I have reiterated tendencies, certain go-to forms,” Robert Benson said. “It’s like with any artist: You get caught up in your own style. With me, it’s the tension between angles and curves.” The trope has been evident “forever” in art made by Indigenous people of far northwestern California, as Benson, a Tsnung’we elder, observed. In […]
Gabrielle Gopinath
Gabrielle Gopinath is a critic who writes about art, place and culture in Northern California. She lives in Arcata. Follow her on Instagram @gabriellegopinath.
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‘I am These People’
I saw the place the Karuk call the center of the world in a painting before going there for real. It was marked with a sleek isosceles triangle, blue magic marker on tinfoil — an emphatic shape that lingered in the mind. Standing before his painting, Brian D. Tripp turned to me in the oaken […]
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Ultra Marine
Multimedia artist Jessie Vala transformed Humboldt State University’s Reese Bullen Gallery for her new exhibition, turning the white cube into a blue sculpture grotto. The Eugene, Oregon-based Vala replaced the usual gallery spotlights with blue lamps, bathing viewers in azure light for an oddly calming effect. The marine implications of all this blueness are reinforced […]
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Joan Gold’s Dark Materials
Approaching Joan Gold’s installation of paintings at Black Faun Gallery is like walking into an animated conversation. The walls seem to dissolve into vibrating pattern. Fifty-eight tall, modular paintings on paper feature superimposed registers framing all-over fields of explosive, dancing pattern. Short, rounded, color-laden brushstrokes gyrate in formation like synchronized swimmers. Brushstrokes are layered, so […]
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Room for the Missing
This month Humboldt State University’s Gou’dini Gallery hosts Sing Our Rivers Red, a traveling exhibition that seeks to call attention to the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women across North America. Organized by a group of 10 artists calling themselves the SORR Collective and sponsored by groups at institutions, including North Dakota State University, […]
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El Maestro en Reposo
In paintings by Anthony “Tony” Machado, people, objects and images from global cultures collide. A young African woman dressed in traditional robes and jewelry stands expressionless in the foreground of one work while a trio of African drummers play. Someone in a furry costume patched in from a different photographic source dances ecstatically nearby. Meanwhile, […]
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Back to Reese Bullen
Maybe geography is destiny. At any rate, the natural world remains a touchstone for Humboldt State University artists: Natural places and their wild inhabitants figure repeatedly in HSU’s new faculty and staff exhibition, which opens this week. Examples range from the inhabited landscapes in Dave Woody’s fine-grained photographs to a tiny cormorant portrait by illustrator […]
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Flesh and Fury
A PRAYER BEFORE DAWN. I left A Prayer Before Dawn feeling like I’d been beaten to a pulp in a Thai prison, but I mean that as a compliment. Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s 2017 drama, written by Jonathan Hirschbein and Nick Saltrese, and starring Joe Cole, is based on a memoir by Billy Moore, a Liverpudlian boxer […]
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Katy Warner and Madelyn Covey Geek Out at the Sanctuary
“This is about otaku-dom: intense, obsessive fandom,” Katy Warner said, using the Japanese word that fans worldwide have adopted to describe obsession. She was referring to the screenprints and collages she is showing at the Sanctuary in Arcata through Sept. 6, dense with snippets of text, “based on the plot of the Japanese role-playing game […]
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The Figure in Balance
Balance has got a couple of meanings,” Steven Vander Meer remarked, regarding the drawings he had made. “Bodies balance. Stones balance. And there’s another kind of balance in these compositions.” Vander Meer’s new show at Piante Gallery explores balance from multiple angles. A polygonal sandbox hosts precarious looking stacks of vertically balanced stones. Figure drawings […]
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Hot off the Press
Photographs and video from the Families Belong Together march held in downtown Eureka on July 30 stand out for the snappy graphics of the homemade signs marchers carried from “Zero Tolerance for Human Rights Abuse” to “Stop the Racism! Stop the Deportations!” and “Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim?” As thousands of protesters marched and made […]
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Now Entering Babylon: Reggae on the River with High Times
“Every time I get high/ Babylon falls.” It was late Friday afternoon at Reggae on the River and the first live musical act on the lineup was just getting started. Hempress Sativa, born Kerida Johnson in Kingston, Jamaica, was performing with her band the Unconquerebels. At the mic, the self-crowned Hempress shone in a Rastafari […]