passion”. And nearby to that is the largest wall work in the show, by Steven Andresen, which has a joy of execution all across its surface that feels like what we’d always want trees in their setting to be able to do for us.   “Among the Trees” runs August 3 – August 31, 2024, open by appointment any Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

Jamie Treacy at Gearbox Gallery April - May 2024 Gearbox Gallery stands street level in a West Oakland building two stories tall. It has enough space to accommodate the group of artists who form and run it, such that all artists have always at least one work on display. In this scheme, it makes a one-person show on the lower floor as special to the members as it may be to us. The current featured work is testimony to how the gallery, as an organization, highly motivates individual members to freely pour energy into a lot of work. Currently, at this location, gallery member and lifelong swimmer Jamie Treacy has his first solo show, Creatures of Duality, running through April 30th. The first impression that the collection of paintings gives is not of creatures. When you enter the gallery and (almost instantly) stand in the center of the square exhibition space, you are immediately surrounded by beautiful intricate surfaces. It makes you wonder where to start but also says that you can start anywhere. Committing to it, I started with noticing that the many hues of green were not like the water of blue vacations but the real water of oceans and ponds. Places where if you leave something alone long enough, something else will grow on it. Some of Treacy’s works make this into outtakes from languid movies, shot perhaps on other discovered planets. But instead, they are from the inner spaces of where we are – waters where Treacy dives, and the imagination. While not arranged in order this way, the set of paintings offer a progression that sets artificial structures or manufactured forms against organic, natural ones – but ultimately subordinates their difference into flattened composed motifs.  There’s an implication that Treacy shows us “found” artificial items and “invented” natural one, but his use of all-over color and placement of things evaporates that implication as it emphasizes his decisions about what to show. Another key element in many pictures is the vantage point that he offers. Across the collection, we are sometimes high up looking down, or pointed towards a horizon, or fully immersed in the thick of organisms or being underwater. The points of view inject a narrative dimension by “placing” us in the sensory field of the picture, as if we were Treacy seeing what is shown. It makes us imagine, or ask, what he was doing there. In his statement, the artist speaks of being a “new diver”, struck by the co-presence of opulence and desiccation, and as a queer artist, given to making spaces that can hold contrasting experiences. Treacy’s painting requires a lot of drawing, and while his color work is the pronounced emotional driver, his line work provides most of the “text”. We see not only de facto shapes of things that seem familiar but verge sometimes on science fiction; and we also see “cutaway” views of the usually hidden internals of those things – their fibrous chambers or framework. Then, for example, while these innards usually are revealed to us when plants meet death or violence, Treacy mainly makes them part of the intricate surface patterning of his canvas. It moves us away from piers and sunken boat hulls, on to a type of imagery that becomes more an abstract fabrication of his visual vocabulary – perhaps more about personal symbology than shared sensation.  This description should not be taken as stating Treacy’s actual intentions or any evolution. All of the works were made during 2022 through 2024 and have the artist’s own evocative titles. But as audiences, we bring a great mix of aesthetic backgrounds, and we look at things both to find out what we have in common with the reality of the work and, separately, with the imagination of the artist. Together they create the dialogue in our own sense of the work.   All excerpts of paintings provided above are from works © Jamie Treacy.

Scientists are fond of surprising children with the news that nothing in reality is colored, but instead has color when excited by light. This makes every crayon a small magic wand, applying a liquid prism on whatever they touch. Three Lost Years photo by YelenaZhavoronkova But perhaps our first experience of pink comes from something we can’t reach – the sky. One of the signature images in Pretty in Pink  at the Gray Loft Gallery reminds us that the sky is where we learn pink is almost pure, ephemeral energy. It doesn’t have nature’s constancy of a field of green or the planet’s umbrella of blue, with one dramatic recurring exception: flowers. In their dazzling variety, flowers have an infinite capacity to capture and shape pink, where we can touch it. Yet they conform to an ebb and flow, a seasonal disappearance, that echoes what we already knew of impermanence in the sky. Perhaps that is why when we grab pink and fix it in place, it grabs us back. Pretty In Pink’s curating jurors Ann Jastrab, Executive Director of the Center for Photographic Art, and Gray Loft Gallery founder Jan Watten, have taken note of how graphically photographers have either portrayed pink’s capture, or have done it themselves. And the show’s numerous display walls give us a variety of groupings that highlight their differing approaches. One grouping is mainly about pink’s appearance as contrast: its brightness far greater than the space it occupies, and making that space feel more lit than it is. Another group presents pink in open environments where, used by some anonymous party, it is poised exactly between being arbitrary or aggressive. But a third group is hosting pink as an emotion in imaginary or psychological theaters, while a fourth set is a primer on how femininity traditionally both owns and is owned by pink. All of those scenes push the impact of deliberately applying pink when some other color would have served a practical purpose – but using something else would have missed the point of having pink’s energy. One of the most initially eclectic groupings similarly shows pink injecting life into, this time, what might otherwise have felt ordinary or indifferent. We get a clue about the way these pictures work from the electric effect of the wall they are hanging on, painted an intense hue of pink – magenta – the only wall like it in the gallery. Then on cue, a different wall in the show emphasizes pink occurring elegantly through the hand of nature; botany is the decision maker, yet it is as if pink just decided on its own to show up, instantly adding spice. Finally, some photographers have pictures that are most strongly about the pictures themselves being objects made with pink. In these items, the artists’ edge-to-edge exploration of form and surface texture relies on pink not so much as a subject but as a key element in their graphic design. There is a great comparison, made by being shown next to each other, of how the formal attention can equally hold a garish festivity or a meditative nuance. And of course, it tells us to pay attention to how design works in all of the other pictures in the show as well. (c) Edie Hoffman To be clear: none of the many effects above are in any case describing only one way to engage the world of the related image, and the show walls are not rigid about holding one group or another. In fact, as we look at any given picture among the others, and then look at it a second or third time, we start appreciating how multiple motives coexist in the artist’s creative process for the image, and have reached a point of being balanced, where the photographer is willing to say they’re done. Show runs Saturday, January 20 – Saturday, February 24, 2024. www.grayloftgallery.com