Sights & Sounds is your weekly guide to the Bay Area arts scene. Illustrator, printmaker and artist Sanaa Khan told KALW’s Jen Chien about three fantastic arts events happening around the Bay this week.
- "Good Luck Everyday" at the Naming Gallery open through 9/1
- "On to the Next" at Long Weekend open through 9/4
- "La mala educación" at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on 8/26
"Good Luck Everyday" features new work by Taylor Carpenter and Chris Rexroad, two artists based in Los Angeles; and Oakland cartoonist Matt Carignan. The show includes sculptural drawings, wood carvings and bright, colorful comics. The Naming Gallery will have a closing reception on 9/1 at 6pm.
KHAN: Matt’s work is really funny, colorful, very cartoony, but it’s deceptive … He’ll have this amazingly detailed scene, for example, of a traffic jam on the Bay Bridge that is "Where’s Waldo"-like in how much little tiny scenes are going on.
Gina Contreras's solo show at Long Weekend, "On to the Next," focuses on one woman’s night of loneliness at the end of a relationship. Together, her paintings are an intimate portrait into the way our feelings of emotion and romance eventually fade into heartbreak and solitude. The show is up until Labor Day at Long Weekend, an art gallery and art store, which is only open on the weekend.
KHAN: She creates this really intimate view of this woman’s bedroom … It’s really vulnerable and relatable.
"La mala educación," directed by Pedro Almodóvar, is about a filmmaker's complicated reunion with a childhood friend. In the movie, Fele Martinez and Gael Garcia Bernal play two friends working together on a movie within the movie that reveals how they've each dealt with the traumas of their shared adolescence at a Catholic boarding school. BAMPFA is showing La mala educación as part of their series, "Women's Troubles: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar."
KHAN: It explores sexuality, it explores identity, it explores being an artist, just so many things that are so compelling to me, and I continue to explore today. It really deserves to be seen on the big screen.
