Title: Lucky Day
Dates: January 25 - March 24, 2007
Location: San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery (main gallery), 401 Van Ness Ave., SF, CA
Artists: Michael Anderson, Gretchen Bennett, Spencer Finch, Euan Macdonald, Chris McCaw, and Claude Zervas
The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery is pleased to present Lucky Day, an exhibition in our main Gallery and our window installation site. This landscape exhibition considers that the artistic representation of physical locations is inevitably bound with what is experienced there. In the song, Lucky Day, Tom Waits sings about returning home some day; however it is clear that his hometown exists as a nostalgic memory and will never again be what he remembers and holds dear. Each artist in this exhibition had a lucky day; an experience that provoked them to seek, capture and record bits and pieces of a specific place. The exhibited works represent locations in terms of the transient nature of each artist’s personal connection to the landscape.
Light and the passage of time. For the past few years Chris McCaw has set up his homemade camera in a variety of outdoor locations, always positioning the lens directly into the sun. The resulting images range from ghostly shadows of trees, ocean waves and horizon lines, to compositions made up entirely of subtle shifts from grey to black. Each photograph ends when the sunlight intensifies through the lens to the point that it burns a hole in the photo paper. McCaw’s work speaks to the nature of photography and its ability to capture light, but it's also a wonderfully poetic look at how the artist attempted to capture the “feel” of a location. Spencer Finch’s entire artistic practices centers on his fascination with how light shapes our understanding of spaces/places. For the exhibited work, Finch sat in a meadow for 6 hours recording the subtle effects of light on the color of various elements around him – a tree, a rock, a dragonfly… The resulting representation, Maine Landscape with Passing Dragonfly (August 8, 2006), is a series of five color-swatch drawings noting the time of day the colors were recorded.
Memory and transition. Gretchen Bennett is a native of the Pacific Northwest, and recently relocated back there after living in Brooklyn, NY. While in Brooklyn Bennett began amassing an enormous collection of stickers (artist-made and business-related) that she then uses to construct mural-sized installations of specific endangered urban landscapes/landmarks. She depicts the Brooklyn sites as she remembers them, knowing that most of them have transformed as a result of urban development. Transition is also key in the exhibited works of Claude Zervas. Zervas photographed landscapes depicting the transition points between old growth and new growth forests. Each image is then processed through a computer program that slowly degrades the original composition while building an abstracted version, only to slowly right the image before beginning the loop again. The ongoing instability of the image is reflective of the instability of the landscape.
Seeking and finding. Lucky Day features the first and second installments of an ongoing project by Michael Anderson. The artist is on a quest to find in nature the exact individual colors represented in television color bars. Anderson found blue in the desert sky and white in the snowy mountains. When he locates a color he then sends a live-feed of the landscape through a video camera and paints the scene from the monitor. Placing the sun front and center seemed the logical choice when Euan Macdonald set out to record the setting sun from a moving helicopter. After chasing the sun Macdonald found that what he was searching for was not the sunset, but the results of the setting sun on the landscape. As the helicopter headed home, moving quickly away from the sun fading on the horizon Macdonald recorded 9 minutes of the onset of dusk and eventually darkness brought on by the earth’s shadow.
