Approaching the New Millennium
This section presents a variety of works by an emerging generation of Bay Area artists.
All made within the last ten years, these works suggest the great diversity of approaches to art-making that are current today. While the Bay Area has, in the past, been identified with certain over-arching styles (e.g. Bay Area figurative painting), the works here show that artists perhaps now feel freer to choose methods and styles that respond to their particular expressive needs.
The art world has become increasingly international as people travel more and become conscious of global issues and trends. Uri Tzaig, recently the subject of a Matrix exhibition here titled Homeless, has no permanent home at all, but rather travels from city to city connecting with artists and art scenes as he goes.
Even among those artists who are relatively stationary, these recent works show that their themes are cosmopolitan and universal rather than absorbed in regional issues or aesthetic problems. Nayland Blake's Miracled Birds is based on the turn-of-the-century autobiography of a noted schizophrenic that served as an important case study for Freud, Jung, and Lacan. D-L Alvarez's Shawl is a poignantly ephemeral work suggestive of the compelling human drive for comfort. Anne Appleby's monochromatic work is from a series title "Geezis" - the Ojibway word for things that come from the light, as well as for sun and month - whose paired paintings are about light and its absence.
While ephemerality and vulnerability are certainly traits shared by a number of these works, there is an equal measure of almost baroque grandiloquence. Catherine Opie's photographic portrait captures the flamboyant irreverence of the late Jerome Caja, a painter and performance artist who inspired many Bay Area artists before his untimely death from AIDS last year.
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Nayland BlakeUnited States, born 1960 . Untitled ("Miracled Birds") . 1989 . mixed media
. 1989.6
Gift of Roselyne and Richard Swig
This work is based on the life of Daniel Paul Schreber, who documented his own experiences of delusional paranoia in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Schreber's book was the subject of much interpretation, especially regarding the causes of homosexuality, by psychologists such as Freud, Jung, and Lacan.
Blake's tableau attempts to strip away a century of analysis and return to explore Schreber's own extraordinary imagination. The framed texts allude to some of the numerous "realms" that Schreber described as existing in the world of his hallucinations. The disembodied wings echo his belief in the existence of "miracled birds," which, along with "devils" and "fleeting improvised men," occupied the "Posterior Realm."