Art Picks, March 2011
Posted on March 17, 2011 – 6:21 AM | by OldManFoster
Signs
Enid Baxter Blader
Center For Contemporary Art Sacramento
Through March 20
Noted northern California artist Enid Baxter Blader’s show opens with perfect timing for CCAS’ new extended hours (open every day but Monday). Blader’s work covers a lot of bases, including painting, photography, music and video. Signs will include both paintings and her short film, The Ord, which documents the de-commissioned Fort Ord Army Base. Blader’s paintings feature simple imagery rendered in a crude, childlike manner. Often painted on bare linen, the paintings have a charming dreamlike quality that is evocative of Charles Burchfield.
1519 19th Street
Hours: Tues-Sun, Noon – 5PM
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Had Enough? (and other questions of pride)
Photographs from the 90s
Richard Gilles
Axis Gallery
March 5 -27
The work of photographer Richard Gilles will be familiar to most regular MM readers; he has a very active practice and we’ve covered quite a number of his exhibits over the past few years. Gilles’ best-known work documents the almost invisible, eerily quiet life at the edges of society: the nearly-homeless traveler, the rural highway memorial to a traffic fatality, the billboard standing blank and abandoned in a field. In Had Enough? Gilles is again focused on those marginalized in our society, but this time they’re not so quiet. Shot largely at San Francisco Gay Pride parades in the 1990s, Gilles displays street photography chops that are totally absent from his later work. In stark contrast to the carefully controlled and meticulously composed imagery of later work like Almost Homeless, these freewheeling pictures are nearly frenzied, documents of the artist in the eye of the storm.
1517 19th Street
Hours: Weekends, Noon-5PM and by appt
Busywork
Paper and Process, Sculpture and Installation
Kondos Gallery
March 14 -April 14, 2011
Reception: March 17, 5-7PM
Paper: it’s not just for drawing any more! Sac City professor Mitra Fabian curated this show of sculptures and installations made with paper. Fabian (who, working with artist Jen Stract as mfjs, contributes an installation) is a process-based artist in the mold of Tara Donovan – she well understands how the artist can transform the most humble of materials into art. And the materials here are humble, including discarded index cards and shredded business documents. The five artists in the show (Jill Sylvia, Fanny Retsek and Penny Young in addition to Fabian and Stract) are all women, and the title is a play on the nature of intensive process work by women “converting fruitless action into impressive and sublime work.”
Sacramento City College, 3835 Freeport Blvd
Hours: Mon – Fri, Noon- 4PM, and by appt
Short list:
Art Comp
Matt K Shrugg
Phono Select
Opens March 12
You may have noticed the illustrations on our contributors’ page of our print edition- they are the work of local art/music maniac (and, full disclosure, my longtime pal) Matt K Shrugg. Shrugg will be having a show a few of his music-themed portraits – with a twist – at Phono Select this month.
2312 K Street