New gallery, featuring Valerie Hegarty work, offers hope.
Burning in Water opens with Valerie Hegarty show at Minnesota Street Project
There is no more optimistic act in the art world than to open a new gallery. A commitment to making art requires courage; writing about it demands a certain hubris. To sell art, though, one must project a confidence in the future that is hard to fake, given the money, time, contacts and organizational skills — not to mention the wardrobe — one needs just to get started. That is why I am always cheered to hear of the birth of a new commercial art space in the Bay Area. When the newcomer is an extension of a promising but fragile startup elsewhere, well, let us choose to interpret that as even more potent positivity. Burning in Water is a phrase known to fans of poet Charles Bukowski, whose collection “Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame” was published in 1974. It’s also the name of a New York gallery barely 2 years old, but which has experi-
enced a measure of success in the critical arena and, the gallerists claim, among collectors.
Founder Barry T. Malin and San Francisco Director Anna Hygelund launched their new outlet at Minnesota Street Project (1275 Minnesota St., S.F. www.burninginwater.net) this week with a seductively downbeat exhibition by Brooklyn artist Valerie Hegarty. “American Berserk,” which will run through July 18, might be called Bukowskian in its dark humor, though the works have a decidedly surrealist bent.
Hegarty has built a regional (that is, New York) reputation with over-the-top sculptural objects that look like 19th century American paintings come to life. Birds fly, trees branch off the canvas surface and into the gallery; pictured forest fires burn their frames to ash.
For their shared San Francisco debut, Hegarty and her gallery are unveiling a body of work in ceramic sculpture, perhaps counting on a perceived West Coast receptiveness to clay as a medium.
One series of lumpy green portrait busts put me in mind of the late, great Viola Frey. It is obvious that they depict George Washington, but I had to be told that, more precisely, they are meant to be seen as topiary portraits of the first president.
That kind of loopy humor, often with reference to American history, carries through the show. Strange watermelon slices morphing into gruesome smiles suggest a diseased association of the fruit with race and slavery. Humanoid vegetables writhe and die. A sailing ship looks to be made of finger bones, the skeletal remains of a history of conquest. Painting as object. An eclectic selection of “paintings” and prints by 34-year-old Wyatt Kahn, on view at Adrian Rosenfeld Gallery (1150 25th St., S.F. https://adrianrosenfeld. com), archly conflates 50-year-old art movements like post-minimalism and pop.
The works are composed of fragmentary objects made of plain canvas or lead wrapped around stretchers. Some build up to absurd but engaging figurative abstractions. These can be almost camouflaged, such as the telephone handset embedded in “Drift and Receive,” or cartoonish 3-D personages that pop off the wall like the character in “A Him in Hand” (both 2018).
Other works, somewhat earlier to judge from the checklist, are accumulations of geometric forms that result in origami-like folded constructions.
The exhibition continues through June 16. Science, art and belief. No matter what we have learned about the malleability of meaning in photographs, we still treat them as surrogates for the real thing. In her exhibition “Cloned,” at Gallery 16 (501 Third St., S.F. https://gallery16.com) through May 25, Alice Shaw presents pictures of sheep. Delivered deadpan, the show is a brief but absorbing rumination (forgive the pun) on the science of cloning, the puzzling appeal of duplication and the problem of truth.
As if to say there is no reason to make new pictures of so mundane a subject, the show opens with a giant print on fabric of an antique image of pairs of sheep on a hillside. Re-presenting an existing photograph in a new context is as useful, for the purpose of introduction, as making a new one. That’s a common trope of contemporary art, and it fits the theme for exactly that reason.
Pairings appear throughout: side by side, front to back, positive and negative, in true and faux stereoscopic presentation. Are we seeing the same animal over and over, or are there multiple copies? Generally, we have no way to know.
Dolly, the first successful mammal clone, makes an appearance in a short video. I’m convinced it’s her, though stuffed and on display in a museum, because I compared the image to one found on the Internet. Of course.
The best thing about the show is that it is devoid of text — something I rarely end up feeling. In this case, though, the images and their juxtapositions say what added words would only faintly echo.
For San their Francisco shared debut, Valerie Hegarty and hergallery are unveiling a body of work in ceramic sculpture.