Art and music notes. Friday, December 18

Last Friday, I managed to visit four different art and music events in one evening. Below are some reflections from each.

Our first stop was the offices of Kearny Street Workshop for their SF Thomassons Holiday Party. Readers may recall KSW’s APAture Festival and the Present Tense Biennial.

“Thomassons” are architectural elements that exist (or persist) outside of the original intended function, such as an inaccessible door leading out of an upper floor of a building, or a staircase leading to nowhere. The term was coined by Japanese conceptual artist and writer Akasegawa Genpei, and the Thomasson website allows people to upload examples from around the world. We at CatSynth have actually presented several Thomassons in our Wordless Wednesday photographic series, including these stairs leading into the San Francisco Bay. KSW’s “SF Thomassons” project involves photography and performance art centered around Thomasson sites in San Francisco. The party was a preview to coincide with Kaya Press’ publication of the first English translation of HYPERART: THOMASSON, and included a performance-art piece set at one of the largest sites in the city, an abandoned church at Howard and 10th streets that happens to be across the street from KSW’s offices.


After that, it was off to Gallery Six at 66 Sixth Street. The current exhibition, entitled “Every Single Where”, features new works by local artist Pakayla Biehn. The paintings each carried superimposed images that are similar but not identical, as if multiple exposures from a camera. According to the press release, Biehn has a congenital visual disability, and her paintings attempt to “give the viewer an understanding of her own optical condition.” Although they share the common theme, each work was stylistically quite different.

Actually, the work in the gallery that caught my attention was not in the featured exhibition, but on display in the back room from a previous exhibition, a small geometric print entitled “Bird’s Nest” from Charmaine Olivia’s Urban Managerie.


From Gallery Six, we then went to Gallery 16 for an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of Emigre. Emigre was a combination digital type foundry and publisher founded by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, and is known both for its typefaces and the design journal Emigre Magazine. The exhibition included examples from the magazine and other designs featuring Emigre fonts.

The prints had a very clean quality, with bold colors, large shapes, and of course text. I particularly liked the works based on Licko’s abstract Puzzler font, with it’s arrangements of dots and other elements into larger complex patterns. One of the large prints (again combining text and geometric elements) also featured a large barcode with a valid ISBN number. Thinking myself quite clever, I performed a quick internet search to find out what it was – I suppose I should not have been surprised that it was issue #67 of Emigre Magazine, although the cover image from the magazine looks nothing like this print.


The final stop was Cafe du Nord for a party and concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of KFJC Radio. This was the last of several events marking the anniversary, including the concert at FLUX53 that I attended earlier in the week.

Because of the busy schedule for the evening, we only caught two of the many bands performing. First was the band al Qaeda (I am sure they were aware the name was already taken). Their music combined driving punk-style drum and guitar elements with experimental electronics elements and electrical noise.

Al Qaeda was followed Arrington de Dionyso. I had seen de Dionyso perform in a trio at FLUX53, but this time he was with his band. Once again, he performed a combination of bass clarinet with various vocal techniques, including throat singing, set against standard rock drum, bass and guitar sounds. On the screen behind the band, increasingly complex black-and-white drawings (or paintings) were being created live.