James D. Phelan (1861-1930), San Francisco mayor, head of the Red
Cross during the 1906 earthquake, US senator, and owner of Saratoga’s
Villa Montalvo, was also an art collector who established awards
recognizing California artists. This year’s prizes in printmaking went
to Harry Clewans of Berkeley for his detailed woodcut collages
and to Maizie Gilbert of San Francisco for her mysterious
soft-focus digital prints; an Honorable Mention goes to Sarah
Newton of San Francisco for her moody intaglio urban street
scenes.
Clewans employs the woodcut medium to generate ideas and imagery.
Choosing motifs from natural history and daily life, Clewans prints
multiple copies, cuts them up, and reassembles them into large collages
on wood that depict either relatively realistic scenes (although
composed of a miscellany of object fragments), or synthesized fantasies
that arise from intuition and chance. Arcimboldo’s symbolic portraits
(e.g., a librarian composed of books) come to mind, as do the collaged
engravings of Max Ernst, with their metamorphoses and alt-reality
science; the congestion of the picture plane recalls such obsessive
space fillers as Jess and Ivan Albright. These images suggest dark
fairy tales in which inanimate matter comes to life; the golem Clewans
once depicted, riffing on the silent movie’s clay giant, is almost
emblematic.
Gilbert finds her subjects instead in the real world, photographing
simplified scenes — a sunset, a woman’s shoulder, a beach —
with a 1970s Polaroid Land camera and various dedicated films.
Photographers will remember the soft optics and vignetting of those
magically self-developing images; both features remain prominent in
Gilbert’s enlarged archival digital prints, which convey poetic mystery
with unforced ease, hinting at cinematic storytelling. Gilbert: “These
images describe pieces of a nonspecific narrative. I am thinking about
a way of feeling and making a story about it out of photographs. I am
looking for, or looking at, a quiet still lingering and a kind of
disassociation.”
Newton’s etchings of quiet streets at night, simultaneously
mysterious and realistic, explore the poetics of darkness as Hopper
explored the poetics of sunlight. The James D. Phelan Art Award
in Printmaking runs through November 28 at Kala Gallery
(2990 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley). Tragically, Kala founder Yuzo Nakano
was seriously burned in a recent studio fire; fortunately, he is on the
mend, though he and partner Kazuko Watanabe lost much of their artwork.
See the web site if you’d like to help. Kala.org or 510-841-7000.
