'The Tokyo Monster Show'
Shooting Gallery, Through June 3

THE SHOOTING GALLERY'S current exhibition, "The Tokyo Monster Show," presents the work of more than 30 artists inspired by the themes and aesthetics of Japanese monster movies. The exhibit distills the genre as a pop-art aggregate of science-fiction, horror, and superhero action that has expanded beyond films to include comic books, toys, and TV shows. Works in the exhibit repeatedly return to childlike imaginings of power, violence, and heroic protection, along with adolescent expressions of sexual anxiety, and apocalyptic scenes of urban destruction. In their works, Eric Joyner and KRK draw the connection between the Japanese monster movie and the utopian, technological fantasies of the postwar world from which it originates. The monster appears, along with the spaceship and the astronaut, as a figure from the imagined "future adventures" of a society that sustains its sense of autonomy by valuing, above all else, efficiency and other comforts provided by the scientific mastery of nature. But the subtitle to KRK's work, All-See Monitor (Future So Bad), hints at the dystopic nightmares that plague this postwar idyll – as if the monster presents a terror that science not only can't master but has also contributed in creating. In Dawn after Destruction Jim Winters presents these nightmares more directly as the historical truth of the Japanese monster fantasy. He paints a black-and-gray cityscape in ruins, devoid of any signs of life, and dotted with orange-and-red fire and blood. The picture presents the creature indirectly through the devastation that it has left behind; but nothing distinguishes the chaos from the atomic holocausts that originally inspired the film Godzilla. In Godzillella in Ecstacy Meets Exploding Al-Queda Bombers, Mick Sheldon makes this terror contemporary. Through a psychedelic haze of oscillating circles, he presents the monster with long golden hair, breasts with hardened nipples, and dilated pupils, holding exploding figures in each of its claws. The piece speaks to the sublimity of the fears that haunt the modern world, which the melodramatic figure of the Tokyo monster expresses. Tues.-Sat., noon-5 p.m., 839 Larkin, S.F. (415) 931-8035. (Clark Buckner)