The reason Emma Lee and Elvis live in Brooklyn, is, in short, paint. Sure, there’s plenty other reasons to call New York home… friends, a pretty decent writing gig, East River State Park, running to the Hudson early in the morning, sculpture and the constant possibility that Something Magnificent Will Happen Any Minute… but really, painting brought Emma Lee to Brooklyn in the first place (a gig at the Metropolitan), and it has kept them here.
So what’s doing in California? If painting were out of the equation, she could be living somewhere as far flung as Uptown Port Townsend right now, definetely within spitting of the Pacific. But art and culture do matter these days, so Emma Lee and Elvis went scouting on their trip out west to see what’s doing in San Fransicso. Here’s what they found.
The New Acadmey of Sciences, across the street from their dear DeYoung. It was overrun with six year olds (Elvis recommends knee pads and shin guards both), but the amazonian biosphere was splendid, as was the green green roof. The scuba diver was exciting, and the penguin demo adorable, but the underground aquarium had already sprung a leak and made all parties want to breath into a paper bag.
The manta ray the CAS touted wasn’t near as cool as the one that Elvis, Emma Lee and the Little FIsh saw a few days later at the Albany Bowl. Nature in Nature! Or rather, Nature eating the slime off a pile of earthquake-refuse-cum-peninsula dotted with a varietal of all-but-burned effigies that reminded Elvis of Burning Man, man.
Speaking of art made of trash, the best stuff Elvis saw at the gallery buidling at 49 Geary was on the second floor, the Jeremy Mora show at Mark Wolfe Contemporary. It was a step away from Isaac Brock’s tiny cities made of ashes…little paper homes, perched precarious atop on rocky outcrops of Styrofoam and assorted crap. In gallery light, the hard wax still looked slick, threatening like some paraffin mud slide to return the tiny TIms —and us with them—to the muck that the tiny structures had risen above. It’s more than minitature that made Mora enjoyable, his humor made them right, warts and all. The glitter and gold helped.
Elvis visited SFMoMA and the Bay Area Now 5 at Yerba Buena. At both institutions, his stocks stayed firmly around his ankles, his laces tightly knotted. Just around the corner, however, Elvis just about lost his shit for the Xanadu Foundation. The international folk art gallery is fine and good, but it is housed in the original Morris Gift Shop, the 1948 Frank Lloyd Write building that followed its big brother Guggenheim into a spiral-ramped, circle-windowed world of architectural goodness.
The verdict? LACMA is an hour twenty away by plane, and had enough of the paint that Elvis thought he could find his art fix out west. But in the meantime, he’s going to go to an architectural league lecture tonight, the editions/art book fair this weekend. He’s going to dress up as a great white shark for Halloween, check out the Montebello tribute show, and be thankful that he lives in Brooklyn.
