Lean times or not, new galleries are still opening. Berkeley’s new
Alphonse Berber Gallery features, in its second show, a
21-artist extravaganza of more than one hundred artworks in drawing,
painting, photography, mixed media, sculpture, video, installation,
jewelry, and fashion. With that diverse smorgasbord, the works are
understandably arranged somewhat haphazardly among the three galleries,
so it can be a bit confusing. Nonetheless, the casual visitor will find
plenty to peruse, only a fraction of which can be discussed here.
Gregory Euclide crafts diorama-like reliefs that combine
drawing and sculpted paper elements to create poetic 3D evocations of
landscape — world and memory preserved like flowers under glass
(“In What the Mist Had Bloomed”). David Chapman Lindsay deconstructs
the stretched canvas: “4 Cardinal Directions” is a gilt-framed oil
portrait of a young girl seemingly jammed perpendicularly halfway into
the wall; the male subject of “Tension Portrait” is painted on curved
wedges of wood and canvas that coalesce into a rough segmented dome.
Ryoko Tajiri‘s oil paintings derive from the Bay Area figurative
tradition, though she employs a more subdued palette than we generally
associate with that school; her pensive women are absorbed into the
painterly, almost abstract compositions (“Woman at White Table,” “Day
Dream,” “Girl in Back Light”). Steve Kim may work from
photographs, but he edits and reinterprets them to create obscure and
sometimes humorous narratives (“Kitsune Noir Diorama,” “Dolly and
Burt,” “Octobaby”). Justin Margitich makes etchings depicting
the activities of the Friends of the Urban Forest (a real tree-planting
nonprofit based in San Francisco) like alfresco assemblies of benign
druids (“The Friends of the Urban Forest Have a Meeting,” “The Friends
of the Urban Forest Enjoy Their New Lake,” “The Friends of the Urban
Forest Meet Again”). The absurdist universe of Timothy Kadish‘s
paintings is exemplified by the inventory of motifs in “Three Waldos,
Four Parachute Men, Seven Mushrooms, Eight Tanks, and Four Turtle
Doves.” Mitsuko‘s comically grotesque ceramic portrait busts
suggest melting snowmen studded with bits of crockery. Lastly,
Benjamin Crowden makes ingenious kinetic sculptures: in “Eating
My Cake and Having It Too” a silicone tongue controlled by a lever
licks a rotating lollipop; in “Some People I Don’t Know,” abstracted
human figures engage in ritualized crank-powered dances — like
the planetary systems in gear-driven Victorian orreries. You, Me
and Everyone We Know runs through June 6 at Alphonse Berber
Gallery (2546 Bancroft Way, Berkeley). AlphonseBerber.com or
510-649-9492.
