Bruce Getty
Schultz & the Machinery of the Absurd
DATE: JULY – AUGUST 2018
Schultz has been an active member of the Bay Area arts community for several decades. A graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts and former aircraft mechanic for the Navy, Schultz moved his toolbox from the warfield to the playground, designing the sets of Children’s Fairyland along Lake Merritt in Oakland and doing design work for the (in)famous and ultra-exclusive Bohemian Club. He later played a foundational role in what would become a working artist’s playground along 5th Avenue Marina in the Oakland Estuary.
His whimsical, hodgepodge style has gotten him shows at the Oakland Museum of California and Shakey Hand Gallery, but his most important work has been right in his workshop, where for over 30 years he has turned the once-crumbling alley into a colorful, exuberant arts community. His work almost always engages with movement, the idea of innovation, and an impish delight in blurring boundaries.
An energetic, carefree tinkerer, Schultz plays with the modern reverence for machines by unabashedly mixing together the functional and decorative, the mechanical and the supernatural, historical tidbits and poetic fancy.
Terminal Punk:
V Vale, Marian Wallace & Krusty Wheatfield
V Vale, Marian Wallace & Krusty Wheatfield
V. Vale, Marian Wallace and Krusty Wheatfield’s explorations of the teeming underbelly of modern life through zines, screenprints, film and photography collectively span more than 40 years. For the month of January, Classic Cars West will be transformed into a living archive of alternative media.
Never-before-seen photographs and original zine spreads by Vale, industrial music and film by Wallace, experimental bio-comics by Krusty Wheatfield, as well as punk ephemera and other underground artifacts from the RE/Search collection will be on display for the counterculture connoisseur and the newly woke alike.
See early work by Bruce Conner and Charles Gatewood, photographs of William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol, and Genesis P-Orridge, and get up close and personal with the minds behind RE/Search’s Modern Primitives, Angry Women, The Industrial Culture Handbook, and more!
Melek Zertal’s “94612”
DATES: March 2nd – April 29th, 2018
OPENING RECEPTION: March 2, 2018, 6:00pm – 9:00pm
What’s in a zip code? Melek Zertal’s early spring exhibition at Classic Cars West Gallery is an intimate documentation of just what can happen in a few square blocks. The artist’s half-year sojourn in the East Bay will culminate in this series of prints and comics recreating what the artist calls “a sour sweet promenade through Oakland streets. So many iconic buildings and signs, so many people walking past them, so many different stories.” The intertwining of feeling and place is a specialty of Zertal’s work, which conveys intimate moments of love and distraction in a few strokes of ink and gouache.
Moments of emotional upheaval are layered over the backdrop of a city alternately eerily still and in dusty, shifting turmoil. A greyhound station, a crumbling victorian, and a messy room create poignant triangulations of absence, presence and dissonance. When asked to elaborate on the connecting theme of each story, Zertal chose to focus on the “the sad romantic ones for now, for purely masochistic purposes”. And when such moments of pain are relayed with a heady, pleasing mix of realist linework and dream-like color, one can’t help but become a temporary mental resident of the 94612 … and a lifelong fan of Melek Zertal.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Melek Zertal is an Algerian artist based in Paris, France. She graduated from Les Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg in 2017, following a long line of illustrators bent in two scratching paper in dark rooms. The illustration and comic world being quite small in France, she moved to California to see a different scene, meet and work with local artists and printmakers, and try to establish a connection between the two countries. Not at all to escape cold winters.
Her drawings are regularly featured in the New-York Times.
For More Information: https://oaklandartmurmur.org/events/94612-new-works-by-melek-zertal/
