Suk Choo Kim’s solo show at Black Faun Gallery represents a reckoning with the past. The large-format photographic images presented here resolve a project that began 40 years ago as a series of Polaroids. Kim learned how to manipulate Polaroids in and around New York City circa 1970, as a photo-obsessed, self-described “flower child” and […]
Art Beat
Artists, galleries, museums, arts nights and shows around the county.
Posted inArts + Scene
The Traditionalist
Artist George Blake has used needles finer than a hair’s breadth to sew brightly colored songbird feathers into intricate patterns. He has strung bows, carved elk antlers into traditional Hupa spoons and shaped second-growth redwood trunks into dugout canoes. The things he makes document moments in a lifelong encounter with the old ways of believing […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Dirty Canteen
A ceramic mug rests in an anonymous space on a flat white surface. The mug inhabits the shot. We get to eyeball its glazed surface for approximately 1.5 seconds before it explodes. A different cup reappears in the same spot. The sequence repeats again and again in Marine veteran and ceramicist Ehren Tool’s 2007 video, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Put a Bird on It
Sometimes pictures draw us in for reasons that are hard to explain. The unthinking attraction they induce is sort of like what Liz Lemon on 30 Rock was describing when she said: “I want to go to there.” Ken Burton’s full-frontal photograph of an Anna’s hummingbird is like that. It compels attention, even glimpsed in […]
Posted inArts + Scene
What Lies Beneath
“Turf Spiral” occupies the front room of Humboldt-based land artist Becky Evans’ new show Water Lines at Piante Gallery. It makes an impression there — it’s not what you expect to see, this mute obdurate hillock in the middle of gallery space, rolled inside out with its brown earth crust on display. The human concept […]
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Ocean Views
In McWay Rocks Big Sur (2013), we view the scene from on high — lean in and a twinge of vertigo might seize you. The diagonally oriented composition yields a striking contrast. The looming headland, with its cloud-like formations of low shrubbery rendered in a wiggly violet line, is balanced by its paired expanse of […]
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24-hour Arty People
This solstice, 24 Eureka photographers came together to document the day’s passage for 24 Hours, 24 Photographers. Humboldt State University photojournalism professor (and freelance photographer for the Journal) Mark Larson, who organized the project, invited each photographer to shoot during a prearranged hour-long time slot. Any type of film, digital camera, and/or lighting was permissible […]
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Marley’s Ghosts
Dare we consider a festival under the banner of visual art? Reader, in 2016, I think we must. This week let’s consider the notable sights from last week’s Reggae on the River festival. This year the festival was graced with an officially designated “Art Cave.” The compositions within its precincts were consumed by tightly rendered, […]
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Content Management
Asher and Ellis Russo’s collection of poultry wishbones looks like a series of spider-fine, upside-down capital Ys, hung neatly in order from small to large on parallel wires. It is one of the most visually arresting groupings at this month’s small and engaging exhibition of collections made by Humboldt County residents at the Morris Graves […]
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Locospectating
Now that it’s July, the farmers market has reached max volume and we’ve got the full scale of summer fruits and vegetables on our collective mind. I’m going to say this means it’s a good time to revisit the importance of being local. Each Saturday morning, the Arcata farmers market serves up a mind-expanding object […]
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Cuts Like a Knife
An early work of language art by Jenny Holzer reads: “With all the holes in you already there’s no reason to define the outside environment as alien.” Sebastopol-based artist Brooke Holve’s show, Cuts Make You, about sliced and broken surfaces, brought that phrase to mind. The exhibition’s name sounds like a joke about collage but Holve […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Humboldt Video Roundup
I know: The timing is counter-intuitive. Summer is supposed to be the season for doing things outdoors: swimming at the river, hiking, fishing and biking. But without detracting one iota from those pleasures, this article advocates for the less strenuous summer activity of watching regionally themed YouTube videos indoors, in the name of art. Peep […]