Sculptor Christopher Romer reclaims woodworking.

By DeWitt Cheng
Link to Online Article

Christopher Romer’s “Night Radiant.

Anyone who went gaga over Martin Puryear’s eclectic historicism, stunning craftsmanship, and visual wit at SFMOMA last year should check out Christopher Romer’s small but impressive show, 3AM: Under the Full Moon. An East Bay newcomer, Romer, like Puryear, draws on vernacular subcultures, employing traditional tools, at least in part. But this is no mere artisanship for artisanship’s sake: Romer’s wooden sculptures, which synthesize figuration and abstraction, contrasting the rough-hewn with the polished, make a strong case for informed, disciplined eclecticism.

Romer’s digital-age commitment to woodworking has proven fertile. Novelist Jonathan Franzen (poaching on the art preserve, like the shameless Updike), sees America as a landscape of domesticated lumber, “a riot of wood … whole towns of wood, utility poles hewn from pine trees, towers of hardwood pallets in loading docks, forests of two-by-fours and glades of plywood at every construction site.” “A Bodger’s Bounty” and “Untitled” are wall-mounted sculptures composed of clustered wooden pods suggesting buoys, balloons, grapes, insect eggs, and grains. Their lustrous surfaces are striated through laborious painting, scraping, and sanding to suggest plumage, foliage, and animal pelts. (A bodger was an itinerant woodworker who transformed stands of birch trees in Victorian England into drawknife-shaped, pole-lathe-turned legs, which makers of Windsor chairs purchased. These reclusive rural craftsmen, who lived in wattle-and-daub lean-tos called bodger hovels, were likened to nocturnal badgers; bodging in contemporary slang means doing a job with what is at hand — improvising.)

Romer’s improvisations on the folk traditions of decoy carving, birdhouse carpentry, and barn raising, create “a new world where historicisms collide, erupting into captivating and fantastic forms,” writes J. Susan Isaacs. For Franzen, the works individually and collectively suggest “an unruly and buggy Nature thrusting up through a non-too-solid veneer of civilization … wild things … abuzz with their strange conversations.” The parental pod/potato in “The Woods Are Full of Them,” patched together from various woods, studded with brads, and resting atop a small pallet, hosts a half-dozen excrescent bobbing baby buds, as smoothly enameled in silver and teal as medicine capsules. The “Silver Buds” pieces invoke duck decoys, bowling pins, ratchet handles, and jugglers’ Indian clubs, while the flock of fish forms in the two “Night Radiant” suspended wooden cages, lashed to wooden boulders, combine elegant stylization with a hint of Surrealist menace. 3AM: Under the Full Moon runs through November 15 at The Compound Gallery (6604 San Pablo Ave., Oakland). Tea with artist happens Sunday, Nov. 15, 3-6 p.m. 510-655-9019 or TheCompoundGallery.com

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.

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.

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

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.

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