Square Cylinder: Doug Aitken @ Manetti Shrem
December, 2019: Doug Aitken, a 51-year-old LA-based artist, presents splashy, big-budget, multi-screen videos designed to dazzle biennial crowds and address significant issues, one of them being the destabilizing effect of technological change. If there's irony embedded in the artist's use of cutting-edge filmmaking techniques to call attention to what technology has wrought, Aitken seems to glide right past it, as if to say, "How else?" Read more...
Square Cylinder: Kathy Butterly @ Manetti Shrem
September, 2019: Kathy Butterly has long held that smaller is better, and in ColorForm, her first career retrospective, she proves it with a dazzling display of more than 50 tabletop works (none taller than nine inches) that, together, affirm her position in the front rank of ceramic sculpture. Read more...
Sacramento News & Review: Map of the mind
July, 2019: Defined literally, “landscape” refers to a viewpoint of natural, often expansive scenery—think mountain ranges, beaches and rural valleys.
In a new exhibit opening July 14 at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, the term encompasses much more. Landscapes Without Boundaries uses paintings, drawings and sculpture to explore the concept of vistas. It largely maps post-World War II Northern California terrain and features works by Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Martin Ramirez and Wayne Thiebaud, among others. Read more...
Washington Post: ‘The piece hasn’t suffered enough’
June, 2019: Kathy Butterly’s ceramic sculptures epitomize a kind of nonchalant irony that’s savvy, street-smart and seductive. That makes them sound cool — and they are. Yet somehow, like the flirt at a party who keeps crashing and burning, they’re also dorky and gauche. Read more...