Rewarding exhibitions by Tavares Strachan and Barry McGee
Missing any of the many worthy exhibitions in the galleries this month is sure to feed that end-of-year anxiety we all feel.
Tavares Strachan (at Anthony Meier Fine Arts, closing Dec. 11) calls upon his impressive skills as a glassmaker to fabricate uncannily delicate objects that nevertheless bear a heavy conceptual weight.
The centerpiece of this, his gallery debut in San Francisco, is a pulsing blue neon, full-scale glass facsimile of the human circulatory system.
The figure, raised above a pedestal at the end of a darkened hall, its arms extended in a gesture of welcome and protection, appears to pause mid-ascension.
A whining chorus of transformer cooling fans is the only sound; the flickering of heart and veins the only light.
The exhibition is a tribute, then, to Franklin, a British scientist -- a woman -- who died young at 37, and whose contributions to the discovery of DNA and other major scientific breakthroughs are said to have gone largely ignored, if not obliterated, by those who showered prizes on her peers.
The whole enterprise is called “Seeing Is Forgetting the Thing That You Saw,” surely a reference to Lawrence Weschler’s great biography of the conceptual and perceptual artist Robert Irwin, “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.”
Small sculptures in wood-framed vitrines — the kind once seen in science museums — are half-substantial, half-ethereal: the upper part of a found object is bonded to a glass reproduction, immersed in mineral oil and only faintly discernible, of its lower part.
Scientific implements, a pair of nurse shoes, a cricket ball and bat: objects evoking a life we can never really know.
Pages of encyclopedia, digitally transferred to their surfaces, are littered with white redactions, emptying the evidentiary record of content, and continuing the theme of historical erasure.
Depending on whom you talk to, a presentation like this in a commercial gallery, Ratio 3, either marks a step toward maturity or a bow to the art market.
Geometric abstraction is everywhere in this exhibition, but generally it shows up as separate, clashing panels of far more complex arrangements.
The cartoonish heads are painted with elaborate flourishes, looking something like Fractur, the Pennsylvania Dutch folk art penmanship.
Unconventional painting surfaces include old surfboards or, famously, pint-sized liquor bottles found in street gutters.
Not because that identity isn’t a big part of the work (and of the artist’s life: I had to be spirited through a backdoor to avoid a rock star-worthy crush of fans at the show’s opening reception), but because too few analyses go much beyond those facts.