ARTFORUM

SAN FRANCISCO

CRITIC'S PICKS

PERIPHERIES OF NARRATIVE

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY

JUNE 01- JULY 15

The mania for poaching art schools doesn't get quite the

same play in San Francisco, a city with less investment in

the rhythms of the art market than New York or London.

It's fitting, then, that this show of fresh MFA grads from

California College of the Arts, curated by painter Kim Anno,

exudes a calm, confident vibe. Using thread and mapping

pins with crimson heads, Katie Lewis delicately translates

physical sensations into a three-dimensional drawing—it's

as visceral as a plastinated, Body Worlds nervous system,

only more elegant. Also dazzling are Jamie Vasta's paintings

of campground waterfalls and misty parking lots, each rendered

with varying amounts of glitter, a kitschy material that, when used

judiciously, effectively captures shifting qualities of light and

the precarious balance between nature and culture. This

balance is also the subject of Arctic Eden, 2006, an unresolved,

color-soaked video by Susan Chen that uses funky miniature

materials to create a looping natural history that travels through

an ice age to a fiery volcanic apocalypse. More cultural landscapes

appear in pieces by Weston Teruya, whose provocative

mixed-media works on paper articulate powerful cycles of creation

and destruction using an unlikely cosmology of carefully drawn

images—dismembered guard barriers, stone lions, bundled logs,

and squares of sod. Collaging her drawings into larger compositions,

Michele Carlson invents her own cast of characters, a posse of women

whose fashion mixes hip-hop with pattern-intensive fabrics that evoke

traditional Asian and African styles. Voluminous dresses billow as the

women travel via airplane or fall towards the ground on an ornate,

elevator-like machine, suggesting, as most of these artists do, that

they're going somewhere interesting in their own sweet time.

Glen Helfand