Oakland Art Murmur, March 2010

March 16th, 2010

These reviews of the March 2010 First Friday Oakland Art Murmur were originally written for comPAct, “the punk rock little brother” of Plastic Antinomy. Layla Lyne-Winkler, Editor.

Article X @ Johansson Projects, 2300 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, January 30 – March 20th

The photos of David Trautrimas portray a future made believable by its connection to the present. His structures are dismantled lawn mowers, oil cans, electric razors, digitally pieced together in Photoshop. Their windows are lifted from Toronto apartments. The landscapes—walls, lawns, and trees—a composite of images gathered while riding his bike. This lends these fantastical structures an eerie familiarity, not alien, but suggesting evolution through salvage.

“It Leaves a Shining Wake,” Kristina Lewis

If Trautrimas is the architect of the structures of the future, Kristina Lewis is their interior decorator. Like Wall-E’s treasured relics plucked from the rubble of a ruined Earth, her mixed media sculptures of found wires, high-heeled shoes, and zippers echo the repurposing inherent in this vision of the future.

Rating: Yay

UR BEST FRIEND: Work by Diego Benavente, Kelly Best, and Jonah Emerson-Bell @ Hatch Gallery, 492 23rd street Oakland 94612, March 5th – ?

Someone got into their big brother’s eighties porn and he is going to be pissed when he sees what they did to it. Taking silver and gold markers to centerfolds, cigarette ads, and a James Dean cutout, they gave them all the dog-faced boy makeover. The exhibit’s highlight was the party out back, decorated with black balloons. Correction: That was “Untitled with Black balloon and purses” ($1500). I’m not the only one to make such a mistake; A woman set her drink down on “Swastika Desk” ($250). The work is too derivative for the gallery’s comparison to SWOON, and it’s way too soon after the death of Dash Snow to take his name in vain.

“Gimme Lean Jimmie Dean,” Diego Benavente and Jonah Emerson-Bell

Rating: Nay

Michael Singman-Aste
Postdiluvian Photo

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Leave a Reply

https://www.postdiluvianphoto.com/blog/feed/