Mark Your Calendar: April Art Happenings

Another busy, busy art weekend (and week) ahead:

Friday, April 3

* At San Francisco's Rare Device, Portland artist Mark Warren Jacques' The Optimistic Life & Mind opens with a reception from 7 to 9 p.m. The young painter's colorful, graphic, and highly detailed work is "a testament to Jacques' sense of order within disorder and acute presence of mind." The show will be up through April 29 at Rare Device, 1845 Market St. at Guerrero. (If you're not in the area, you can view and purchase Jacques' pieces for the show here.)

* The Mission's Triple Base Gallery presents Out of the Flat Files II, featuring new work from more than 30 local artists, including Alissa Anderson, Marty Anderson, Chi Birmingham, Michelle Blade, James Bradley, Todd Bura, Michael Cappabianca, Shashana Chittle, Serena Cole, Tara Foley, Bryson Gill, Leonie Guyer, Jason Kalogiros, Melissa Kaseman, Justin Limoges, Isaac Lin, Leigh McCarthy, Jay Nelson, Kelly Ording, Oliver Halsman Rosenberg, Hilary Pecis, Jesse Schlesinger, Orion Shepherd, Christine Shields, Paul Urich, David Wilson, and Edmund Wyss.

* Also at Triple Base, Bryson Gill's Mirror and Mirror, Warm Milk - Still Cream, Degrees of Separation, Shades of Blue and Throwbacks, small works that reinterpret "late 17th century portraits through the lens of advertising-inspired graphic pictorial devices." The shows will be up through May 3 at Triple Base, 3041 24th St. at Treat.

* Hop on the Bay Bridge and head over to Oakland's Swarm Gallery, where John Casey's solo show, Distant Cousins, opens with an artist's reception from 6 to 9 p.m. At first glance, Casey's works "seem to portray a menagerie of deformed creatures. A collective analysis reveals this array of oddball creations to be a series of psychological studies -- self-portraits of the artist's inner psyche in all of its multifaceted incarnations."

* Also opening at Swarm: Nature Boy, a collection of Don Porcella's pipe cleaner sculptures, which "play with our concept of consumerism, reality and our own weird mortality," as well as Regime Change, a group show featuring small works (all priced under $500) celebrating our new representation in Washington and the hopefulness that has inspired. Participating artists include Alfred Steiner, Amanda Williams, Amy Ross, Andy Vogt, Barbara Holmes, Casey Jex Smith, Chris Pew, Chris Sicat, Dan Nelson, David Higgins, David King, Ema Sintamarian, Ernest Concepcion, Fred Muram, Fumiha Tanaka, Gregory Euclide, Jaime Cortez, Jessica Serran, Jim Rosenau, Jordan Essoe, Joshua Hagler, Kathy Aoki, Kevin E. Taylor, Linda Braz, Mayumi Hamanaka, Michael Hall, Narangkar Glover, Pete Glover, Sarah Emerson, Sarah Smith, Terry Furry, Treasure Frey, Vaughn Bell, Vicki Walsh, Zach Houston. The shows will be up through May 10 at Swarm, 560 Second St. near Jack London Square.

* Good battles evil at Rock Paper Scissors Collective's new exhibition, Heroes and Villains, which kicks off with an opening reception from 6 to 9 p.m. The show offers "a new and interesting eye on the classic dichotomy of chivalry and ugliness, portraiture and caricature, love and death." Artists include Arnell Ando, Teppei Ando, Graham Annable, David Ball, Ben Catmull, Mary Cook, Alika Cooper, Matt Hart, Matt Hewitt, Obi Kaufman, An Nguyen, Jonah Olson, Deth P. Sun, Mark Todd, and Derek Wood. Heroes and Villains will be up through April 25 at Rock Paper Scissors, 2278 Telegraph Ave. at 23rd St. in Uptown Oakland.

* Jason Byers and Patricia Wakida will be in attendance for the opening of their join show, [Print] Run, at 21 Grand from 7 p.m. on. The show features new paintings from Byers as well as Wakida's linoleum block prints, and will be up through April 18 at 21 Grand, 416 25th St. at Broadway.


* Smokey's Tangle in Oakland's Temescal District hosts an opening party from 7 to 10 p.m. for Beatlenuts, an "attempt to bridge the gap between fine art and fan art." The show will be up through April 15 at 4709 Telegraph Ave. at 47th St. (hint: that's a few doors down from Lanesplitter Pizza & Pub, if you want to make an evening of it).

Saturday, April 4

* At Oakland's Rowan Morrison, Small Ruins, featuring the photography of Hannah Henry, opens with an artist's reception from 7 to 10 p.m. Henry's large-scale photographs showcase "objects from the bottom of people's hearts and drawers: things with a past but no longer a purpose. The photos depict an individual object set against a blank background, highlighting the object itself, and begging of it a myriad of imaginary narratives." The show will be up through May 9 at Rowan Morrison, 330 40th St. at Broadway.

Thursday, April 9

* Finally, the show I've been anticipating with baited breath for months: Marci Washington's Dark Mirror at San Francisco's Rena Bransten Gallery. Washington's "lush paintings work on several levels to build suspicion and to enhance an ominous sense of discomfort and crisis in viewers. She achieves this by depicting ghosts, haunted houses, vampires, dismembered limbs, bloody scenery, and an assortment of sallow young people who serve as metaphors for serious social ills. Washington’s model for a doomed society was Edwardian England, whose rigid social norms and repressive imperialist vision sparked its decline -- a situation Washington feels is mirrored by a present-day America. Her Edwardian characters and romance novel format allow Washington 'to construct an allegorical tale ... in order to reveal a much darker tale of moral decline, spiritual crisis, and rampant anxiety, all lurking beneath the siren song of material desire.'” I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I do know that Washington's deliciously dark and twisted images give me chills (in the best possible way). Dark Mirror will be up through May 16 at Rena Bransten, 77 Geary St. at Kearny.

Happy arting!

Mark Your Calendar: East Bay Art Happenings

More and more local art openings, it seems, are veering off the standard "First Friday" schedule for new shows. That might be a good thing, because while the Oakland Art Murmur is a blast, it's often so packed that it's all but impossible to really appreciate the art.

I'm super-excited for Seattle artist Katy Stone (top) and Oakland local Yvette Molina's (above) joint show, Tickling Thicket -- which "considers the ephemeral thrills and underlying decrepitude of the natural world." The exhibit opens with an artists' reception from 6 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, October 30, at Johansson Projects. JP shows never miss, and this one looks amazing: Delicate, luminous, earthy and yet out-of-this world. Tickling Thicket will be up through December 13.

At CCA's Oliver Art Center, Oakland artist and cultural anthropologist Lydia Nakashima Degarrod's Geographies of the Imagination presents "both the emotional dislocation of migration and its transformative power" and invites viewers to explore "the cultural and physical landscapes of their past." The show debuts with an opening reception from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 29, and will be up through November 21.

My friend and neighbor, Bedford Gallery curator Carrie Lederer, is part of a group show at Blankspace called Double Exposure. The show features the work of ten local gallery curators -- including Daniel Healy, Rowan Morrison's Pete and Narangkar Glover, and Root Division's Michelle Mansour -- who are also artists in their own right. Lederer's pieces for the exhibit "depict turbulent gardens informed by nature’s riotous beauty." Double Exposure will be up through November 17.

On Thursday, October 30, from 7 to 10 p.m., the Rowan Morrison gallery and bookstore will host a signing and launch party with Oakland artist John Casey for his new, limited first-edition book, Scarecrow, featuring more than 60 "unseen biomorphic drawings from the depths of the subconscious." Casey will also have original art on display in the gallery. (If you're not in the area, Scarecrow can be procured right here.)

Finally, at Compound Gallery on Saturday, November 1, from 6 to 9 p.m., there will be an opening reception for Scott Reilly's solo exhibit, October 9, 1969, in which he exposes "a deeper emotional source that lies within all of his creative expression." The show will be up through December 1.