Welcome to the New Old Times

For the Living Arts Fund’s curatorial debut, founder and director Betty Nguyen presents an exhibition of collage-based work, not in the large storefront gallery, which won’t open until the fall, but in her apartment on the second floor. Dubbed the LAF Salon, it suits the live–work style of this chic, well-networked blonde who runs her funky flat in the out of the way Excelsior district—where, Nguyen muses, “the Mission ends and the ocean is palpable”—as if it were on the Left Bank. There’s no mistaking the building on this quiet block of otherwise non-descript row houses: a dark, glitzy ’70s–style monolith with a cantilevered façade in shaded glass and aged redwood. This is LAF’s first headquarters since it started producing peripatetic exhibitions and events around town in the early 2000s; its mission includes funding artists’ proposals through occasional “Sunday Soups” and grander schemes, such as developing new systems for delivering art to the public.

As the title Welcome to the New Old Times insinuates with its strains of the vaudevillian, collage has a way of continually reincarnating itself. Born in the Paris of Picasso and Braque, it has weathered the Beat generation and Vietnam and currently enjoys a paste-free renaissance in our digital, interdisciplinary age. An up-to-the-minute example here is Publicity Reform (all works 2011 unless otherwise noted), a black-and-white digital collage resembling a warped Jean Dubuffet painting by Los Angeles–based artist Luke Fischbeck, co-founder of the band Lucky Dragons and the collaborative drawing group the Sumi Ink Club. Made by shredding and successively scanning campaign posters, one contemplates the work while listening to the accompanying track of abstract music.

The curating is collagist as well—plus a little Cagean, too. Or perhaps “potluck” would be more apropos, as Nguyen brings

Dave Muller. Cats, 1999-2000; set of six collages and altered book. Courtesy of the Artist and Living Arts Fund, San Francisco.

Charlie Callahan. Bridge Jumpers, 2011; collage; 44 x 37 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Living Arts Fund, San Francisco.

people and their confections to the table from all corners of her international multimedia network, many of who do not normally make fine art. The musician Evan Caminiti, of the drone noise band Barn Owl, made an impression with his talismanic, shrinelike NadaBrahma (2008), in which twigs, lichen, and cassette tape tangled with human hair and a nonplussed Buddha statuette in their midst appear to explode from the speaker base. The work’s relationship to his music is clear. Other newcomers to the gallery circuit include Brian Roettinger, an award-winning designer of album covers from Los Angeles; Jacinto Astiazarán, a filmmaker from Mexico City, and his boyfriend, Abdi Taslimi; and Kyoung Kim, a Korean-American, London-based writing student pursuing a PhD at Goldsmith’s. Even their lesser efforts contribute to the atmosphere of easy-going experimentation among friends. 

Oddly enough, the only piece that plays with the domestic setting is Kim’s chunky rope ladder, Dear Gabriele (2011), which dangles from the kitchen skylight. It is woven from torn bedcovers and a suicide note that the artist found in her London flat; a copy of the note, written in Italian, accompanies the installation.

Hung in the hallway, emerging Bay Area artist Charlie Callahan channels Bruce Conner with Bridge Jumpers (2011), a collage of yellowed vintage photos and newspaper clippings visible behind the lacy wings of double blue Rorschach forms spray painted on the plexiglass frame. Better-known Bay Area artist Laurie Reid, collaborating with newcomer Ben Echeverria, presents a wall-mounted assemblage. A giant mirror and plexiglass icicle function as a kind of crutch supporting a diamond shaped redwood stretcher housing a delicate drawing. The work, In the Middle of Nowhere on the Way to Somewhere (2011), teeters between two and three dimensions, geometric balance and organic collapse. It would have fared better, however, without the white leather sofa below it scraping the tip of the icicle and Roettinger’s floppy unframed silkscreen hung next to it.

Nguyen builds the show around a charming 1999 suite of found cat pictures by Dave Muller, referred to as another misto “DJ/artist,” who is the box office draw here. In a creepy adaptation that Tim Burton would approve of, all seventeen cats have been equipped with new eyes: those rattling black and white googly eyes worn by stuffed animals. Muller looks pleasingly scrappy again in this mixed company of strays, polymaths, and up-and-comers. Like Muller’s feline subjects, everyone here looks and acts a little different when under the influence of collage.

Welcome to the New Old Times is on view at the Living Arts Fund's LAF Salon in San Francisco through August 23, 2011.