Zines, awkward sales pitches, and awful fonts at the Zine Fest, SF Weekly

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Larissa Archer

Small-press publishers don’t slack off. Over the weekend at SF Zine Fest, the County Fair Building’s two halls and a reading room were filled with independently produced artwork and literature. And if that weren’t testament enough to their productivity, many of the artists passed the time with notebook and pen or paintbrush in hand. Although we don’t know what the final numbers were on sales, this offered a much more engaging selling technique than any “pitch” could be. Nothing’s more awkward than being sold to by someone who not only cares about what they’re selling but who’s also the one who created it. The perfume spritzers at Macy’s can be a nuisance, but you know that when you decline to buy a bottle of the latest Eau d’une Nuit Régrèttable from Tommy Hilfiger you’re not rejecting their babies. There is perhaps no more poignant consumer experience than to have to pass over work presented to you by the artist who made it, and this colors the interaction that begins the moment you hesitate right as they catch your eye. One needs a Puccini to capture all the doomed optimism of that initial, “And how areyou doin’ today?” (continue reading)

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My review of Fraction Magazine’s show at Rayko Photo Center in the Huffington Post

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Larissa Archer

For the lay observer, a group show often has the advantage of a clear theme, a unifying idea behind the curation that primes the viewer to look for certain common elements throughout the exhibit, and to interpret the work with some particular concept in mind. In Fabricated Realities, Robert Koch Gallery recently exhibited a group of experimental and surrealist photography from the 1920s through the ’70s. SFMOMA’s The Steins Collect offered a revelation of the early throes of modern art and the avant garde. Rayko’s group show, Fraction Magazine: Three Years in the Making, bears no such obvious unity, except inasmuch as they are all images Fraction Magazine founder and editor David Bram curated from the three years of contemporary photographers’ portfolios he’s shown in his monthly online review. This is not a defect in the collection, but it does require more work on the part of the viewer to glean what the photographs are on about. (continue reading)

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Photobooth and my crush on tintypes, SF Weekly

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Larissa Archer

from Skatepark tintypes by Jenny Sampson

​ A lot of people have been scratching their heads at the surge in popularity of photographic styles that were once the inevitable defects of machinery long since surpassed and outmoded. While digital cameras that can take clear, detailed, almost “perfect” images are ever cheaper and more accessible (even phones have cameras more advanced than what was available to hobbyists of previous decades), the use of apps that can replicate the imperfections of even the most limited toy cams of yesteryear has proliferated. Whose Facebook profile doesn’t have a “My hipstamatic prints” album? I for one waste hours playing with Instagram and am not among the people scratching their heads at the swelling preference for the slightly blurrier, sometimes washed-out, or oversaturated colors of these ersatz analog images. Despite the randomness of the results (particularly with Hipstamatic, which doesn’t let you choose and manipulate filters after a shot is taken), they capture an atmosphere, or they create a more evocative one than existed. They reflect more faithfully the impressionistic messiness of memory. (continue reading)

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Specs Celebrations in North Beach, SF Weekly

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Larissa Archer

​It’s rare to hear news of an old San Francisco establishment that doesn’t end in “evicted over a rent dispute” or “replaced by a Starbucks.” While ongoing development of the city is a mark of vitality and should be welcome (well, maybe except for Starbucks), it’s distressing to note the regularity with which bits of San Francisco’s history vanish without fanfare, often supplanted by  chain businesses, luxury condos, or doomed ventures in the latest short-winded culinary, hobbyist, or fashion crazes.

So it was heartening to hear of celebratory events related to the continuance, rather than demise, of a favorite city institution. Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum, one point of the Columbus Avenue triangle of historic bars including Tosca’s and Vesuvio, enjoyed two rounds of festivities last week. (continue reading)

 

 

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Notes from an Extended Art Crawl, SF Weekly

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Larissa Archer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August is the month when most of the world goes on vacation and makes you feel a bit of a chump for staying put in a dubious staycation in the half-deserted city. Many theaters and concert venues go dark, and some galleries reduce their viewing hours. Unless you’re happy to pay more than $200 for Big Music Festival tickets, you might fear you’re stranded in a city as bereft of cultural offerings as your average American city, which is a grim prospect indeed. But starting late last week we found a plethora of unusual events, so maybe there is hope for the people without a cabin in Tahoe. (continue reading)

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My review of Scott Yeskel’s “Mapping California” in the San Francisco Examiner

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Larissa Archer

Painter Scott Yeskel’s exhibit at Jack Fischer Gallery is titled “Mapping California,” but it could as aptly be named “Leaving California” or “EscapingCalifornia.”

It is not a pervasive view of California he depicts. He ignores the wealthy enclaves of Hollywood and San Francisco, and the climatic diversity of the lush northern half of the state, and focuses entirely on the sunbaked sprawl of the less-affluent inland south.

Volvos from the 1980s and old-fashioned trailers stand at the ready outside what would look like shabby tract houses, but for their apparent loneliness in the landscape.

Yet the scenes look as though they have already been abandoned. Windows are shut with their curtains drawn, and even the tended hedges fail to suggest the human touch. Cars speed down the highway, their windows obscured to render drivers and passengers invisible. Unmanned, apparently unstocked taco trucks idle in parking lots, with a few empty folding chairs sitting unneeded nearby.

The alienation is as palpable as the heat rising off the asphalt. Yeskel’s California is a place to escape, and the implication is that the exodus is already well under way.
(continue reading)

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Fabricated Realities at Robert Koch Gallery, in Art Practical

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Larissa Archer

Despite the sometimes disturbing effectiveness of Photoshop, we still expect photography to show us something that at least seems real. It’s understood that the freedom to contrive entire alternate worlds belongs to the painter, sculptor, writer, or dramatist—any artist whose work is to dream up and “craft” a subject from beginning to end. But for all the gimmicks available to the photographer, not only with Photoshop, but now also with the retro effects of Hipstamatic and Instagram, the camera still records what is in front of it, leaving us with the assumption that there is a limit to how outré the resultant images can be. Fabricated Realities debunks that expectation. The artists, who represent fifty years of experimental photography, achieved their bizarre tableaux through various means, such as photomontage, collage, photogram, and even through the technique of photographing a subject’s reflection in a funhouse mirror, as with André Kertész’s Distortion #70 (variant) (1933/1979). In this image, a woman stands like a fashion model, hair coiffed in finger waves, hand on hip. She is naked under her overcoat, which hangs open to reveal one breast. That breast is central to both the composition of the photograph and to the mirror itself, so the distortion emanates from the focal point of the nipple, as if a visual representation of the warping effect of sex on the mind: a siren-song and resultant destruction in one. (continue reading)

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Jonah Raskin writes about pot; I write about him for SF Weekly.

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Larissa Archer

 

“If baseball is the opiate of the masses, why aren’t opiates given to the masses?”

This was possibly the most cogent question posed to Jonah Raskin on Thursday at Canessa Gallery after he read from his new book, Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, published by High Times Books. The poser of the question was a young man who spoke with what was (in the context) calm, Harvardian breviloquence about how his family had no problem with his pot-smoking despite their own abstinence from the herb.

He had asked it as a follow-up to a somewhat less calm (and significantly less breviloquent) comment made by one of the older members of the audience, which was that the government — the Man, what have you — wants people to enjoy baseball because when you’re at the game, enjoying yourself, you’re not thinking of how little money you make. (He’s apparently never pushed his debit card to its withdrawal limit trying to buy garlic fries and a beer at AT&T Park.) (continue reading)

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Fan Ho’s A Hong Kong Memoir in the SF Examiner

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Larissa Archer

Fan Ho’s “A Hong Kong Memoir,” on display thorough Sept. 3 at Modernbook Gallery, might seem at first look like the work of an Asian Eugene Atget — documental (bordering on sentimental) images of a city and a life that has since been subsumed by political, social and economic changes, leaving this quaint black-and-white version unrecognizable.

However, examination of certain photographs yields an unexpected playfulness of composition and medium, and an unabashed theatricality that make these images notable for more than their simple beauty and value as a visual record of an altered world. Read more at the San Francisco Examiner:

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the cool/weird dance project "Sex, Love, Money" in SF Weekly

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Larissa Archer

​The reasons for marrying are probably as numerous as the marriages out there. Why do so many people choose to (legally) bind themselves to other humans for life? It means putting up with another’s weird habits and Republican in-laws and holding in your farts (maybe) and the nagging feeling that you’ve bought into some societal or historical paradigm designed to sublimate your entire gender. Why do this when you could live the life of blissfully unscrutinized single slobs, with only your own sociopathic habits to withstand? The Samantha Giron Dance Project examines such compulsions in the new piece Sex, Love, Money starting Friday at CounterPULSE. (continue reading)

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