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'@**#!&! Comic Relief!'
Through Sept. 21,
Ardency Gallery
COMICS. AS a kid, Jeff Stevens loved their bold colors and
thrilling adventures, superhuman heroes and despicable villains. As
an adult, he set about collecting them again, but this time he found
himself attuned to other kinds of messages and nuances, encoded but
legible, just below their pulp-paper surfaces. Stevens began painting
his own versions of comic pages on a massive scale – larger-than-life
Evel Knievels, mad scientists, and bottled genies – intending to
bowl over viewers with their brilliant colors and powerful expressions
of virility, greed, courage, and other stereotypically male attributes.
Each canvas tells the beginning of a story in a recognizable comic genre
but then leaves us hanging – a little like a movie trailer, except
we know there's no movie to see and thus no possible conclusion or resolution
to be had. Maybe Stevens intends these beginnings-without-endings to
be a kind of narrative complement to his lopsided, hyperbolic characters:
men so "manly" that they seem about to fall over forward from
the weight of their jutting chins. The power of the paintings comes
from their consistent refusal to offer any kind of balance or closure.
Also featured at the gallery is a series of handblown glass jugs by
San Francisco's Rev. Timothy T. Taylor. Taylor describes his jugs as
"GBAL," which stands for "Gay Black Alien Lover"
and refers to a type of "grotesque" jug made by African American
slave potters in South Carolina in the 1860s. The jugs' bulbous eyes
and mouths stand out in stark relief; they look comical at first, but
after you see them repeated over and over on all of Taylor's works,
the exaggerated features seem to take on a kind of ritual meaning, as
if the artist hoped they might ward off sinister forces. Tues.-Sat.,
11 a.m.-5 p.m., 709 Broadway, Oakl. (510) 836-0831. (Lindsey Westbrook)
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