East Bay Express, 3/23/2005

On the Wall

Our critics weigh in on local art.

BY DAVID DOWNS

david.downs@eastbayexpress.com

Freekmagnet Closing -- Imaginative Emeryville photographer and artist Jeremy Kirsch pulls off a cohesive exhibit of 24 arresting black-and-white photos starring his friends acting out Greek and Nordic mythology. Intense costuming and set design defines this exhibit and places it way above local point-and-shoot coffeeshop work. Highlights include "Death of Balder," depicting a Nordic god's gory end at the hands of a bunch of ten-year-olds, while "Hera, Queen of the Prom" endows a hot seventeen-year-old girl with the essence and sadness of all women. A refreshing blend of action and detail. Kirsch's work is destined for magazine covers. The exhibit commemorates his book Freekmagnet. (Closing show March 25; Auto Gallery, 3321 Telegraph Ave. (at 33rd St.), Oakland, 510-593-8489.)

SFStation.com 3/2005

FreekMagnet: Photos by Jeremy Kirsch

Auto 3321

Fri March 4th, 7pm

If Fellini had been a black and white photographer, he would be Jeremy Kirsch. Kirsch fell in love with staging tableaux upon first sight of Lewis Carrol's "Saint George and the Dragon." Since that day, he has specialized in the Victorian-era art of elaborately reenacting scenes from literature and history for the camera. Musical guests The Mall and Archaeopteryx kick things off at 9pm

Williamette Weekly, 6/2005

Visual Arts

NEWSPACE Gallery

By Richard Speer

Getting ready to blow out the candles for it's third birthday as a photo studio, darkroom, teaching space and gallery, Newspace is kicking into more ambitious gear with it's first national Juried Exhibition. Put together by Terry Toedtemeier, Portland Art Museum's curator of photography, the show features 44 images by 39 photographers from 16 different states, most prominently, California, New York, and Oregon. By it's very nature, such a democratic sampling necessarily lacks cohesion and therefore sacrifices a certain amount of fire and flair. Particularly, one wishes more of the selections had stepped outside of the box, literally, of the four-sided print as only Patrick Manning does here with his rickety, installation-like Untitled Historical Site.

The show concentrates on portraiture and still life, with less exploration of photojournalism and landscape, but that's OK, because artifice is more interesting than reality, and people are more interesting than trees and grass (well, most people, anyway). Still, the featured portraits communicate little intimacy or humanity, perhaps because photography is still in the death-grip of postmodernism and post-irony. For examples, see Jeremy Kirsch's mock cowgirl and wind-up model airplane, David Oresick's and Siri Kaur's retro-chic studies, Claudia Howell's stuffed animal, Irma Sizer's plastic toy vignette, and Julia Sherman's Dinner for One, in which a pink-bonneted tart drinks milk from a Bordeaux glass and picks apart a lobster with red-gloved hands. The current generation of photographers is trying terribly hard to be clever.

In fact, the closest anything comes here to being genuinely affecting are Monica Orozco's Freedom, and exultingly Rubenesque female nude, and Gary Thomson's Skip, which evokes the spectacle of ghoulish 9/11 channel surfers ogling the people who jumped out of the burning World Trade Centers. It's a crying shame that of all the works displayed, onlu two could be called beautiful: Sara Distin's utopic idyll, Puerto Viejo, and Hans Hansen's twinkling graffiti, Kerosene Dreams, Wyoming 2005. But, given the state of contemporary photography, perhaps two out of 44 ain't bad. Richard Speer. 632 SE 10th Ave, 963-1935. Closes June 26.