Nice surprises at this year's 'Emerge' show for new talent
Kenneth Baker
Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Gen Art, the national organization that spotlights new talent in the arts and fashion, has scored a very mixed record with "Emerge," its annual San Francisco visual arts extravaganza. But this year's edition, the eighth, rocks.

Gen Art has installed the work of 18 artists (through Sunday) on four floors of the Warwick Building at 988 Market St., San Francisco. (Hours: 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday; noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; www.genart.com.)  A surprise awaits around nearly every corner in "Emerge."

Stepping into one small room that feels a little like a stairway landing, a visitor encounters Sonya Blesofsky's "Staircase Piece" -- a fragmentary staircase and railing made entirely of vellum and glue.On a different floor, Blesofsky presents a section of scaffold made of newspaper that looks as if it can barely support its own weight. These sculptures have emotional power in inverse proportion to their physical fragility.

Dan Grayber's custom-made contraptions, a couple of which cling to beams nearly out of sight, breathe new life into kinetic sculpture, an art that very few practice successfully. (Rebecca Horn and Stelarc come to mind.)Grayber's "Self-installing Mechanism," once turned on, drills anchor holes in a wall and slowly pulls itself upward until it unplugs itself from its power source. Call it self-siting, site-specific sculpture.

Other pieces by Grayber use springs and internal weights to hold their position near the ceiling. His biggest piece, "Parallel Walls Mechanism" (2005), takes up most of a room. Its telescoping frames push apart, driven by an internal spring arrangement, to press against opposite walls and hold itself aloft. It almost makes you believe that it could prop the building up.
Except for Laura Paulini's obsessive, process-oriented abstractions and Jeong-Im Yi's spare, realistic pictures of scarred walls, "Emerge" represents new painting as a fairly conceptual affair.Some of the aesthetic drama and nuance we used to associate with color-field painting resurfaces in time-based terms in an installation by Freddy Chandra. Here what look like two pairs of frosted windows face each across a dark room. Light and shadow play dimly over them, illegible, but troublingly reminiscent of an uncomfortable passage between sleep and waking, and other experiences of frustrated awareness.

Frustration also receives ingenious treatment in the video pieces that Roger Ngim based on old black-and-white film footage. The spookiest of the three rephrases an old instructional film intended to teach women how to calm themselves.Its odd screen-within-a-screen format comes directly from the original, but the enigmatic editing and the soundtrack -- Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" -- are due to Ngim.At the opposite end of the scale in pacing and visual excitement is Elise Irving's "KR-3," a color video that strings together in order all the digital still pictures she took in the previous 47 weeks.

It may sound tedious, but the images' fluctuating density and their shifting and recurring themes gradually evoke a self-portrait taken beyond self-knowledge by the media involved.
Not everything in "Emerge" hits the level of the work I've described, but the show as a whole leaves a visitor feeling light and optimistic. See it.
E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.