San Francisco

CatSynth at the 12th Annual Outsound Music Summit, San Francisco

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The annual Outsound Music Summit will be starting this weekend at the Community Music Center (544 Capp St) in San Francisco. And once again, we at CatSynth will be there. I will be participating the Touch the Gear Expo this Sunday (July 21, 7PM) with technologies ranging from iPad soft synths to the analog modular system. I am also curating the concert on Friday, July 26, featuring Transient, a project of David Molina, Matt Davignon’s PMOCATAT ensemble, and a reunion of Fuzzybunny, an electronic improvising trio featuring Tim Perkis, Chris Brown and Scot Gresham-Lancaster. It should be a great show.

The best way to experience the Summit is in person, so if you in the Bay Area, I encourage you to attend one or more of the programs. Ticket information can be found here. But for those who cannot attend, you can follow @catsynth on Twitter and Instagram for live updates, and here on the blog for more in-depth reviews of the shows.

Art Fairs SF 2013 at Stretcher

I recently published an overall review from this year’s San Francisco art fairs at Stretcher, an online magazine covering arts in the Bay Area and beyond.

It’s been a little over a month since the annual art fairs all returned to San Francisco on a single weekend. This year there were just two art fairs instead of three: ArtPadSF was once again at the Phoenix Hotel, and an expanded artMRKT took over the Fort Mason exhibition center. Consolidating to two fairs at once seems more reasonable. Not only is it less overwhelming for attendees, but the shakeout has left a strong dichotomy between the two. artMRKT is an international art fair in San Francisco, while ArtPadSF is a “San Francisco Art Fair.” The latter is very intimately tied to the character of the city and specifically to the surrounding neighborhood, with the exhibitors in hotel rooms around the central pool, surrounded by the buildings of San Francisco’s Downtown/Tenderloin neighborhood.

You can follow this link to read the full article and see a great many images from the fairs. Here are couple of them.

[Stickyphille, Phelipe, Radion (2008-2009), Andrea Patrachi, Mirus Gallery.]

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[Dakini, 2011, Monet Clark, Krowswork.]

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[Works by Michelle Pred, Nancy Hoffman gallery.]

Wordless Wednesday: Here

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Photos from SF Pride

Last Sunday was the big annual Pride celebration in San Francisco, and with the recent court decisions restoring and expanding marriage equality, it was the largest and most celebratory that I had seen in my five years here. It was already quite crowded when I arrived at usual perch along Market Street at 7th.

Marriage equality and the court cases were of course a common theme in signs and displays.

But there was also lots of perennial displays and entertainment. There are beauty queens, for example.

And the obligatory bare-chested men.

The above float does signify one of the big complaints about the event, that it has become very commercial and “corporate”. How should one react to a festive float like this one below, which has a positive message, but it also sponsored by one of the much-despised big banks?

In corporate displays, perhaps none was larger than Facebook, with hundreds of employees marching in colorful t-shirts, and Mark Zuckerberg doing a goofy dance on a bus (sorry, I did not get any good pictures of that). On the positive side, many community organizations were also represented, including the San Francisco SPCA:

The Contemporary Jewish Museum also had a contingent centered around their current Allen Ginsberg exhibition.

There was music, including a rolling live performance from Hedwig and the Angry Itch.

Many ethnic-based groups march in the parade. This year I managed to catch Trikone, a representing LGBT South-Asian Americans (i.e., individuals whose heritage comes from the Indian subcontinent).

Individuals from many countries were also more prominent.

This is a long all-day event. The parade always goes much longer than planned, and then there is the big festival in front of city hall. Certainly there were plenty of complaints to be heard about the crowds and slowness of things. But overall it was a very positive day.

Wordless Wednesday: Mission Rock

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Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble and Emergency (X)tet, Luggage Store Gallery

A few weeks after performing at Berkeley Arts, the Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble returned to the Bay Area. This performance, at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco, featured the same film as a few weeks earlier, but with very different music and thus an overall different experience.

The evening opened with the Emergency (X)tet, featuring Bob Marsh and a rotating cast of string players. This incarnation included Doug Carroll on cello, Kanoko Nishi on bass koto, and David Michalak on lap steel guitar and effects. This was actually a birthday performance for Bob Marsh, so the set opened with a rousing atonal rendition of Happy Birthday that included audience participation. After that introduction, the group performed a number of improvised pieces, each started by a different member. Each piece seemed to focus on a particular texture of the instruments, with long drones that favored the cellos and the slowly bending sounds of the lap steel guitar, to extremely percussive sounds especially focused on the bass koto.

Then it was time for the JCDE performance of their project Current Events. Just as a few weeks earlier, the film opened with stark news images from the crash of Air France Flight 447. But the ensemble quickly veered off in a different direction, with Dubowsky providing a solid jazzy bass line and Erika Johnson and Fred Morgan on percussion holding down the foundation. This was quite a stark contrast to the dark and abstract sounds from the previous performance, but it was quite captivating and fun.

The strongest of the sections, once again, was “Future Cities”, which featured more rhythmic work from the ensemble as well as Dubowsky with classic analog sounds on the Roland Jupiter Six synthesizer – think a space-music jam from the 1970s. Indeed, the musical content made it easier to see more of the detail in the films. In addition to the future cities, I was able to focus on the the critters and landscape textures of the desert section; and the disturbing nature of seeing journalists killed in a U.S. drone strike was much clearer (it probably had a more profound effect on my opinions of drone strikes than two years of reading incessant rants on Facebook).

In addition to getting to see the differences between the two separate JCDE performances, it was also the right order to see them, going from the serious and abstract sounds to the funkier, more rhythmic nature of the second performance. I look forward to seeing more of the ensemble’s work in the future.

Wordless Wednesday: Ramp to Nowhere

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Shai Kremer, Concrete Abstract & Notes From the Edge, Robert Koch Gallery

I am always on the lookout for art that celebrates the landscape and texture of the city in unique ways. Shai Kremer’s solo exhibition at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, Concrete Abstract & Notes From the Edge, fits this goal perfectly. Through choice of setting and compositional techniques, Kremer presents views of New York that are outside the usual iconography of the city.

[Installation view. Image courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery.]

In Concrete Abstract, Kremer looks at the reconstruction efforts at the World Trade Center site. The large-scale photographs feature overlaid images of the construction at the site between 2001 and 2012 and look quite abstract and fantastical even as they reveal real elements such as girders, concrete columns and pipes.

[Shai Kremer, Concrete Abstract #5: World Trade Center 2001 – 2012 (2013). Pigment ink print. Image courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery.]

On one level, a viewer aware of the fact that these are from the World Trade Center site can look for elements that one expects in a large-scale construction project, as well as reminders of the destruction and recover efforts that preceded. However, one can also look at all the layers together to reveal and imaginary future city on an immense scale not yet realized, something out of Metropolis or any number of dystopian urban films. In Concrete Abstract #5, shown above, the concrete skeleton of the floors of the building with their columns become a three-dimension grid of city blocks, with the overlays providing the individual character of each block, some bustling with movement, others looking a bit forlorn.

In Notes From the Edge, Kremer focuses on details and landscapes at the periphery of the city, with the familiar shapes of the Manhattan skyline visible in the distance. The famous cityscape becomes a background to help frame the true subjects of the pieces.

[Shai Kremer, Waterfront, Brooklyn (2010). Pigment ink print. Image courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery]

Kremer explores a variety of locations and elements in this series, ranging from the decaying structures on the Brooklyn waterfront shown above to the clean lines and geometry of the Liberty State Park memorial in New Jersey. There is a painterly quality to the photographs which makes the foreground elements seem like an imaginary projection onto the real city. In making real images of the urban landscape seem more fantastic, Kremer unites this series with the pieces in Concrete Abstract. Taken together, we imagine a city as an unimaginable hive of activity at its core and quiet haunted decaying spaces at its edges.

Kremer’s work in both series is technically strong and demonstrates how simple but unexpected elements can be combined to make views of the city that are unique and celebratory without being overly romantic. This is a quality that makes for great urban art (and great art in general).

The exhibition will remain on display at Robert Koch Gallery through Saturday, June 15. If you are in San Francisco this Friday or Saturday, I strongly recommend checking it out.

Wordless Wednesday: Street Art

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SFMOMA Closing Celebration

Last weekend, SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) remained open all night Saturday into Sunday, ahead of its three year closure and renovation. Thousands turned out for this event, and plenty has already been written about it. But here are a few words and photos from my own experience.

I finally had the opportunity to see the Lebbeus Woods exhibit. I am glad I did. Woods’ architectural sketches were fantastic and whimsical, but still had a sense of modernism to them with strong lines and geometric shapes. There was a sense that these ideas could be realized as actual structures, even if most of them never were.

I did a quick tour through the permanent collection to see a few favorites one last time, including this piece by Yves Tanguy. There were other familiar works, like the room of pieces by Clyfford Still. But the room with minimalist works (like the chrome wall piece by Donald Judd) were not on display.

Then it was up to the rooftop courtyard for nighttime views, mingling, and some live performances. The first group branded themselves as “eco-sexuals”, with a performance that blended eco activism with a variety of things one might associate with the word “sexual.”

SUE-C and Kevin Slagle presented a series of beautiful hand-made films.

And Rick Prelinger presented some of the home movies collected from his archive, particularly those documenting U.S. cross-country road trips.

Then it was downstairs to the reception room for more performances. First up was jazz singer/chanteuse Veronica Klaus with a very retro set of jazz standards:

Emcee Marga Gomez delivered her interstitial schtick from a desk on the side, in the style of late-night shows.

More performances followed, including some randomized musical readings by Sofía Córdova and a performance descending the landmark SFMOMA staircase by Chris Sollars. Both fun, but challenging to photograph. The next performance by Dia Dear was fairly mindblowing both visually and sonically:

Up next was a trio featuring Dale Hoyt with David Lawrence and Liz Walsh.

They presented a sing-a-long with a somewhat more wistful view of the museum’s closure, lamenting the time away and those who might never have the opportunity to come back. THey closed with a version of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” (made popular as the closing song in the movie Dr. Strangelove).

As it was approaching 3AM, I decided it was time for me to depart. The celebration continued with more performances into the morning and next afternoon and a final processional to mark the closing of the museum. They will be having off-site exhibitions over the next few years at other locations in the Bay Area, and I look forward to seeing them.