"What do you think about space and time travel?" "But I thought all travels were done in time and space?"-PABLO GUARDIOLA

It's the air of mystery and slight tease; this black hole between image and didactic experience, the sometimes quirky attributes to art making and ingesting that keeps me completely addicted. Come hell or high water, a good friend of mine decisively said, "I make art because I have to."


On February 24th, I attended a curator talk at the SFMOMA about Shahzia Sikander's piece, Sinxay: Narrative as Dissolution #2, which further pushed my fascination with language and imagery. Its subject matter relates to the greatest Laotian epic poem transcribed by Sikander but because of her unfamiliarity with the language, despite her ethnic ties to Laos, the imagery becomes this huge entanglement of beautiful typography and disassociation.  As someone who is more visually biased, writing has never been my expertise, and I relate so deeply to this investigation Sikander is showing us. 

Which brings me to my next artist, Laura Lineback, who has investigated the posterity of language and its specificity to sociopolitical issues, with some of the best painterly humor around.

Recently, I interviewed Laura Lineback and wish to share some of her words of wisdom.

SM: When and where do you spend time to reflect on your work?

LL: I think I'm the opposite. I am always thinking about my work and then I need time-outs. I really like doing yoga to calm down and reflect or I literally have to write it in my schedule and I keep a planner. I've kept a written planner since I was 16...I've had ones with pictures of Paris or cartoon ones....this one isn't so bad. My boss gave me this sticker that says, "You are young, broke, and beautiful." (points to sticker on planner)

SM: You are partially at home, partially at school, and now at your new studio. How has this change affected you?

LL: The studio is essential for an artist. When you go there, you know you're there to get to work. When you're working at home, it's too easy to get distracted, but when you're paying for a studio space, you really know that it's time to get shit done! Just as it helps a writer to get out of the house and head to a coffee shop or something like that.

SM: You do stand up comedy and I was curious if improv ever plays into your painting practice?

LL: Improv plays a very important role into my life. In improv you learn all these rules: don't deny, don't ask questions and the biggest thing is...which I've tried to teach and it's really difficult; you can't be afraid to fail. With paintings it's the exact same thing. When you become afraid to fail, you become hesitant and it gets really hard.  A painter and Associate Professor at SFSU always says, you make a painting to figure it out. If you already had it figured out, why would you make the painting?

If you would like to read more, "rants from a younger, prettier, less pervy, female Woody Allen," visit

Laura Lineback's website: http://reallycoldice.com/

For the next few weeks there will be short interview recaps in my blog in addition to other writings about openings and art related events. Don't be surprised if there are sporadic pictures of recent artwork made by yours truly, as well. 

To finalize this post, just wanted to give you a short blurb of what personal art-making projects I'm working on. With all the recent interest in text versus imagery; my next series will be paintings attributed to recent museum blog and art critic reviews. A recent study by two universities, one in the US and one in England, have coded the language used by major international company Twitter updates to predict the stock market with 90% accuracy. They took the emotionally alluded words to predict whether stocks were going to rise or fall. This made me ecstatic and now I want to delve more into the over-all-tone of the written art world. Maybe I will even be able to anticipate whether or not art sales will go up! None the less, it will be interesting to see what art comes from those who write about it. Simulacrum! It will be a really big game of Telephone-Pictionary except I'm the only one voluntarily playing. If I have you confused and tantalized; just wait to see the product!

Oh, maker

Just wanted to update with a few shots of my work from my last semester at San Francisco State...

Then I was going to take a break for the next month but I started making mental notes...and a few drawings of Dogpatch (district) landscape accoutrements...

Guess what your holiday thank you cards are going to look like. 

Yep!

Adobe, Dolby Chadwick, and more

To be honest, it's been kind of a struggle writing in this blog of mine. Every time I sit down to write something about the galleries I've visited in the past week, all I want to do is grab my pencils or paints. Whether it's really bad work that inspires me to do what they aren't doing or really amazing work that drop kicks me to challenge myself more with my own work, I'm getting impatient on writing about it.

But here are some highlights and some serious lowlights:

I'm kind of in love with Sean McFarland and his tiny found landscape photographs that have been framed with paint to look like old polaroid borders and covered in wax. They are treasures that you would imagine to find tucked away in some box on the floor of an old bookstore. I don't think McFarland could have chosen a more perfect venue. It was sort of reminiscent to Barry McGee's works of pictures of the sun found on the internet photomontage, but this was so much better. Maybe because it was in a dusty old place instead of a stark white, clean museum...I don't know.

Then I went to Needles and Pens...

The story behind this show is that friends, Daniel Higgs and Kyle Ranson, decided to be pen palls and play a little back and forth de kooning and rauschenberg drawing play except nobody gets their drawing erased. Indirectly I thought of Carl Jung's collective unconscious, where the artists are pulling from their subconscious imagery database to reference something from a previous image. Eventually a metamorphases results. This style of work is popping up all over the place, whether is fecalface.com or mission murals or fashion magazines, even graffiti artists doing obscure looking portraits. 

Here's Tom Leiber's work from Dolby Chadwick Gallery. It was nicely framed. It's obvious he has a good sense of creating space with color but overall, the gestural quality was pretty boring. They are pretty big, about 72"x 72", and its obvious the works are about a full body experience, action painting. I wasn't surprised to read in the artist's statement about meditation and yoga.

But here's some exciting news, Ms. Chadwick has an artist I've been keeping my eye on, Alex Kanevsky, showing October 7th-30th. I never thought I would ever get the chance to see his works in the flesh, but she personally brought out some pieces for me to view when I was there. Gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous, is all I have to say. I almost don't care that the figures in their space don't make any meaningful sense to me. The way the paint is applied and use of color is just amazing in person.

Wonderland September 2nd Opening

I recently read an article in ArtForum by Olafur Alaisson that, in short, provoked the idea of the museum space and challenges whether quiet, white and traditional are still necessary, or if it ever was? By white, I meant walls, specifically, but we all know it means more than that. That's why I think galleries are so necessary and why the Mission district can be such an exciting place to view works in a setting that activates the content of the work.

This past thursday evening I visited Wonderland gallery/boutique showcasing the "Fantasy Girls/Mujeres de Fantasia" exhibiting figurative work by 18 bay area artists.  Here are a few of the artist's work:

"La Muerte y la Doncella (Death and the Maiden) 30"x30"

by Rachel Znerold

"Patience"

by Amanda Lynn Andrzej

Mark Campbell

"Description for image 5"

by Mark Campbell

Most of the work was ornamental and played off of trends in fashion and popular culture. The artist who stood out the most to me was Mark Campbell for his ability to successfully use his original surface to give form, and to integrate paint seamlessly. But my interests ended there, because it was mostly line based and just about the figure. Figurative works have never made me that excited because I can't make that great of connection to the context or importance of the person. It just comes down to the fact that I don't know them or what they mean to the artist, (unless there are better visual hints to a global contemporary social issue or painterly issue, I can't keep interested).  

Overall, the show was boring. It took me about 15 minutes to get around the large crowd to see a lot of works that weren't thoughtfully put together. Watercolor works that were buckled, bad lighting, and lack of cohesiveness to the transition of works and overarching theme. Plus a bunch of art groupies with red cups and bad balance.