Whoa, man! Cosmic Wonder Opens at YBCA
Let us give you some advice, if you plan on taking any hallucinogenic drugs in the near future, head straight for Cosmic Wonder at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. We freely admit that our first response to the show, billed as “contemporary artists exploring trance … through exaggerated color, mind-altering patterns and morphing forms,” was more or less, “Whoa, trippy, man!” However, we quickly snapped out of it, and pen and paper in hand, made the rounds albeit slightly dizzy and nauseous the entire time. Five hours later we emerged, vomited on the sidewalk and are feeling much better now, thanks.
It’s obvious there has been a sudden resurgence of psychedelic art making its way through the contemporary art scene. On our last trip to Chelsea in New York, we certainly saw our share of neon paintings with forms dripping off the canvases and quite a lot of aluminum foil. Many of the artists indulging in this new trend are young urbanites paying homage to the transcendental 60s, but adding their own pop culture twists along the way.
Image: Doug Aitken, New Opposition II, 2001
SFist Shelley, contributing
Cosmic Wonder blends together these emerging artists with seasoned veterans to create a show mixing spirituality, nature, evolution, pop culture overload, and of course, drugs; culminating in a burst of unnatural color and shapes that challenges you to walk straight.
The show opens with Sam Gordon’s Sketchbooks and Thoughtographs, a wall of the artist’s black and white geometric doodles as the backdrop to a series of his color photographs depicting seemingly random occurrences in nature, rainbows refracting off a statue of a man riding a horse, etc. They each seem to raise the question whether these situations are random or deliberate acts of a supreme being. We’re still a little confused as to the answer, but as it turns out, this would be the most sane and logical work we would face.
Once inside the main gallery, a melee of bright colors confronted us, the likes of which we haven’t seen since we donned Hypercolor t-shirts and French-rolled our jeans. Instantly, we were drawn to the floor-to-ceiling multimedia installation by notorious artist collective Paper Rad. A giant 2-D neon robot made up of popular 80s cartoon figures overlapped on one another to the point of being stomach-churning, the piece was complete with three television screens running continuous video and sound. It was much like a car accident in that we couldn’t look away and then hated ourselves for it.
Then there was the installation by Mark Borthwick, Is My Nature My Only Way. The more time we spent with it, the more we felt like we missed something. It consisted of a tepee, makeshift bed, several candles, flowers, polaroids, half-full bottles of water among other artifacts strewn about the gallery floor. Was it a camp-out? Santeria? There were no animal bones, so probably not. But something spiritual was going on.
The installation continued onto the wall where things started to make more sense. It looked like the artist’s personal photo album with images of people outdoors strumming guitars and children playing in the grass. Scrawled on the walls were words such as “flow,” “sun people” and “movement of the minds.” Oh, this guy is a hippie. And while Borthwick’s imagery harkens back to the time of free love, it was created much more recently than that. On the opposite wall he places skateboard decks featuring religious figures which emanate vibrational hot pink rings up the wall over a large-scale drawing of some tranced-out bearded figure. Borthwick is clearly seeking out the same enlightenment and heightened spirituality as those optimistic flower children of the past but in the context of today’s urban culture.
Not to be missed in the main gallery (as if you could), are the massive paintings by Hisham Bharoocha and Erik Parker. Climb High by Bharoocha is a circular work painted directly onto the gallery wall and depicts the earth from sea to land to sky in various intricate patterns using an ungodly palette. It’s nothing short of astonishing in the way that it forces you to stand and stare at it for long periods of time until you realize your neck hurts from craning up to see the dotted cloud patterns.
Parker’s piece, Space Chase works in much the same way. It forces you to zone out just by trying desperately to make sense out of the shapes, “Are those eyes? Is that a penis? Tentacles, maybe?” There is so much to look at in both pieces and no specific directional movement for your eyes that it’s easy to get lost. We’ll leave it up to you to discern for yourselves, but after staggering away from both paintings which heavily borrow from the psychedelic posters of the 70s, all we wanted was to sit down and settle our stomachs.
Not all of the art in the exhibit was created using neon colors and pop culture references, there were two works which stood out as original and extremely well crafted. The first was Craftsbury Common II by Reed Anderson, a large-scale circular paper cutout that was so delicately complex in terms of pattern, it took our breath away. The image that pops out is of two birds flying in opposite directions and the cutouts are accented by the expert use of acrylic paint to highlight the lines and shapes of the birds. The second piece we admired was a series of mixed media assemblages by Jose Alvarez which combined minerals such as mica and desert rose crystals with animal feathers and fur to create clean, colorful compositions which seemed both futuristic and natural at the same time. We were just thankful, or rather our eyes were thankful, to finally have a break from the rest of the chaos surrounding us.
The additional gallery space in Cosmic Wonder contained a few video pieces and of course, the much buzzed about piece by James Turell, master of light and space. Untitled (Silver), the video piece by Takeshi Murata, shows a pixilated screen slightly out of focus, with what appears to be a human figure from an old black and white movie melting and reforming over and over again in infinite ways. It was disturbing and creepy, yet again, we couldn’t take our eyes off of it and it’s hard to say how long we sat there staring, head cocked to one side trying to figure out if that was Joan Crawford's face melting. Sounds frightening, doesn't it?
Last, but certainly, not least, we came face-to-velvet rope with Alta (Pink) by Turrell, lonely in its own room and cordoned off. The piece is really just a pink light directed into a triangular corner section of the gallery which ends up having an odd three-dimensional effect when combined with the triangular reflection on the floor -- the triangle then pops out at you in the shape of a diamond. It’s fascinating how the image switches back and forth between 3-D image and light on the wall as the left and right sides if your brain duke it out over reality and visual stimulation. What can we say? Such is the essence of Turrell.
All in all, we enjoyed Cosmic Wonder, it’s a show that doesn’t take itself too seriously yet carries a message about the importance of transcendence and escapism in our culture today when we’re faced with such reality as the rising death toll in Iraq each night on the news. Just make sure you don’t eat a heavy meal before you go.
Cosmic Wonder
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street at Third
July 15 -- Nov. 5
Hours: Tues. – Sun. 12 – 5 p.m.
Thurs. 12 – 8 p.m.
Image: Hisham Bharoocha, Bearhug, 2005