Lately I’ve become obsessed with the paintings of Sydney Cohen, the Oakland-based artist who is also an adjunct painting/drawing professor at California College of the Arts. We met there last summer teaching painting in the Pre-College Program on the Oakland campus. She is warm and unpretentious, and we became fast friends commiserating... More
John Koch’s solo debut, Interpenetrations at Right Window Gallery closed a little over a week ago, but it was such a joyous surprise of a show that I wanted to share it with those who may have missed it. Consisting of a large high-contrast photograph blown up to fit the full frame and right angle of the window and back-lit with fluorescent ... More
Yesterday, I woke up to the tragic news that Trish Keenan, frontwoman for the UK band Broadcast, had passed away from complications stemming from pneumonia contracted while on tour in Australia. She was 42. Since becoming a columnist on Open Space, I had hoped to bring in musical topics to the blog. While I would never have wished this to be that ... More
One of my favorite haunts in San Francisco is the San Francisco Antique and Design Mall, tucked away near the end of Bayshore Drive near Industrial, just before it reaches over into Visitacion Valley. It’s one of the few places in the city where, once inside, one can truly feel like they’re on vacation, or at least in another, much sma... More
“The Gauntlet” is what my partner, Cliff Hengst, and I have long dubbed the block of Capp St. between our apartment and our art studios in the Mission. On any given day you can find — through the obstacle course of trash, rotting food, feces, needles, and other junk — random personal ephemera: scrawled notes, posted messages, discarded f... More
I went down to the Artists Shop at Right Window on Friday evening and bought two pictures by San Francisco painter Scott Hewicker. He is one of my favorites and oh! So cheap! The artists’ shop is a project of the video artist Karla Milosevich and runs this weekend and next down at 992 Valencia Street. Lots and lots of artists, everything very reasonable, and 100 per cent of the $$$ goes to the artists themselves.
First I bought this little piece which I call, “Red Sun.”
Then I fought off several other would-be buyers to lay my hands on this great picture (below). Can you see it or can you not see it? It is like that old etching of Vanity looking into her mirror and canny viewers see a big skull, Or like that old optical illusion Wittgenstein wrote about where it looks like a duck and it looks like a rabbit. Well, look again, and you will see two black cats aping the viewer’s gaze and staring, like yourself, into the severely luscious weather conditions only Hewicker kn... More
[As a timely intermission here in the middle of the JUNE ALEXANDERPLATZ onslaught, we introduce a new regular feature. Each month or so we'll ask a local guest to organize lists, groupings, or 'exhibitions' from our permanent collection, to be presented here on the blog. For our first installment, I invited two long-time Bay Area artists, Scott Hewicker and Cliff Hengst, who are also musicians, record collectors, and DJs, to select their favorite works and pair them with song clips, a permanent-collection "playlist", our first "Collection Rotation." I... More
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