3AM: Under the Full Mooon Review (East Bay Express)

Posted on November 11th, 2009 in Press

Artful Bodger

Sculptor Christopher Romer reclaims woodworking.

By DeWitt Cheng
Link to Online Article

This Long Road (East Bay Express, September 29, 2009)

Posted on September 30th, 2009 in Press

Triangulation: Three sculptors take aim at the human condition.
By DeWitt Cheng
September 29, 2009 (CLICK HERE TO GO TO ONLINE ARTICLE)

Artistic collaborations have become increasingly common in recent years as the idea of art as the distilled, hard-won aesthetic honey of suffering worker-bee geniuses has been replaced by a cooler (and possibly more realistic) idea of art as research, or objectified philosophy. With performance and mixed media, teamwork and the division of labor make good sense, and nobody’s ontological survival is on the line any more, at least officially.

This Long Road brings together three ceramic sculptors — Ben Belknap, Crystal Morey, and Derek Weisberg — who met in art school and have worked independently with the figure since then. While their individual styles can be easily discerned in the larger, collaborative pieces, they work together, like musicians playing in harmony or counterpoint. Belknap’s caricatures of a variety of physical types contrast nicely with his colleagues’ trademark figures — prim, skeptical, fine-boned nudes by Morey, and hairless babies or old men, comically melancholic, by Weisberg. (Also on view are solo pieces by each artist, or by various duos.)

Art history meets contemporaneity in these works, some of which recall traditional European carved reliefs, altars and sarcophagi, though invaded, inexplicably, by less-then-exalted modern comic personages. Narrative explanations are up to the viewers, as the titles, e.g., “So Close Yet So Far,” “Forest Families VIII,” and “Into Days Yet Unknown XVIIII,” are suggestively ironic, with their Roman numerals implying obsessive repetition, without being definitive. The large installation that provides the show’s name features more than twenty small works that seem as random and odd as life: heads on stages/shelves or in niches; women with hands sprouting winglike from their shoulders, or extending tendril-like from their necks as fingered bodies. In two untitled works, Belknap juxtaposes surprised-appearing male and female heads that are contained within small roofed cabins; in a similar grouping, three portrait busts set on shelves beneath arched enclosures suggest opera boxes, baptismal fonts, and Renaissance paintings extruded into 3D; and his asbestos-suited oil-field worker stands impassively amid flames that looks suspiciously like jalapeno peppers, an icon of cool (or dumb). In “This Long Road II,” a ruminative Morey heroine stands between two gesticulating Weisberg schlemiels (the Yiddishism is irresistible) while two huge hands offer benedictions; in another, a female Morey Baptism is heralded by a morose angelic Weisberg choir.

Anatomies (San Francisco Chronicle, July 2, 2009)

Posted on July 17th, 2009 in News, Press

The SF Chronicle marked Anatomies as a “Don’t Miss” exhibition!

Thursday, July 2, 2009
By Sarah Han

The Compound Gallery reopens after a month long closure in June with this exhibition, featuring works by Kari Marboe and Adrian Van Allen. Artist and gallery owner (of Oakland’s MG Gallery) Marboe gives us an inside look at her family – literally – with her clay “internal portraits.” She also offers sculptures of organs in glass cubes that re-create stories from friends and from the news. Van Allen also deals with strange biological matters – she creates an evolutionary time line using skeletons, including the skull of the mystical unicorn.

Anatomies (East Bay Express, July 15th, 2009)

Posted on July 17th, 2009 in Press

We had a great review of our current show “Anatomies” in this week’s East Bay Express. Check it out:
Cutups:Anatomically incorrect works merge science and art.
By DeWitt Cheng
July 15, 2009

Kari Marboe and Adrian Van Allen are inspired by bones, flesh, and viscera. This may sound morbid nowadays, but for the nearly four centuries between the Renaissance and Modernism, artists were expected to know the anatomical facts of life and thereby depict the human condition with gravitas — to follow Leonardo, who performed secret dissections (and wrote backward, as if that would have fooled the inquisitors), and Vesalius, who published woodcuts of dissected figures posed like classic statues: scientific versions of the satyr Marsyas, flayed by Apollo over artistic hubris. Marboe’s Medical Narratives are comprised of sculptures accompanied by text. The sealed glass cubes with their alcohol-bathed sheep/cow organs may suggest Damien Hirst’s slice-of-life sensationalism, but here the brain, eye, heart, lungs, kidney, and ovary are intact and isolated, as if for scientific analysis or aesthetic delectation. “Kidney” is indeed quite beautiful and funny, with its submerged bean/potato sprouting a snorkel. The tabloid narratives further emphasize the absurd side of human vulnerability: a psychotic inmate eats his eyes; a man married to the wife of his heart donor shoots himself, as his donor did; a fir tree is found growing in a man’s lung. Also shown are painted ceramic reliefs set on wooden panels, medical retablos, illustrating Aunt Jane’s appendectomy, Marboe’s ovarian cyst, sister Elinor’s leg wound, and cousin Joby’s root canal: with its nerves removed, Joby writes, “We have drifted apart, unable to communicate. It’s just a lodger now. An empty, soulless stranger in my mouth. An enamel gravestone.” Van Allen plays with morphology and taxonomy, constructing “a personal zoo” of biological curiosities from old skeletal diagrams that she reassembles through collage and prints atop Geological Survey map fragments, suggesting paleontological digs and maybe, considering her faux museology, ontological gags, too. The title, Natura Historia (Revised), refers to the encyclopedic amalgam of fact and fiction compiled by the Roman scientist Pliny the Elder (who died studying the erupting Vesuvius in 79 AD), and perhaps to Surrealist Max Ernst’s eponymous book of collage/frottage works. Pliny proposed an early method of classifying animals based on modes of locomotion, with chickens and kiwis (yum) darting and flapping, otters scurrying, and weasels scampering; Van Allen’s hybrids are organized along functional lines as well: a giant Megatherium sloth has the webbed, clawed feet of a mole or penguin; a bison sports a mammoth’s head; a flying Draco lizard gains additional life from a flatfish’s fine ribs; common unicorn and uncommon otter co-exist. Anatomies runs through August 3 at the Compound Gallery (6604 San Pablo Ave., Oakland). TheCompoundGallery.com or 510-655-9019

Art in a Box Article – Contra Costa Times (June 17, 2009)

Posted on June 18th, 2009 in Press

Selling subscriptions to art that surprises

By Laura Casey/Photos by Jane Tyska
Contra Costa Times
06/17/2009

Stephen Russell likes surprises. He’s a subscriber to a community-supported agriculture service and a variety of fresh produce from a local farm shows up at his house every week.”I think it’s pretty nice,” he says of the delivery. “You never know what you’re going to get.”So when an artist whose work he enjoys told Russell he is participating in the Compound Gallery’s Art in a Box program — which is modeled after produce subscription services — Russell didn’t hesitate to sign up.”I recently moved into a new apartment and I am looking to get some new art,” says Russell, a transplant from the East Coast. “Art in a Box seems like a cool way to get introduced to Bay Area artists.”

Art In a Box was created by the Compound Gallery’s Matt and Lena Reynoso to do just that — introduce people to some of the best artists in the East Bay, one small piece at a time.Here’s how it works: Each month, subscribers get a new work by a local up-and-coming artist. A $30 subscription is for pick up only; a $50 subscription includes mailing the work. All subscriptions last at least three months, and the art is yours to keep.

The Reynosos, who’ve been running the Compound Gallery on the Oakland/Emeryville border for about a year, have hosted 13 shows, including a show by Numi Tea co-founder, Reem Rahim.Artists themselves, they say they love to transform spaces. The venue they operate out of had a troubled history as a liquor store before it was a boarded-up blight. Today, the gallery is bright and lively. Artists stream in and out to chat or to work on projects. The Reynosos rent locker space to artists and give them an area to work. One of those artists, YaChin Bonny You, suggested the new art-selling strategy. It was an idea the couple quickly embraced.

“I just thought ‘Oh my God’ that’s ingenious,” says Lena Reynoso, a UC Berkeley student working on her doctoral degree. Lena Reynoso is also a painter and printmaker. Lena Reynoso sees the program as a way for art lovers to not only beef up their home collections, but also receive works they can give as unusual wedding or birthday gifts. An Art in a Box subscriber can choose what medium they would like their work to be in but they cannot choose the exact works they will get monthly, hence the surprise factor.

“Like when you subscribe to a vegetable box you can say ‘I hate leeks, don’t send me leeks’ and they won’t,” Lena Reynoso says. “It becomes sort of a surprise what you get.” On the program’s launch night earlier this month, the gallery was filled with works from the 11 participating artists. Sharing wall space with a lovely, delicate and small birdlike sculpture by ceramist Crystal Morey were the strange human/animal Photoshop creations of Eric Sanchez. You’s colorful Pop art pieces stood out while Kerry Lee Johnson’s drawings were more delicate and subtle.

Matt Reynoso, who in addition to running the gallery makes custom metal and wood furniture and paints murals, stresses that the program is affordable and local. And the gallery is in one of the most exciting spots for new art in the Bay Area, one of the dozen or so galleries that swing open their doors for the ultrahip First Friday Oakland Art Murmur.On the first Friday of this month, when the program launched, the Reynosos were pleased that 12 people bought subscriptions.And Russell, a subscriber, was happy, too. He got a colorful, abstract work by Tallulah Terryll that he has already bought a frame for.The Reynosos hope their program will sell many more surprises.

“It’s a big experiment,” Matt Reynoso says. “We’ll see.”

Contact Laura Casey at lcasey@bayareanewsgroup.com or 925-952-2697.

For more information about Art in a Box, including how to subscribe, visit the Compound Gallery’s Web site at www.thecompoundgallery.com.

Review of Yelling Clinic – East Bay Express (October 1, 2008)

Posted on October 9th, 2008 in Press

CRITIC’S CHOICE

Yelling Clinic

While terror-stampeded Americans have nearly forgotten our proxy Cold War in Vietnam, theart-and-disability collective Yelling Clinic has not. In a show curated by Katherine Sherwood at the Compound Gallery, Chau Thuy Huynh
, Sunaura Taylor , and Ehren Tool
examine the war’s environmental and psychological legacies both here and there. Huynh, who grew up postwar in the north, makes art that tries to reconcile the rifts between former adversaries; her drawing “Soul Catcher” combines the paper boats that she made as a child with the reminiscences of southerner/”boat person” An Nguyen. Taylor, developmentally affected by stateside US military pollution, shows powerful paintings indicting our cruelty to factory-farm animals like “downer” cows, or male chicks tossed down a chute into a Dumpster. Gulf War veteran Tool makes ceramic cups collaged with images of war, weaponry, and the wounded. Here’s to “other priorities” like war profiteering! Yelling Clinic runs through October 3 at the Compound Gallery (6640 San Pablo Ave., Oakland). www.TheCompoundGallery.com or 510-547-6608.

Opening reception
: Sat., Sept. 13, 6-9 p.m.
Time & Date: Sept. 13-Oct. 6

– By DeWitt Cheng

Review of Mikhael Banut’s Rooted in the Bay Area (East Bay Express)

Posted on July 29th, 2008 in Press

CRITIC’S CHOICE

Rooted (in the Bay Area)

The Cubists and Futurists believed the automobile had accelerated human consciousness; that was nothing compared to what TV, the computer, and e-progeny like the iPod have wrought. The paintings of Mikhael Banut at the Compound Gallery comment on and reflect our contemporary free-floating, fractured consciousness while seeking some of the old organic certainty that myth and religion provide (he’s Catholic). Banut’s medium- to large-sized paintings combine charcoal, acrylic, and spray paint, so they have a hip-hop/graffiti look. But Banut sees trees as metaphors for connection, so his pictorial use of Biblical passages about trees, along with his melancholy, comical Adam and Eve figures, suggest that the mythic is now, even if it’s less than heroic or Miltonic. The expressive swirling gestures recall Munch, while the macrocosmic Tree of Life with hidden figures recalls Tchelitchew’s “Hide and Seek.” Rooted (in the Bay Area) runs through August 12 at the Compound Gallery (6604 San Pablo Ave., Oakland). www.TheCompoundGallery.com or 510-655-9019.

Time & Date: July 25-Aug. 13

– By DeWitt Cheng

Review of Jason Byers’ Life is a Pigsty

Posted on June 29th, 2008 in Press

CRITIC’S CHOICE

Life is a Pigsty

In 1975, Susan Rothenberg started painting horses. In that adamantly conceptual era, she was viewed as an aesthetic apostate — until others followed suit. Today we have a freer, less dogmatic attitude, and Jason Byers chooses, playfully, to paint isolated objects against closely hued hard-edged vertical stripes: in the past, a hamburger, an ice cream cone, a baseball bat, and a bicycle; for Life is a Pigsty, he has picked a rat, a cow, a donkey, and a pig. The colored stripes suggest 1950s commercial signage, but the animals, which seem to float just above the substrate, are detailed and realistic, with their sepia tones connoting scientific illustration. Each panel is surrounded by smaller square-format stripe paintings, sans critters. Byers, a musician as well, borrows titles from the Smiths (e.g., “You’re the One for Me, Fatty”). Beautifully crafted, eccentric, and humorous works. Through July 7 at the Compound Gallery (6604 San Pablo Ave., Oakland). www.TheCompoundGallery.com or 510-665-9019.

Time & Date: June 18-July 7

— By DeWitt Cheng

Communication Gap Review – East Bay Express – September 3-9, 2008

Posted on June 3rd, 2008 in Press

CRITIC’S CHOICE

Communication Gap

Anyone who has experienced e-mail sender’s remorse (”Oh, no!”) knows the peril of depersonalized, disembodied instant communication: responding quickly and automatically, we can be easily misunderstood — or, perhaps worse, too well understood. Angie Brown, Crystal Morey, Jake Gabel, Nancy Bach, Patrick Renner, and Amanda Jayne Kennedy explore modern interpersonal (and impersonal) relations at the Compound Gallery. Kennedy and Renner adopt the Surrealist game of blind artistic collaboration for an “exquisite corpse” sculpture that marries a ball of socks in its Gothic cage with an octopus tentacle. Brown draws dramatic, angular portraits that infuse comic-book style with angst. Gabel depicts mysterious juxtapositions of tigers, playing cards and rosettes. Bach constructs a multimedia cityscape with cassette tapes rolling on their capstans like pulleys or assembly lines. Morey builds doll-like, vexed female nudes that are classically posed on their florid wall brackets. Communication Gap runs through September 8 at the Compound Gallery (6604 San Pablo Ave., Oakland). www.TheCompoundGallery.com or 510-655-9019.

— By DeWitt Cheng