When I returned to San Francisco after the winter holidays, I went to see Maya Lin’s Systematic Landscapes at the de Young Museum. The museum was packed, but fortunately the crowds were mostly interested in Yves Saint-Laurent (which after viewing, it turned out, I was mostly uninterested in).

Lin’s recent work represents landscape data rather than the landscape itself. It is a transformation of scientific viewing into artistic viewing. The direct observation of the world is done through mechanical, sonic, or digital means by non-human systems. Lin translates this information–the landscape as it is perceived by machines–into a new set of drawings or scaled-down landscape structures, allowing us to move around and inhabit the data. The work still looks very digital, but the transcription has an obvious human hand, and the bumps in the data are smoothed to the point where the analog feel of a landscape is restored.

After meandering through Lin’s constructions, I made my way through many of the other galleries at the museum. I was really happy to run into a lot of work by Al Farrow, whose reliquary series I first encountered at 21C in Louisville a week prior. Farrow constructs iconic religious structures from ammunition and weaponry. The structures themselves are beautiful, and the obvious subtext of religiously-sanctioned violence makes the work challenging without being didactic.

Systematic Landscapes was on view at the de Young museum October 25, 2008 – January 18, 2009. It traveled to be there, so there is a chance it will travel to a city near you in the future.

View more photos taken at The de Young Museum on Flickr.

I traveled to Boston this weekend for the Barbarian company meeting and holiday festivities. On Saturday, I went to the ICA to check out the Tara Donovan exhibition. The exhibition was fantastic, displaying a number of large installations by the artist. Each piece is constructed from multiples of a simple base object, with the overall forms being determined by the connection between pieces. Donovan’s work is instructive on many levels, some of which I’ll explore below.

Last night, we had an informal get together in the San Francisco Barbarian office. Pizza was eaten, beverages were enjoyed, and a lot of ridiculously cool work was shared.

Videos, photos and links to some of the work shown are being aggregated on the oooshiny log.

Dipping my toes into the SF gallery scene yesterday with Becky exposed a few interesting pieces of art, and a world of gallerists significantly different from those in NYC. At nearly every gallery, we were greeted by someone who explained their current offerings and talked about upcoming shows.

My favorite work was in the Summer Reading exhibition by the Hosfelt Gallery, a collection of artworks inspired by literature. The collection included a series of dioramas by Su Blackwell. Each was constructed from the pages of a book to recreate the world of the words inside a beautiful wooden box. Pictured here is ‘The Secret Garden,’ which has a door opening into the box and is the most immediately striking. Others in the series contain lights, a moving carousel, and other small mechanical inclusions. The words on the pages, naturally, tend to relate to the forms they construct, like a suitcase with the word ‘trunks’ legible on its side.

Another successful exhibition was of contemporary chinese art at the Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery.

I drove down Highway 1 and the 101 to LA last weekend to check out the Glow Festival on and about the Santa Monica pier. Many thanks to Tom and Jess for letting us crash at their place again. The all-night art festival turned out to be mostly a big, messy beach-party. No worries, as we got to the Usman Haque piece before it broke and were able to squeeze in a few seconds of interaction with Moon Theater. We also had some solid tapas and sangria fueling us as we pushed through the crowds.

Moon Theater, a project by Nova Jiang and Michael Kontopoulos, was the most intriguing and beautiful work I saw at the festival (admittedly, I didn’t get to see/interact with everything due to the crowds). It was of particular interest to me since I’m applying to UCLA this fall and both the artists are currently enrolled in the D|MA program. A projection of the moon onto a disc provided a stage for shadow puppetry. Puppet-like silhouettes were generated by a computer observing the shapes people made with their hands in front of another glowing-white disc embedded in a large white console about 30 feet away from the moon.

Moon Theater allows for the overlay of individual narratives through a controlled device in a new public format (i.e. you can make up your own stories/reasons for the characters appearing on the screen), which is its main attraction as a user. However, the separation between the projection and the control led to some confusion with the piece, with many people simply standing in front of the projector to cast their shadows. Simply raising the projector so people couldn’t get in its way would have helped the piece a lot. It also seems like it would be very successful in more of a gallery setting, where the connection between controller and display is more obvious — the crowds hid the relationship between the two components.

Haque’s work, ‘Primal Source’, alternated between sound-responsive flourishes and generative patterns projected onto a screen of mist sprayed over the beach. The work was photogenic and attractive even from a distance. The motion of the streamers after their release into the fluid space was beautiful.

The variety of visuals in ‘Primal Source,’ a strength overall, weakened the interactive aspect of the work. Fences held back viewers/revelers from the projection and overly-sensitive microphones — the people standing near me couldn’t figure out whether they were impacting the piece at all. It would have been fantastic were we allowed to play inside the projection space, as one can do with Anthony McCall’s ‘A Line Describing a Cone’ (pictured below). The fences, however, guaranteed people were mostly observers, rather than explorers of or active participants in the artwork’s space.

More photos on flickr.