This is the Sound of Someone Losing the Plot

Catherine Clark selected Bay Area artist Anthony Discenza to curate the opening exhibition for her highly anticipated new space in Potrero Hill. Discenza is an artist who makes language a central part of his work, and the title of his show, This is the Sound of Someone Losing the Plot, attests to his poetic and subtle approach to both text and exhibition construction.

Gareth Spor, Lost Horizon, 2011. Super 8 film loop. Variable

Discenza’s assignment from Clark was to limit his selection to alumni of and faculty at California College of the Arts, the neighborhood’s flagship. Among the highlights of work by nine artists is the collaboration between Gareth Spor and Piero Passacantando. The latter contributed a ten-by-ten inch patterned landscape of narrow triangles rigidly mathematical in conception and execution, yet somehow deeply affecting in its symmetry and shades of aqueous blue. Spor responded by translating the painting to black-and-white film.  Projected nearby at about the same size, the film zooms in on the image. It’s more and less; different from and synonymous with the original.

Piero Passacantando, Mean Infinity-Blue, 2010. Acrylic on muslin. 10 x 10 inches

Two other artists in the show also utilize translation as medium. Josh Greene, who works with family and strangers to elicit their thoughts on contemporary art (and particularly his own work) hired a Chinese artist named Yangzi to reproduce Greene’s work, The Last First (2011). Yangzi solicited reactions from her family to Greene’s family’s reactions to his request for their least favorite of his works. The cross-cultural translation of perplexity in the face of contemporary art reveals the odd position of visual practice as well as the wealth of meaning that individuals reveal in their most thoughtful and vulnerable moments. Patricia Esquivias has made modest videos since her days as a graduate student; in these, she narrates while the camera focuses in on her hands performing various tasks. The success of her work comes from the charming sincerity of her heavily accented English. While her talk is translated from Spanish to English in her mind and our ears, viewers must also navigate between her spoken language and provided texts, searching for lies, truths, and all the richness in between.

Josh Greene, The Last First, 2011. Detail of digital C-print installation

Artist-curated shows were first seen in the Bay Area in not for profit contexts like the San Francisco Art Institute Annual, curated by the SFAI Artist Committee, and in alternative spaces in the ’70s, but didn’t cross over to commercial spaces. Beginning in 2000, Robert Gober, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Nayland Blake curated the annual summer exhibitions at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York to great acclaim. Thus handing over the keys to Discenza for this major moment in her gallery’s history demonstrates particular moxie on Clark’s part, embracing both Discenza's approach and the notion of artist curatorial practice in a Bay Area commercial gallery. The late Larry Sultan once shared with me his preference for artistic juxtapositions whose meanings were not on the surface but instead required study to suss out the curatorial strategy behind them. The show offers the visitor an intriguing grouping of seventeen pieces that would have pleased Sultan in their variety and mysterious intimations of commonality. As the title suggests, we can sometimes find ourselves scratching our heads, in a good way.

This is the Sound of Someone Losing the Plot is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in

San Francisco