March 5 2003

TUCKER NICHOLS MAKES the world smarter and funnier. He brings it into focus with an awesome clarity and sense of humor, and any show that includes his work is worth seeing. He's in good company at Spanganga's "An Uncertain Line," which features Nichols and three other local artists with dramatically different approaches to the art of drawing. Whereas Nichols uses stolid black lines for his haiku-like poetics and minimal imagery, the work of California College of Arts and Crafts graduate Libby Black reveals a delicate hand that's more in keeping with the show's title. Black's pen-and-pencil drawings of high-end fashion accessories are captioned in small, cramped handwriting – mostly razor-tongued first-person tales of ownership and, as is more often the case, nonownership. Drawing enables Black to simultaneously covet and shun brands like Kate Spade and Prada (for a recent San Francisco Arts Commission exhibit, she constructed a life-size 1969 280SL Mercedes convertible entirely out of paper). For her, materialism is not something to simply accept or disdain and get on with life; it is the fundamental moral struggle, and all other human drama can be expressed in its terms. Lee Walton contributes two large-scale, multipart drawings and one video in which he and some friends "transcribe" via body movements the 162-game season records of each team in the National League Western Division. His drawings function in a similar way, utilizing elaborate systems of shorthand to record activity on Market Street or baseball plays in the 2001 World Series. They have a certain internal logic, but they're more like meditations on life's randomness than actual decipherable codes. Rounding out the show is Jennifer Kaufman, whose drawings are by far the most abstract and, like Walton's, incorporate elements of chance into a structure of mark-making. Tues. and Fri.-Sat., 8-10 p.m.; and by appointment. 3376 19th St., S.F. (415) 821-1102. (Lindsey Westbrook)