Art! Jessica Martin, Keira Kotler, Rafael Delacruz, Ruth Asawa Part 2, Hayal Pozanti, Johansson Projects
the start-of-the-month post
A visit to the Minnesota Street Project galleries, the second half of my reportage on the current big Ruth Asawa show, and highlights from a couple of other Bay Area galleries. We’ve got a lot to get to this month, kids. Let’s hop to it!
Jessica Martin
I saw Jessica Martin’s show at Themes & Projects (in the main Minnesota Street Project galley building) and I loved it. Her colorful shapes and patterns and forms — presented both in a wall of wooden cut-out shapes and collection of paintings — are very much up my alley. Alas, most all the gallery shows I’ll be talking about here ended at the end of May, so I cannot send you to go see them.
Keira Kotler
Right across the hall was a show of Keira Kotler’s work at Nancy Toomey gallery. Abstract photography exploring fields of color and light, this was another body of work almost tailor-made to speak to the particular visual receptors in my particular brain.
Rafael Delacruz
Folks don’t always make it to Altman Siegel gallery in their MSP meanderings, because you have to leave the main building and walk up the block. But it’s well worth the effort to find a big beautiful New York-style “white-cube” converted warehouse space showing great work. I got to see Rafael Delacruz’s large dreamy canvases and found myself especially drawn to the most abstract ones.
Ruth Asawa (part 2)
Last month I raved about the wealth of sculptures on display in the current vast Ruth Asawa show at SFMOMA. But, as I mentioned, there’s a whole other dimension to the show that disserves its own moment in the sun—and that moment has now arrived—her works on paper. This show contains such a vast wealth of drawings, sketches, prints, watercolors, and other pictures Asawa created in various mediums, it’s really remarkable. Though I’m about to show you a whole bunch, this is truly only a tiny fraction of what’s there (there are, for instance, as whole vast series of drawings of flower bouquets from late in her life that are gorgeous). Here are my favorites:
Hayal Pozanti
I went to see the large-scale paintings of Hayal Pozanti at Jessica Silverman gallery. Their imagery hovers somewhere between florals and landscapes, with brilliant colors and luminous brushwork giving them a glow-y, surreal, almost psychedelic quality. Great stuff.
Johansson Projects
Last but not least, I popped into Johansson Projects when I was in Oakland, where there was a group exhibition, Curated Corners, featuring artists who “explore complex emotions while illustrating human and spatial connections” and I found a few pictures there that I particularly adored. I wasn’t able to spot an end-date for this show, so if you want to try and see it you could take your chances!
xo
b
That Ruth Osawa chair <3