Second Hand

Way back when I visited Marfa, Texas I fell in love with Ilya Kabakov’s installation School No. 6.  For me it was the notion that a collage could jump off the paper and be done on a large scale and fill a space.  But Marfa has never really been about minimalism – it’s about what I prefer to call maximalism.  The visit to Marfa helped inform my own installation in 2012, Imaging Val Travel.  This week, I was reminded that I want to do more installation creating collages in big, large spaces.  The current show at San Francisco’s Pier 24, titled Secondhand, is brilliant. 

As the name Secondhand implies, it’s all about re-use and repurposing – and at Pier 24, that means photography.   For this exhibit, some of the galleries feel less as if they are curated and more as if they are large collages in themselves.  It begins as visitors are greeted by a wall of vintage employee badges hung in a grid at the entrance.   The concept of curation as collage is also evident in three rooms filled with photos of various ages, assembled and hung as an Archive of Modern Conflict.  For me, the show’s star is Erik Kessels – his installation in almost every picture includes large reproduced, plexi photo cubes – the ones that were on every coffee table in the 1970’s.   His installation Album Beauty was my favorite.  Cases displaying various family photo albums in the center of the room with the albums and photos reproduced on a large scale throughout the room, including some huge prints incorporated into the room’s wallpaper.    It’s a mix of various stranger’s photo albums and personal photos.  I felt the same sense of invasive detachment that I feel when I use old, found photos in my own work.  I just kept standing in the middle room and thinking to myself – I want to do this!

The show runs until May 31, 2015 – but as the museum is getting better known, I recommend making your reservations well in advance as things book-up ever quicker. 

Summer at Pier 24

There is a new exhibit up at Pier 24, so it was time to go back. I still am in awe of the show I saw last winter. The current exhibit is another stellar offering from their collection. I am beginning to think San Francisco can boast the best museum for contemporary photography on the West Coast and one of the best in the world.

There is a nice series of the Eadweard Muybridge Victorian images of San Francisco. They were taken before the 1906 earthquake and fire. Below each image is a corresponding, more recent, photo by Mark Klett. They help provide some orientation, but as nearly everything in the Muybridge photos was destroyed, there are few similarities between the sets of images. The Muybridge prints are pristine and amazingly clear. San Francisco looks stunning. It took me a moment to grasp that part of the effect is that these photos were created at a time when we truly were a Victorian city. Every bit of trim and bric-a-brac is intact. Even though I live right below Alamo Square, Victorian San Francisco is not quite what it once was. The exteriors of about half the remaining Victorians have been altered in significant ways — everything from Art Deco, stucco “modernizations” to the sacrifices of front yards for parking garages to some really tragic asbestos or aluminum siding.

The show also includes a new series of work by Larry Sultan. Perhaps best described as landscapes. They show the intrusion of mcmansion subdivisions into wild California. Like so much of his work, far into the future it will be used as a document of our current era. Sultan is one of the Muybridge’s of the current Turn of the Century.

One of the reasons I go to see work in person is to expose myself to new work and new artists. I am wondering how I have gone so far without knowing the work of Henry Wessel.

You have to plan to go see Pier 24, reserve it in advance and maybe play hooky from work. Right now, it is still a local treasure that we can take advantage of before it really gets discovered.

It feels like Marfa under the Bay Bridge

Today I visited Pier 24, the amazing photography museum hidden in plain site under the Bay Bridge. The current exhibit is from the collection of Randi and Bob Fisher and runs through February 28.
The exhibit showcases a stellar collection of the some best photography in the world. It's pretty much the all star team of modern photography with most photographers getting a dedicated room. Many of the works I've seen in various museum shows over the years. So much looks familiar, if not from museums, but from my own library of art books. Seeing so much of this caliber of photography at one time is a rare treat, The space is vast, calming and quiet.
The museum is free but you must make a reservation to visit. The crowd is very small. It is a feeling I have not had since visiting the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. It's a privilege to be surrounded by so much art in an uncrowded quiet space.