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The Month Ahead in Oakland Art
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Theo Konrad Auer
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Last Updated on January, 01 2009 at 01:06 PM
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I couldn’t think of a better cure for a new year hangover than a month
filled with a hearty helping of art. This month holds ample opportunity
for art viewing, buying and the immersive/interactive experience of an
art opening where you can discover the stories behind the art on view
in any given month.
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Evan Holm at Hatch Gallery for the "Preview 09'" show
I couldn’t think of a better cure for a new year hangover than a month filled with a hearty helping of art. This month holds ample opportunity for art viewing, buying and the immersive/interactive experience of an art opening where you can discover the stories behind the art on view in any given month. The Art Murmur is unusually and perhaps appropriately subdued this time around as it falls the day after the New Year with many spaces including Blankspace and Creative Growth choosing not to participate. I still wouldn’t miss the murmur as it often provides a chance to see some good art and almost always is filled with interesting people watching. Without further adieu, here are my picks for the first month of 2009.
PREVIEW '09
Hatch Gallery
492 23rd St.
http://www.hatchgallery.org/
Reception: Friday, Jan.2th, 7 p.m
Last week, I noted the growing connections being made between the art fairs in Miami as well as the blurring of lines between the art market and the increasingly euphemistically termed “underground culture” of D.I.Y. warehouse spaces. At the heart of many of these changes is the young and energetic director of the recently opened Hatch Gallery, Adam Hatch. He runs, arguably the largest regularly scheduled non–museum art/music space in the Bay Area, Lobot Gallery. Now he is also running a new gallery off to strong start with glowing reviews from local critic s like DeWitt Cheng of Artweek. Hatch has featured shows with clearly sellable art like last month's Frame Line and others which are more conceptual in nature, being harder sells market–wise, such as a recent show in which the gallery was filled with several feet of mulch, dirt and tree branches. The latter show featured the work of conceptualist Takahashi Dashi, an artist Hatch found at the Miami art fairs two years ago, a fact which illustrates the mutually beneficial two-way relationship the art fairs can offer. The year, Adam Hatch is already planning for his space to be represented at the next round of fairs.
Hatch plans to schedule his future slate of shows according to seasonal variations with each artist complimenting the outer environment that seeps in from the gallery’s tall glassy entrance. For example, the intense, contemplative sculptures of Derek Weisberg are being planned to be shown soon in the winter season. The scheduling concept is solid, though it will make for some curatorially awkward decisions.
This month’s “Preview 09’” gives viewers an idea of what to expect from Hatch Gallery in the coming year with works from local artists like Ross Campbell, Evan Holm, Nat Russell, Jason Tyler Grace and Nate Crane among seven others, which will make up just half of the artists showing at Hatch in the next year. He also ambitiously plans to have art books made to accompany each show. The future looks to be a bright one for this space and I hope it can maintain the momentum it has displayed so far. This show is also an opportunity to see, perhaps the lineup of artists at Hatch Gallery’s booth at the next Miami art fairs, here..
CHOOSE YOR OWN ADVENTURE: Laura Ball
Swarm Gallery
560 Second St.
http://www.swarmgallery.com/gallery/exhibitions/LB_KS.htm
Reception: Friday, Jan.9th, 6- 8p.m
Svea Lin Vezzone’s Swarm Gallery looks to continue its strong run of shows with an intruiging solo show of watercolor and oil paintings by Laura Ball. The artist says that her work is exploring, “…fantastical characters of our minds, examining the journeys and struggles we undertake both as mythological character and as ourselves.” In other words: the internal world of the subconscious as epic art. I think the Joseph Campbell quote included in the press copy provides the most insightful selling point for art work that delves into the depths of the psyche, “..into unsuspected Aladdin caves ... where not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives."
LA Paint – Public Tour
The Oakland Museum of California
1000 Oak Street@ 10th St.
http://www.museumca.org/
Docent Tour: Sunday, Jan.18th 2pm
The Oakland Museum is an understated gem that has been working on its getting shine on, with an ongoing extensive remodel of its art and history galleries and with a more prominent role in the community as seen in its recent retrospective of artists associated with the California College of Arts and Crafts and Cool Remixed which showcased Oakland’s famed scraper bikes among other artworks made by local youth. For LA Paint Chief Curator of Art Philip Linhares has selected 60 works made by 11 Los Angles-based artists as evidence of the market and critical clout contained within the megapolis whose layout novelist Thomas Pynchon once famously compared to the printed circuit of a transistor radio. Show highlights include the pop surrealist paintings of Juxtapoz Magazine founder and the raw, witty cultural reappropriation seen in the mixed media works of The Date Farmers. While the show borders a bit on being curatorially diffuse, most of the work in it IS must-see. At its opening, much of the conversation centered on those two qualities. Shows such as this are pregnant with questions and as usual with art, answers do not come easy. A good place to ask some of those questions and continue the conversation is at a docent led-tour of the show like the one happening January 4. Can’t make it? There’s another one on Sunday, January 18th. I think I’ll be making a repeat visit…
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