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Three Downtown Shows Fit for a Fall Day

Three Downtown Shows Fit for a Fall Day

The days on the calendar have changed but the weather hasn’t. It’s still as warm and sunny on these streets as it was during the Studio Tour. We know it won’t last: this may well be the final weekend of pedestrian perfection we’ll see until 2025. It’s peak foliage in the Bergen Arches, and an opportune moment to do as we did during the first week of October. I’ve already crowed about the strong shows at the galleries at 150 Bay Street; those will be open this weekend, and they do reward repeat viewings. But if you’re walking around Downtown and you’re interested in more, allow me to direct you to a few other interesting options — not all of which were part of JCAST 2024.

Home @ Art House Productions

Datz’s landscapes blur the line between land and sky. If we surrender to his pieces — and they’re so pretty that we can’t help ourselves — we find ourselves suspended somewhere that we aren’t quite sure is terra firma. It’s the thrill of destabilization that he’s working with, and it’s one that’s fun to experience, at least for the duration it takes to look at a picture. A similar thing happens at “Home,” Andrea McKenna’s latest first-rate curation at the Art House Productions gallery (345 Marin Blvd.). She’s selected pieces that trouble the boundaries of what we possess and what we don’t, and that examine the distance between the homes we inhabit and the homes that exist in our heads.

And again, she does it in very few strokes. The Art House Productions gallery is bright and airy, and it’s got high ceilings. But it’s also pretty tight, and the close quarters magnify every curatorial gesture. Everything in the nine-artist group show speaks eloquently to the theme of the precarity and ambiguity of home: Tina Maneca’s barbed nest, for instance, or her bird feeder with an entrance that looks very much like a blade poised to fall, or Jen Morris’s elegant oil and mixed-media piece that situates a smart living room chair and strips of wallpaper in a nebulous field of green, or Greg Brickey’s array of windows and drapes surrounded by a grey mist dotted with shooting stars.

Click here for the full JC Times article by Tris McCall