Bay Area Exhibitions

ROBIN KANDEL: THE 45TH PARALLEL

545 4th Street, San Francisco

October 13 – November 11, 2016

“This work is about a specific place and any place. It’s about midpoints, landmarks, road trips, road maps, and long stretches that take us somewhere and elsewhere”. — Robin Kandel

True to her previous explorations, Kandel consistently examines and dissects our notions of distance and location. Her practice remains deliberately slow and meditative, creating a fluid rhythm of straight lines that layer to bring about a kinetic yet minimal optical effect. Showing over 20 new works, ranging in size, Kandel employs acrylic paints and graphite on various materials such as vintage maps and wood panels.

This series of work relates to Kandel’s primary school memories of first thinking about distance and location while making paper globes in geography class. She revisited the experience recently when she came face to face with the 45th Parallel while stopping through Traverse City, Michigan. For Kandel, something that only existed conceptually, became real—points on a map are every bit as abstract as they are concrete, embodying meaning as well as information.

http://www.asgallery.com/Exhibition%20Pages/ASG-Kandel2016.php

FRANK STELLA: A RETROSPECTIVE

de Young, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco

NOV 5, 2016 – FEB 26, 2017

For almost six decades Frank Stella has been one of the most important and influential figures in the evolution of modern art, expanding the definitions of art and challenging its conventions. Exploring pictorial space—how paintings can seem to expand or contract, lie completely flat or envelop the viewer, suggest movement or foster stillness—has led to some of Stella’s most significant innovations. In its examination of his work, this exhibition considers Stella’s long-standing interest in the picture plane, presenting early paintings that reference the spaces where he lived and worked; his groundbreaking use of color, shape, and volume to map new possibilities for abstraction; and finally his use of advanced technology to evoke new conceptions of space.

https://deyoung.famsf.org/exhibitions/stella

Claudy Jognstra: Aarde

SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, San Francisco

May 14, 2016–April 2, 2017

Using wool from heritage sheep she raises in the Northern Netherlands, Dutch designer Claudy Jongstra creates visceral landscapes of texture and color. For Aarde, a monumental, site-specific mural installation at SFMOMA, Jongstra applied Bay Area minerals to hand-dyed wool. This large-scale textile mural works in evocative contrast to the hard-edge materials of the museum’s building, creating a unique passage that marks SFMOMA’s architectural history through the designs of architects Mario Botta in 1995, Mark Jensen in 2008, and Snøhetta in 2016.

https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/claudy-jongstra-aarde/

WILL AND BE GOING TO

Altman Siegel, 1150 25th Street, San Francisco

November 11 – December 17, 2016

Will and Be Going To includes work by Zarouhie Abdalian, Nate Boyce, Jessica Dickinson, Shannon Ebner, Liam Everett, Laeh Glenn, Chris Johanson, Matt Keegan, Shinpei Kusanagi, Devin Leonardi, K.r.m. Mooney, Alex Olson, Trevor Paglen, Will Rogan, Sara VanDerBeek and Emily Wardill.

Deriving its title from Shannon Ebner’s two-part photograph, Will and Be Going To suggests both a present state and directive for future mobility. The black-and-white diptych is comprised of the titular text—an inverted phrase from the artist’s video A PUBLIC CHARACTER—that Ebner stacked atop a scavenged pole. Acting as a prop for language, the rod holds the phrase in space like a three-dimensional word bubble, framing and directing the fragmented speech. This interchangeability of subjects and verbs, evading traditional grammar rules and coupled with the object’s insertion into the natural landscape, combine to question the rigidity of architecture and hint at the impending failure of these structures. The two images differ only slightly in their depictions of the California landscape. The subtle shift in the clouds suggests only minutes or seconds between exposures of the ephemeral, text box skyline. Stimulating the interstices of language and photography, Ebner’s pigment print diptych, like much of the artist’s focus, addresses our understanding of time and space, and serves as an introduction to the works presented here by Altman Siegel’s artists.

http://www.altmansiegel.com/exhibitions-l/current/

VIVIANE SASSEN Pikin Sleep & ELSPETH DIEDERIX In These Shadows SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Casemore Kirkeby, 1275 Minnesota Street, #102, San Francisco

November 4 – December 22, 2016

Viviane Sassen and Elspeth Diederix first met in an art class as teenagers and have remained close friends throughout their adult lives. While they came to photography via different routes, both cite their childhood experiences as Europeans living in Africa as formative to their sensibilities, and both create images that challenge the tendency to quickly categorize and make sense of what we see, especially when confronting a photograph. Instead they invite us into worlds that demand a sustained attentiveness, where novelty and surprise are fully integrated into the surroundings and textures of the everyday, and images and objects resonate with their own strange authority. They also privilege the highly personal and subjective view as the most open-ended approach to their material; whether working at home or abroad, both artists are fine-tuned to the experience of displacement, of finding the familiar in the foreign and vice versa, and create a generous space for what lies between.

http://casemorekirkeby.com/exhibition/viviane-sassen-elspeth-diederix/