Upper Market Gallery, San Francisco, Nov 8-10, 2024

Put nine artists together under the prompt INVISIBLE CITIES and an unspoken dialogue emerges. INVISIBLE CITIES takes its inspiration from Italo Calvino’s tale of a fictional conversation between the Mongol Emperor Kubla Khan and Marco Polo. The worlds conjured by the young explorer are inventions (magical, surreal, poetic, oblique, or familiar) but all are mirrors of the human imagination. Calvino’s novel – like this exhibition – presents visions of will, desire, beauty, and despair, and of each individual’s reactions to space, memory, the known, and the unknowable. 

Joe Szuecs presents a dioramic construction that situates organic forms in technologically mediated environments. The result is an otherworldly tableau. His mode of spatial storytelling is echoed in Adam Wolpert’s presentation of a quartet, sextet, and trio of small oil paintings. The quartet juxtaposes an iceberg, a smokestack, an empty bird nest, and a paintbrush. What is an artist to do for and with the natural world in this day and age? Wopert’s paintings seem to converse with many of my own, which present actual feathers on a painted field or page. 

Bill Krinard offers paintings of an open window, the unpeopled facade of an apartment building, a forested path, and the scene of a solitary figure in a cosmos filled with jacks (a game that used to be played with knuckle bones). And speaking of childhood games, Walt Morton takes two of the most overdone art forms — floral art and portraiture — and seeks to reinterpret them in a non-classical style. The result is a fantastic series of Barbie headshots and single tulips (once the lust object of a historic speculative financial bubble).

Rather than straddle the question of the human place in the natural world, Jane Manning gives us beautiful pastoral scenes of lakes, mountains, trees, and all that one would wish to preserve of the earth for this and future generations. Omar Mueller’s stirring desert and California coastal scenes further this welcome sensation of longing. While Kim Chigi’s paintings dance in the realm of abstraction inviting a contemplation of uncertainty, fluidity, and an openness to new possibilities. 

Charlie Pendergast’s portraits of legs wandering a gallery space invite visitors to enter the invisible cities of their own imaginations and wander. Work from INVISIBLE CITIES is available on the Upper Market Gallery website.