Cheap Eats
By Dan Leone

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THE EIGHT ARTISTS participating in "Housebroken" (curated by Bay Guardian art critic Glen Helfand) take the concept of domesticity with a grain of salt. Working in a variety of media, they play with conventional ideas of house and home, often to unsettling effect. Some, including Bruce Tomb and the duo castaneda/reiman, use ordinary building materials like wood and plastic to create dramatically unusual structures. Tomb's Bedroom is a large wooden box with an slug-shaped fiberglass orb sticking out of it, sort of like a skylight but more like a fat worm-creature that has gnawed its way through the walls and presumably given quite a nightmare to whomever was sleeping inside. Subtler, but still invasive in their own way, are Kate Pocrass's Stolen Soaps photographs, each showing a piece of soap she pilfered from one of her friends' bathrooms. While a few of the soaps are new, most are partially used, and it's a little disconcerting – even stomach-turning in a few cases – to think about how close they've been to the bodies of so many strangers. Aggregated on the gallery wall, the evidence of Pocrass's little acts of kleptomania gives a whole new meaning to the term "home invasion." Other artists in the show are Larry Sultan, who photographs San Fernando Valley homes that double as sets for porn films; Yoshi Abe, a photographer fascinated with asphalt embankments, walkways, and storm drains; Jon Rubin, who draws chaotic and densely detailed domestic interiors with red pencil; and An Te Liu, a conceptual artist who turns kitchen sponges and images of tract homes into wallpaper patterns. Except for Liu, who is Canadian, all eight artists in the show live and work in the Bay Area. Tues.-Fri., 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m., 77 Geary, S.F. (415) 982-3292. (Lindsey Westbrook)