Mark Your Calendar: First Friday Openings

Looks like another great collection of gallery shows at this month's Oakland Art Murmur, Friday, August 1, from 6 p.m. to 9-ish:

* The second anniversary party at Industrielle, featuring new work from Sita Rupe (top) and others

* The Sum of Its Parts, with art by Laura Ball (above) and seven other artists, at Swarm Gallery

* Radialvedic, with contributions from Kristina Lewis, Jill Gallenstein, and Kana Tanaka, at Johansson Projects

* Cityscapes, with images from a variety of fine art photographers, at Rock Paper Scissors

* A Sacred Subject, featuring work from Clay Cahoon, Hunter Mack, and Rocky Rische-Baird (above), at Esteban Sabar

* A.K.A. Graffiti, with Peeta and others, at FiveTen Studio

* Audrey Welch's Random Thoughts at WELL

You can find more info about the Art Murmur right here.

Mark Your Calendar: Friday Night Art in Oakland

Photo by Vonguard

This Friday, April 4, is Oakland's monthly Art Murmur, which we've missed for one reason or another the last few months. I'm looking forward to getting out and seeing some of the homegrown art on display in the Uptown galleries. There are few new shows that I'm especially looking forward to:

My favorite Oakland art spot, Johansson Projects, 2300 Telegraph Avenue, is hosting Propagations, a mulitmedia exhibit from artists Tadashi Moriyama, Paul Hayes, Alexis Amann, Rebecca Whipple, and Kiersten Essenpreis.

Propagations "explores the conjunction of natural, cultural and technological forces that foster unexpected artistic transmissions, replications, and disseminations."

Across the street at the Rock Paper Scissors Collective, 2278 Telegraph Avenue, is Science Fair. Curated by Detroit's Andrew Thompson and featuring the work of eight local and national artists (including Amanda Lechner, Erik Peterson, and Trisha Brookbank), the exhibit "addresses the intersections of art and science as subject matter, whether it be through the guise of pseudoscience, the lure of technology, or the eccentricity of cultural anthropologies."

Front Gallery, at 35 Grand Avenue, is hosting an opening reception for Venue, a joint show from Judith White, Danny Scheible, and Art Hazelwood that's described as a study of spaces, "whether they be exterior or interior; physical or psychological."

Galleries participating in the Oakland Art Murmur's First Friday event are generally open from 6 to 9 p.m. -- though a few stay open until 10.

And Bloom Screen Printing, at 2310 Telegraph Avenue, is having a big print sale -- including rare, out-of-print, slightly damaged, and brand-new gig posters from Jason Munn's The Small Stakes (below) for $5 to $25 each. The sale is from 5 to 10 p.m.

See you there!

Mark Your Calendar: Back to Basics

This Friday, February 1, Oakland's Industrielle hosts an opening reception for its Back to Basics exhibition featuring the pinhole and Dolga work of photographers Roy Berkowitz (above and below) and Travis Kuhl, as well as metal artist Khabir Salahadyn.

The reception runs from 7 to 10 p.m. during the monthly Oakland Art Murmur. Stop by and check it out if you're local. Industrielle is located at 33 Grand Avenue, in Oakland's gallery-packed Uptown district.

And while you're in the area, don't miss Neither Here Nor There (above) at Johansson Projects, Best Western (below) at Estaban Sabar Gallery, and Invisible Cities at Mercury 20 (bottom).

The Artful Home: Evan B. Harris

Lady Bird ... Tea Party

I've always had a thing for folklore and fairy tales -- and no, not the kind where orphaned princesses trill melodically while they toil, aided by cute little rodents.

I mean the darker, unsanitized, not-fit-for-bedtime-stories kind. The pre-Disney versions, where the wicked stepsisters' comeuppance involves having their eyes plucked out by vengeful birds. The kind where stupid little piggies are actually devoured, with sinful relish, by seductively sinister wolves. The kind where young girls wandering alone in the woods discover within themselves a brute savagery to rival their predators'. (Have you ever read any Angela Carter? Oh, but you must.)

So it was with great anticipation that I visited the Anatomy of Folklore show at Oakland's consistently impressive Johansson Projects this weekend.

Though it's a joint show with San Francisco sculptor Lawrence LaBianca, I was there to see the paintings of Portland, Oregon-based Evan B. Harris. (Is it just me, or is Portland a hotbed of interesting art these days?)

White Whale and Shells

In Harris' imagined world, young girls (and a few boys) reside in the bellies of seemingly innocuous woodland creatures, wolves' breath warms innocently sleeping children, tree branches and roots spring from various body parts, whales swallow mermaids whole, and songbirds nest in women's hair (sweet enough, except that the hair is attached to what appears to be a disembodied head).

As his bio says, "Born among the briars and brambles in backwoods of Medford, Oregon, Evan Benjamin Harris ... dove into the recesses of his own imagination and embraced the fables and folklore that fascinated him. Now older, things haven’t changed much. The stories he created as a child are still present in his paintings."

Take a look:

Cuts Keep Growing

The Hare and Her

Hearts, Home Is ...

Redwood Waves

Birds, Birch, Hands

Tea for Birds

Regiment of the Hive

Scottish Deerhound

I'm no art critic -- I confess that I really don't have a clue about the deeper meaning of Harris's work. But I find it oddly beautiful, strangely fascinating, and darkly magical.

And though Harris's original paintings, priced from $475 to $1,450, are just a wee bit out of our budget, I'm happy to report that his work can be enjoyed in more affordable ways as well:

Harris's mural at Portland's Ace Hotel

Belly of the Bears print, $30 at Tiny Showcase

"Birds of a Letter" Stationery Set, $5

The Wurst Gallery Tote Bag, $20

Pssst -- I also hear that Portland's Office PDX store and gallery has a few reasonably priced small pieces left from Harris's last show there. Email the nice folks at Office for more info.

Anatomy of Folklore will be at Johansson Projects through January 5. Click here to see more of Harris's work.

The Artful Home: Val Britton

As with so many good things lately, I first encountered Berkeley artist Val Britton's work at Oakland's Johannson Projects Gallery during one of the Oakland Art Murmur's First Fridays (if you're around, don't miss tonight's event).

I was transfixed by her delicately traced and layered, softly stained, and intricately cut and stitched paper map collages, which seemed to evoke some strange, unknown -- and unknowable -- geography.

"The impetus ... was my longing to connect to my father, a truck driver who drove eighteen-wheelers across the country hauling industrial machinery. He died over ten years ago," the recent California College of the Arts MFA writes. "Based on road maps of the U.S., routes my father often traveled, and an invented conglomeration, mutation, and fragmentation of those passageways, my works ... help me piece together the past and make up the parts I cannot know."

Call it the terrain of the human heart.

See more of Britton's work here. (And if you're in the area, you can see her pieces in person at the group show There's No Place Like Here, being held at the Sonoma State University Art Gallery through December 9.)

The Artful Home: Amanda Hughen

Wandering through Oakland's Johansson Projects gallery recently (I swear that place always has the coolest stuff), I was immediately drawn to the work of artist Amanda Hughen.

The UC Berkeley MFA, who has exhibited everywhere from San Francisco to Paris to Reykjavik, uses pencil, ink, and paint to layer delicate geometric shapes onto translucent mylar "until the forms reach a critical mass ... mutat[ing] into ... an organic, moving, unidentifiable entity."

The results are transfixing:

Preoccupation

Critical Mass

Regulated Concentration

Crystallized Culmination

Hughen originals are priced at several hundred to a couple thousand dollars apiece, but limited-edition miniprints of "Compulsion," below, are available for $40 through San Francisco's Electric Works.

Take a look at more of Hughen's creations right here. And if you're in the area, do your best to catch her joint show, "Transtructural," with sculptor and painter Michael Meyers, which will be at Johansson until October 5.