Fort Mason Festival Pavilion, San Francisco

For FOG 2018, Jessica Silverman Gallery presents “On the Other Hand,” a group exhibition that explores the shifting meaning of the handmade in an era of digital production. Davina Semo’s wall sculptures draw from a dynamic vocabulary of industrial materials. With the circular “chain” piece Semo examines the beauty of power, tension and restraint, responding to the surprise discovery of a wave pattern that curves across the surface of the powder-coated links. Luke Butler’s paintings riff on themes of mortality, self-portraiture and what the artist calls “epic frailty.” In this series, Butler appropriates text from cinema, “The End” or producer credits such as “L BUTLER PICTURES” run over landscapes and seascapes. Woody De Othello’s large-scale ceramic sculptures often anthropomorphize objects. In the case of Othello’s “Telephone” series, the plastic, mass-produced originals are enlarged and transformed into glistening sculptures that exude both hyperbolic grandiosity and weary emotional deflation. Dashiell Manley’s meditative “E” paintings seek serenity in the face of the relentless onslaught of social media and unnerving news. They contain two kinds of brushstroke: a short, rhythmic, repetitive stroke, which relates to a mindful focus on the process of painting itself; and a longer, drifting transgressive line, which signals and attempts to correct a moment of distraction. Finally, John Houck’s “Coordinate Systems” works, made with flashe paint and archival pigment prints, explore digits in all senses of the word – fingers, numerical grids and digital art-making techniques – in pursuit of thought-provoking trompe l’oeil images.

Image: Woody De Othello, Don’t Hit My Line, 2017