Chronicling Narratives: SF Galleries Open the Fall Season With Book Inspired Artwork

By Patter Hellstrom

San Francisco art season opens with fascinating work presenting themes of texts, stories and sequence images. These book-related images emerge and draw to mind the nature of a book, ripe with mystery and chronicling narratives. Stories both reveal and conceal meaning in this season’s fall art offerings.

The reoccurring text themes are clearly visible in the digital c-print by Idris Khan at the Fraenkel Gallery. ”Thus Spake Zarathustra… after Friedrich Nietzche” is an over-sized digital photo with many text overlays creating a book. The viewer is drawn into the mysterious layers of seminal texts and musical scores combined into poetic softness. In these meditations on culture, Khan masterfully balances light and shadow. (see above).

Toomey Tourell Fine Art presents the uniquely carved books by artist Brian Dettmer. These altered books also include digital video projection and music. The work satisfies the curiosity books intrinsically hold as they allude to a book’s unfolding story in a single viewing.

Dettmer cuts into older dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, engineering books, art books, medical guides, history books, atlases, comic books, and wallpaper sample books altering both the object and it’s intention. His innovative work was coincidentally used to illustrate the New York Times article, “Words Without Borders” in the Sunday October 18th, 2009 Week in Review.

Catherine Clark Gallery in the South of Market Museum corridor challenges viewers with a unique exhibition by Los Angles artist, Sandow Birk. American Qur’an is made up of mid-sized gouache and ink paintings on paper. This work is exhibited concurrently in San Francisco and Los Angles. Then moves on to New York City in 2010, offering a new vision of Islamic art. Birk’s illustrated panels speak to the nature of being Muslim in America. This ongoing project sets the goal to illuminate the Qur’an with scenes from contemporary American life written in English. Evidence of Persian miniature painting is an influence in his depiction of Americans in daily activities. This group of illustrated panels will be complied into a book moving forward.

Gallery 16 offers up a sequenced series of text related images by Rex Ray. The artist’s acknowledged influences are diverse ranging from the Arts & Crafts Movement to textile design and Op Art. The artist is playful, sequential and productive as he bridges the gap between fine and applied art. The show promises an endless variety of shape, color, texts and texture.