S.F.
Bay Guardian, 'Confess' by Harry Roche, November 27, 1996 Confess The same confessional splurge characterizing many an hour of Oprah is the impetus behind 69 motley artists' humorous and occasionally heart-wrenching displays of self-revelation at Southern Exposure. 'Confess', Southern Exposure's sixth annual semi-egalitarian, entry fee-free competition was assembled by Thelma Golden, jet-lagged juror and associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, from a pool of some 500 northern Californian artist-confessors. Much of the best work she selected is grouped together in the intimate second-floor gallery, including John Norton's All in a Day, a sucker-for-sweets Joseph Cornell-ish medicine-cabinet reliquary. So Many Roses, Galen Brown's graphite frieze, pays flushed homage to father dadaist Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal and female alter ego, Rose Sélavy. Teresa Chen's Self-Portrait with Bruises is a painfully naked snapshot. Standouts downstairs include Megan Wilson's stark, poignant Subject: Confession, which marries E-mail and moleskin to document love connections forged and frayed in cyberspace. The hands-down crowd-pleaser is Second Degree Confession, Ted Colt's maniacally irreverent coin-operated confessional, which offers plenty of peep-show appeal for voyeurs and exhibitionists alike (theVoice from above is your own). |