The San Francisco Arts Commission has a gallery in the front of the Veterans Building on the corner of McAllister and Van Ness where there was an opening party on Thursday evening. It was the fifth in a series of high-concept "conversations featuring a local artist alongside an artist from another point on the globe."
The auslanders were the Canadian husband and wife team of Sheila and Nicholas Pye, who are offering a boring piece of video art in a back room, and who didn't manage to make it to the opening.
This didn't matter in the least because there were the usual crowds of beautiful young people at the party...
...and the front rooms were displaying the large-scale glitter paintings of Jamie Vasta, which are spectacular.
I asked the artist (above right) whether she was using a mixture of paint and glitter, and whether she was working from photographs.
"Glitter and glue are the only materials I used, and yes, I work from photographs," the young artist replied.
The effect is endlessly fascinating, with each of the works looking completely different depending on the light and your angle of viewing. Their meaning(s) also change moment to moment, from ecstatic to sinister and back again.
The subject matter at this show is fairly benign, in fact. According to a post by Alanna Risse at Bay Area ArtQuake, Vasta's last show at the Patricia Sweetow gallery in downtown San Francisco were of rural girls with animals they had just killed.
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