nonsite

We arrived in San Francisco late Thursday evening after a two hour flight from Vancouver. At the airport I was struck by how beautiful the diagram of the layout of the airport was- for all the transit signage were these beautiful Illustrator files with bright rear lit colours- of the bold shapes on a black ground. I began thinking about how interesting it would be to see a number of these airport layout together. Every airport is has the same function, but each has a layout that has evolved over time and based on the specifics of the location, history and evolution. I will try to collect some and think about this further. There are two issues- the actual plan and layout of each airport and then there is the design of the diagram explaining that layout to the many passengers that pass through each day.

Yesterday we visited Montalvo Arts Centre in Saratoga below Silicon Valley and just west of San Jose. It is set in a beautiful, if slight bucolic setting in the Saratoga hills forested with eucalyptus trees- very beautiful setting. It has a number of artist studios most of which seemed to be empty. Late November seems to be a down time, or perhaps it is just because this is the weekend after American Thanksgiving. Richard Thompson is playing there next weekend so our timing was off a week.

We came here to see the Olafur Eliasson: Take Your Time exhibition of new works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But also showing is the Jeff Wall: In His Own Words and Douglas Gordon: “Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now” but also featured is Lucy MacKenzie’s New Work. I’ve seen her work in reproduction but never in exhibition so I’m looking forward to seeing that exhibition.

We’re also going to see the Tino Seghal exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art.The Wattis Instsiute is the gallery asociated with the CCAs Graduate Programme and curated by Jens Hoffman.

More on my thoughts on these exhibitions shortly…