Aurelia’s Oratorio: Light, Sad, Circus
Last night I saw Aurelia’s Oratorio at Berkeley Repertory Theater. This is one of those rare things that is both light and heartbreaking. Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, the creator of the show and the mother of its star, is Charlie Chaplin’s daughter. Uncle Dan actually hooted “Pure Chaplin!!” in the middle of one [... more ...]
Posted in News Tagged Aurelia's Oratorio, Berkeley Repertory Theater, circus, cirque nouveau Leave a comment
Robin Ekiss, Dollhouse Survivor
Last night I went to see Robin Ekiss read from her new book of poems The Mansion Of Happiness at Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley. (“The Mansion of Happiness” turns out to be the Victorian precursor to the “The Game of Life.”) The poems mine her weird upbringing by miniaturists. She explained with a reasonably [... more ...]
Ebay Art Club
Has anyone found anything really worth looking at on Ebay lately? If so, please share. Here is a commemorative (not sure in what spirit, exactly) 9/11 disaster rug from Afghanistan. Bidding has ended for this one, sorry. I’m just keeping it in my “watching” pile. Today I found an interesting woodblock print [... more ...]
Ingo Giezendanner’s Diary for Nieves Makes You Want to Draw, or Leave.
Swiss artist Ingo Giezendanner’s beautiful new zine for Nieves Books is called Baku & Back. Ingo G. made the drawings on a cultural exchange trip he took from Switzerland to the Caucasus. The cultural exchange part didn’t work out but we get to keep the drawings. The amount of white paper left between the [... more ...]
Article Optimized for Fancy Phones
Now it’s easier to see/read Article on your “smart phone.” If you have one of those, the Forty-Two Suns Rise video series in particular looks especially nice on the small screen. For iPhone owners, you can even bookmark Article mobile so it looks like an app. Just go to articlejournal.net on your mobile browser to take [... more ...]
New Hoa Nguyen Poems at Glitter Pony!
Article contributor Hoa Nguyen’s poems are warm and wet and wriggly, like newborn puppies. “Rain Poem” begins “Stripes cover you in rain/We are grew and grey/A particular mood tooth / Kind of Day: Beans on Toast.” They often put together the most delicious sense impressions and then sort of drop back into diary [... more ...]
TRANS: form | color
TRANS: form / color is a sprawling nine-person show that came out of an Internet chat habit between artists Richard Schur (Munich) Mel Prest (San Francisco) and Brent Hallard (Tokyo). Each believes in the rewards of heavy viewer participation in abstract painting.
Nancy White’s folded metal has sharp edges and a finish like lipstick [... more ...]
Don Voisine at Gregory Lind Gallery
Sometimes you go to a show that makes you feel better because someone made some paintings that are not too proud of themselves but as respectful as possible of the complexity and difficulty of our little lives. Don Voisine’s paintings at Gregory Lind in San Francisco are at first glance pretty straight traditional abstract [... more ...]
A True Story: Interview with David True
When David True was a young New York artist in the 1970s working on industrially fabricated glass sculptures, his thoughts one evening settled on transparency, and then invisibility. He was alone, and sober (according to his account), when he decided to will himself invisible. He thought very, very hard, and then it happened. Or, at [... more ...]
Brodsky & Utkin: Etchings from the Projects Portfolio
BRODSKY & UTKIN: ETCHINGS from the PROJECTS PORTFOLIO (1981-90), Michael Rosenthal Contemporary Art, Redwood City, Calif.
Last month I went to see the “Projects” etchings created between 1981 and 1990 by Russian artists Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin. The pair trained as architects in the Soviet Union during the late 1970s. When they graduated, they unsurprisingly [... more ...]
Imperfect Beauty: A Conversation with John Chiara
John Chiara is a 36-year-old artist from San Francisco who photographs with a camera the size of a speedboat that he built himself and hauls around town on a trailer to photograph the city’s hillsides and houses and underbrush. He never shoots the big, important view, and though his camera is big, it isn’t grand. [... more ...]
Posted in ISSUE #2 SPRING/SUMMER 2007 Tagged Crown Point Press, interviews, John Chiara, Kim Bennett Leave a comment
Article Interview: Leslie Snoke
1. How would you describe your work to someone who has never seen it before?
Think of it as an interior designer’s nightmare. I am consumed with perception of good and bad taste. Take, for example, silk flowers “planted” outdoors in a garden. They bother me because I cannot decide to which season they belong. Are [... more ...]
Psychic Cherries: Into the Shadow World with Roz Leibowitz
Daria Tavoularis, my co-editor, met with serious resistance from her MFA program for focusing on the imagined and imaginative aspects of her work. One professor bragged to colleagues that if he had a pistol he would have used it at her thesis defense. I thought I was going to make my congenial reviewer at the [... more ...]
Posted in ISSUE #1 WINTER 2007 Tagged Daria Tavoularis, David Foster Wallace, David Lynch, Kim Bennett, Roz Leibowitz Leave a comment
F****** Awesome Amish Quilts