Mark Your Calendar: Weekend Events

A few Bay Area events and art openings on the radar this weekend:

Thursday, June 4:

* Everything You Need Can Grow, new work by Christopher David Ryan, opens at San Francisco's Rare Device. The artist's reception runs from 7 to 9 p.m., and the show will be up through July 7.

* Worship Thee Kindly the Dark Hand That Guides Me, a new installation of sculpture, paintings, and mixed media work from Skinner, opens at 111 Minna. The reception runs from 6 p.m. on, and the show will be up at the SOMA gallery through June 27.

* Over in Oakland, Nathaniel Crane and Michael Deane's Becoming Non-Object opens with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. at Uptown's Hatch Gallery. The gallery will also be open for Friday's monthly Oakland Art Murmur, and the show will be up through June 27.

Friday, June 5:

* There will be a First Friday reception for Val Britton and Michael Meyers's The Echo Fields from 5 to 9 p.m. at Oakland's Johansson Projects. While you're there, don't miss Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's Show Me installation in the project space.

Saturday, June 6:

* More than 400 local artists will provide glimpses into their work spaces and processes during East Bay Open Studios, which runs from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday as well as next weekend. Get a list of participating artists here, studio maps here, and preview the artists' work here.

* The Sunset Celebration Weekend transforms Sunset magazine's sprawling Menlo Park campus into a multi-acre test kitchen, demonstration garden, craft bazaar, home and garden trade show, and performance venue. The event takes place both Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and tickets are $15.

* Pop Noir is San Francisco nonprofit arts organization Southern Exposure's huge annual fundraiser, with art for sale from a veritable who's-who of the Bay Area art scene. The auction runs from 6 to 10:30 p.m., and there's a $35 admission charge. Preview the artwork for sale here.

* Annie Galvin's In a Golden State opens at San Francisco's Studio 3579. The reception runs from 6 to 9 p.m., and the show will be up through July 18.

Sunday, June 7:

* Oakland newsstand extraordinaire Issues holds its Second Anniversary Party from 2 to 6 p.m. Stop by for snacks and microbrew, palm readings, a customer-appreciation raffle, and a giant sidewalk sale featuring books, vinyl, t-shirts, "weird sculptures," and odds and ends galore at the popular Piedmont Avenue-area shop.

Lots to do!

Mark Your Calendar: Weekend Roundup

* Saturday, May 9, from 10 to 3: Feria Urbana at Pizzaiolo in Oakland

* Saturday and Sunday from 10 to 4: Open Studios and Factory Store Sale at Heath Ceramics in Sausalito

* Opening Saturday at noon at Johansson Projects in Uptown Oakland: Val Britton and Michael Meyers's Echo Fields (the artists' reception for the show is next Saturday, May 16, from 5 to 8 p.m.)

* Saturday from 2 to 4: The First Annual Cupcake Bake-Off at Oakland's Rock Paper Scissors Collective (across the street from Johansson Projects); $4 at the door

* Saturday from 7 to 11 p.m.: The opening reception for Isabel Samaras's Into the Woodz at San Francisco's Shooting Gallery

* And at the same time next door at White Walls Gallery: The opening reception for New Work from Ian Johnson

* Finally, if you're still on the hunt for a Mother's Day gift, don't forget the exclusive discount for More Ways to Waste Time Readers at Atomic Garden in Rockridge.

Mark Your Calendar: "Collective Compulsions" at Johansson Projects

Opening at Oakland's Johansson Projects this weekend: Collective Compulsions, a kind of "greatest hits" of the gallery's featured artists over the past 18 months. All share an obsession with "intricate visual detail ... Stepping back from the image, the meticulously built forms disappear into the context of the whole. Delicate, dense, panoramic memory maps stretch before us in one piece, only to collapse into spiraling abstractions in the next."

Among the featured artists:

Amanda Hughen (previously blogged here)

Val Britton (previously blogged here)

Anna Fidler

Nathan Cordero

Tadashi Moriyama

Kristina Lewis

Jill Gallenstein

Jen Stark

Misa Inaoka

Andrew Benson

An artists' reception will be held Saturday, January 17, from 4 to 7 p.m., and Collective Compulsions will be up at Johansson Projects through February 21.

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.)