November 27, 2002

By Glen Helfand

A COUPLE THOUSAND people, most of them young and scruffy, squeezed into Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the opening of "Bay Area Now 3," the hotly anticipated triennial showcase of indigenous art. Ask anyone – it was a great party. Bands, beer (albeit overpriced), cute scenesters, and pervasive optimistic vibes surrounded what, through the masses and cocktail chatter, looked to be a strong exhibition of 30 local visual artists. The San Francisco art scene, it seemed, might be back on track as a vital force, rebounding from dot-com infections. The event was a welcome opportunity to affirm the fact that, indeed, there is something going on in the Bay Area now.

After the rollicking reception, enthusiasm for the exhibition as a whole (which also contains film, video, and performance programs not addressed in this review) has been less than unanimous. I've heard some people praise it as a great and varied project and others dismiss it as a trumped-up MFA show. Post-opening night, in the harsh light of day, I have the feeling that "BAN 3" holds up reasonably well. It's a better-than-average, mixed-bag survey of certain brands of Bay Area artistic production, strains that reflect the taste of curators René de Guzman, Renny Pritikin, and Arnold J. Kemp. The presentation contains a range of solid work and a few genuine head-scratchers – the whole feels greater than the sum of its parts.

A prime appeal of broad surveys is to capture a zeitgeist. This show, with a stated curatorial theme of the "everyday," highlights artists who work in a mode that's antithetical to recent boom-era excess. There's an emphasis on funky materials and an attention to ordinary subjects. The unassuming sculptures by Christopher Garrett, for example, include a giant wad of crumpled paper and a tower made of scavenged cardboard boxes. The latter material also houses Jon Santos's winning Saul Bass-meets-DJ Spooky audio-video installation. Kota Ezawa uses similar low-cost animation for his cartoon reenactment of the delivery of the O.J. Simpson verdict, a Colorforms-like crowd pleaser that offers a politically ambivalent take on mass media, placing the former football star in a realm commonly associated with some other Simpsons. Bob Linder's two video projections channel the Bay Area conceptualists of the 1970s by documenting low-tech actions with digital video. Even the one Web-based artwork, an overly ambitious, somewhat muddled telematic installation by Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, includes a flea-market selection of appliances. A yard-sale spirit also seeps from Abner Nolan's black-and-white photographs of quirky, quotidian subjects, which have been lovingly printed from found negatives. While attractive, these pictures conceptually don't quite distinguish themselves from the recent gallery credence given to anonymous, nonart photographs.

In contrast to previous years' busy expolike presentations, "BAN 3" feels cohesive and comfortably spare. This may be because there is indeed a polite humbleness in the tone – few things scream for attention. The opening hallway gallery, for example, contains works that quietly revel in private cosmologies. Anne Collier's elegantly deadpan color photographs of eclectic subject matter are personal rebuses, while Shaun O'Dell's tight drawings of wave shapes, eagle heads, and the Transamerica Pyramid are strong but highly subjective explorations that don't necessarily play well with those of other artists.

Further in, however, thematic and stylistic communities emerge. There's an oddly pervasive bird motif; friendly or doom-laden feathered creatures appear in the work of O'Dell, Jo Jackson, Carolyn Ryder-Cooley, and Desireé Arlette Holman. The selection of paintings, rather than showcasing a range of practices, highlight an affinity for candy-colored glop and drips. Linda Geary's small paintings are shiny, messy conglomerations of what look like swirls of still-wet nail polish. Katherine Sherwood presents a more provocative series of pastel-hued organic abstractions based on the patterns of brain scans, which are actually incorporated into her mixed-media works on canvas. It's difficult, however, to find meaning in Amy Ellingson's unabashedly beautiful pattern paintings, though they create a potent sense of dimension via semitransparent layers of oil and encaustic. Even William Swanson, with an ambitious but moderately successful vertical installation of quasi-futuristic landscape paintings, relies on controlled runny acrylic, though with much flatter results than the aforementioned painters.

Elsewhere, works by Ryder-Cooley, Sara Thustra (a.k.a. Z), and skateboard god Mark Gonzalez continue a Bay Area tradition of street-based works introduced in earlier "BAN" shows by Barry McGee, Chris Johanson, and Margaret Kilgallen. It's a lineage for which the region is best and most proudly known, but if "BAN 3" is to be trusted, the lineage's latest threads are based more in aesthetics than in identity. (You might recall that YBC's initial, now seemingly historic imperative was to represent community in all its multi-culti glory.) Those of us looking to see local reflections of, or responses to, the frightening conservative chill that's running through the backbone of this country will have to wait for the next edition of the exhibition – aside from Thustra's mural (and Hung's facile installation), "BAN 3" is emphatically apolitical in tone.

A broader and more problematic thematic constant – one that has always haunted "BAN" exhibitions – is adolescence. The art world, like most market-based spheres, is enamored of the new and fresh, but here the curators seem to think spotlighting young artists means showing works fixated on childhood. Aaron Plant's extra-large color photographs of aging playgrounds at night are handsome but rote expressions of nostalgia for growing pains, while Jona Frank's attractive but derivative three-screen video installation focuses on the choreography of a high school ROTC drill team. (It plays like a low-rent hybrid of Sharon Lockhart's Goshogaoka and Isaac Julien's Long Road to Mazatlan, the latter recently seen in the same gallery). Frank Haines's four-wall mural made from colorful felt cutouts is awe-inspiringly labor-intensive, but the subject matter calls to mind Dungeons and Dragons. Felipe Dulzaides's engaging video installation offers perspectives from bike and skateboard riders, and Eamon Ore-Giron's flat, colorful acrylic paintings depict fantasy-theme holes at a surrealistic miniature golf course.

Keith Boadwee's raunchy, puerile (and occasionally hilarious) photos and videos are like an art world version of Jackass, and Allison Sheild's misfired installation of found toys and letters resembles a shelf of gewgaw in an eight-year-old's room, the point of which is unclear. More effective is Holman's queasier installation, a Disneyesque fusion of animation and live-action video that dissembles, formally and psychologically, notions of cuteness.

While the pieces vary in quality, the simple fact that they've been brought together suggests the Bay Area art scene is beset with a Peter Pan syndrome. The greater cohesion of the show hints at a scene growing up, but finds that Yerba Buena Center, as an institution, is still seduced by youth. The kids are alright, and they know how to party; the next step is to lure them into serious conversation.