Review: Zheng/Donaldson/Fritz at Worksound

There’s good work at WorkSound this month. Two visiting artists and a local.

Michael Zheng (SF) did two installations and a performance at the opening concerning the “Distance Between Us,” the name of one of the installation pieces, and about bridging it, or not, via communication. Most easily digested was “Hear Hear,” the familiar tin-can telephone that ran from wall to wall in the back space. “Distance…” is a far more subtle treatment of the subject: a concrete pillow weighting to the floor a swath of muslin that stretched the length of the gallery. Both measure and symbol—the distance between us is heavy and lonely—there is only one pillow in this hammock-like bed. Finally, Zheng did a performance in which he crumpled and flung, sheet-by-sheet, a stack of paper. He then retrieved sheets, brushed their contoured folds with ink, flattened them, and tacked them to the wall. Formally beautiful, but ultimately uncommunicative although he’d “written” on them, these may have been letters to no one that the artist would never send.

Is this my worst photo yet? But you get the idea.

Oh, the readymade, and what do we do about it 100 years later. Or rather, when we stop valuing it as a readymade, which is to say “art,” what’s to become of all that stuff? Kim Donaldson’s (Melbourne) “Eternity Drawings” are a series of graphite drawings of found objects, on which the bit of trash is isolated on a white ground, its dimensions and location duly recorded. The garbage can nearby, “You are my freedom,” plays dance music from a CD the artist found in the trash, as if to say, “look in here for the good stuff.” The “Eternity Drawings” are as pages from a field journal recording, for eternity, those landfill-bound scraps and broken bits that will decay in perhaps an eternity or two in a subtle bit of didacticism.

Donaldson also showed a drawing of a two-sided chain letter with a set of multiples of same in two stacks on the ground in the manner of Felix-Gonzalez Torres. Finally, she showed a video that was at turns funny as hell and sad as hell—”It’s going to be…” featured artist after artist, or more likely those-who-wish-they-were-artists talking about imagined projects (because, after all, the difference is in the doing). There’s probably some analogue I’m forgetting of “If wishes were horses then beggars would ride,” that begins, “If dreams were horses….”

Finally, Laura Fritz’ “Intrus” (named by her partner Jeff Jahn) rewarded a durational viewing. The light source, called “Prototype,” resembled a cross between smaller version of a backyard metal fire pit and a low square lantern with mesh sides. But it was lit by a white glow that seemed to be emanating from what might have been white crystals inside. This lantern threw fantastic patterns on the floor and walls, patterns that it took some time to discern as one’s eyes adjusted to the light. The other element in the room (which cast a great angular shadow) was a high black table, one end of which was opened up. It took two visits into the darkened room for me to see that there was a dim light inside, not illuminating, but hinting at a set of blobish forms evenly space on a mirrored surface making it a display cabinet of sorts, but of a mysterious and confounding nature.