Gale Antokal, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco - We are so Lightly Here

Gale Antokal, We are so Lightly Here 

Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco 

September 9 - October 14, 2004 

Patricia Sweetow Gallery presents the exhibition of Gale Antokal, We are so Lightly Here, drawings in pastel, flour and ash. This is Gale Antokal's third solo exhibition at PSG. A fully illustrated 36-page catalogue accompanies this exhibition. 

Bay Area artist GALE ANTOKAL took a 3 1/2 year hiatus to develop a body of work vastly different from her formal, still-life compositions that were the subject of her drawings for two decades. The new body of work differs in palette, monochrome v. color; in subject, human v. object; and detail, soft-focus v. hard-focus. Prior to beginning the current body of drawings, Gale Antokal synthesized an approach to her subject that obviates identification of person, time and place, yet delivers a haunting vision of displacement, and loss. Her queries are eloquently posed through the drawings, "What do we leave behind to prove we have ever existed? What is left after all is taken away?"

"Unorthodox and meaningful materials allow Antokal to give the work a considered gravity without resorting to heavy-handed imagery. They allow each drawing to remain historically nonspecific, and to invoke responses from within each viewer’s personal experience. While some works reveal clues—the boxy suitcase, the dated hemline—to place and location, the physical fragility of the work, (one brush against the paper and the image vanishes) reminds how quickly the lessons of history can be forgotten". (1) Gale Antokal's choice of images is extensive, milk pouring down a flight of stairs, groups of people walking with baggage in hand, monumental mountains shrouded in snow, sledders disappearing down a hill, billowing smoke, footprints in snow, a lone skater gliding across a field of ice, birds in chaotic flight, all the drawings reverberate with ghostly evanescence and collective foreboding. The fugitive nature of the media gives poignancy and immediacy to images that intentionally dissolve into oblique memories.

A fully illustrated 36-page catalogue accompanies this exhibition. Included are essays written by Laura Richard Janku, Editor of Artweek, We are so Lightly Here: The Fate of People and Places, and Craig Buckwald, PhD, Principal Editor at the University of California, Berkeley, Approaching Life: Vision and Technique in Gale Antokal's We are so Lightly Here.

GALE ANTOKAL was born in New York, New York, and received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 1984. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art & Design at San Jose State University, California. Gale Antokal held several visiting artist positions and teaching positions including the San Francisco Art Institute, Instructor of Art History at the Lehrhaus Institute, and the American College in Jerusalem. In 1992 Gale Antokal received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is included in both public and private collections

(1) Laura Richard Janku, We are so Lightly Here, catalogue essay

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.patriciasweetowgallery.com

David Huffman, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco - Tribulations

David Huffman - Tribulations

Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco

April 1 - May 15, 2004

Patricia Sweetow Gallery presents the paintings of David Huffman in his exhibition of new paintings, Tribulations. This exhibition is in conjunction with the University of Santa Clara, de Saisset Museum exhibition, Dark Matter: The Art of David Huffman, April 17 - August 1, 2004.

Bay Area artist DAVID HUFFMAN (b.1963), has expressed his idiosyncratic universe of Traumabot's, and Trauma Smiles in an unfolding epic of violence as the cultural norm. The cataclysmic conflicts portrayed in his paintings metaphorically parallel our nation/state, religious, racial and personal tragedies. His language is one of alienation and urgency, where characters that are marked with the Minstrel's smile exist in an environment of isolation fearing phenomena that are of their own making.

Although the paintings graphically depict a culture of apprehension, David Huffman's palette and brushwork seduce the viewer with a surface of muted tones, watermarks that dissolve in a mat, powdered surface of liquid atmosphere. Roberta Smith, art critic for the New York Times, wrote of Huffman's paintings in a November 28 review of The Studio Museum in Harlem recent exhibition Blackbelt "David Huffman's paintings of black astronauts and action figures drifting in surfaces of soft, smoky plumes and swirls suggest a familiarity with Chinese landscape painting and supply one of the show's few sensuous moments". 

Through interviews, reviews, essays and statements, David Huffman's work has been discussed and written about in many publications." In the exhibition catalog of Freestyle, The Studio Museum in Harlem,  Eungie Joo writes, "Imagine traveling to the outskirts of infinity to arrive in a Journey to the Center of the Earth-territory of bodily space, replete with internal organs, digestive gases, and glandular operations. The organs can process disease, infection and sorrow. They are awareness...."In comparison, Huffman articulates his ideas through his paintings, often demanding the viewer draw their own conclusions about influence and substance. "By recontectualizing the minstrel into super-robots, the concentration has been intellectual and material accomplishments, thus leading to a soul-less spiritual crisis. Their sense of self has become an artifact from denial of self, from obsessive material success, all cast and proffered by others. Although the stereotype of caricature has been removed, the Trauma smiles continue to inhabit the mask of the minstrel."

David Huffman's work is represented in public and private collections.

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.patriciasweetowgallery.com