See these shows before they close
The energy of this fall season in the art galleries has been remarkable. If you are trying to keep up, you will have to bring equal vigor to making the rounds.
Run, don’t walk: Three excellent exhibitions that may earlier have escaped notice are closing this week.
JJ Peet’s deliciously outré painted heads, at Anthony
Meier Fine Arts (1969 California St., S.F. www.anthony meierfinearts.com) only though Friday, Sept. 29, might have been sketched in the darkness of a bad dream, and his cast sculptures preserve in bronze what few would want around in the original. Gothic in a good way.
And two strong shows at Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota St., both close Saturday, Sept. 30. Jack Fischer Gallery (www.jack fischergallery.com) presents
Annie Vought’s series of wondrously detailed, cutpaper texts and designs on drawing paper left behind by her artist father, with evocative titles like “My Imagination Fills in the Blanks About Your Life.” And a pop-up version of the ephemeral bookstore/publisher/ gallery Electric Works (www.sfelectricworks.com) offers deeply absorbing, abstract drawings and paintings by the collaborative duo Hughen/Starkweather, built up from topographic maps and planning documents. Artists Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather will discuss the work at a closing reception in the gallery on Saturday at 5 p.m.
Elsewhere at Minnesota
Street Project: The big name is Vik Muniz, the Brazilian artist who, for three decades, has fascinated audiences worldwide with his photographed compositions “drawn” in unlikely materials (chocolate syrup, spaghetti, torn paper). The Rena Bransten Gallery (http://rena branstengallery.com) presentation of recent work, “Handmade,” through Oct. 28, is something of a perception game, with real objects mixed together with illusionistic photographs. Brief fun as picture puzzles, the works have little conceptual sticking power. Sean McFarland’s exhibition “Echo,” at Casemore
Kirkeby (https://casemore kirkeby.com), through Oct. 28, presents the same sort of pictures, in much the same way, as his room at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of the 2017 SECA Art Award exhibition, which closed earlier in September. So, why does it look so much better this time out? One big reason is the casual presentation, with many prints leaning on or pinned to the wall and no massive vitrine to keep viewers away. This is how McFarland’s meditations on nature — and on the nature of representation — are meant to be seen.
The work can be annoyingly precious, with curls of paper tacked just so, and tiny paper cards on miniature shelves bearing indecipherable bits of photographic information demanding attention equal to that we afford real pictures. But the full scope of the artist’s obsessions is worth the patience the work demands. Eventually, a landscape as a faint, torn image or a jittery multiple exposure convinces us of its significance as an object redolent of its uncertain time. Anglim Gilbert Gallery’s (http://anglimgilbertgallery.com) “Gay Outlaw: Ozone” is the most fun I have had in a glass exhibition, probably ever. It runs through Oct. 14.
Clunky cast blocks in sugary colors look like fruitcakes from seasons long past (Outlaw calls the series “Meatloafsunset”) — think of them as Pop art, after the fall.
Around the room, unextraordinary photographs are rendered comically dumb with a tough ... smash? snuff? puff? — the artist calls it a “flow” — of opaque colored glass in the center. A glassy bloom expands, as if exposing the pictures’ saccharine guts as they spill forward, obscuring surface image, exposing what had been secreted within.