Ted Pushinsky: Black and White Photographs Taken While Traveling Outside the United States
@ Hamburger Eyes Photo Epicenter, 7/10/08
Ted Pushinsky has chronicled the streets of San Francisco with his 35mm camera for almost three decades, capturing everything from brawls to boxing rings to the human carnival at 24th and Mission. A regular contributor to the beloved photo zine Hamburger Eyes, he zooms in on telling gestures and ephemeral scenes with a raw, immediate style reminiscent of Robert Frank. For his latest show, Pushinsky packs up his lens and leaves SF behind, training his viewfinder on the street life in Mexico, Europe, and Asia.

Lauren DiCioccio and Aliza Lelah
@ Jack Fischer, 7/12/08
Lauren DiCioccio and Aliza Lelah stitch up sublime social commentary. DiCioccio stretches muslin over copies of the New York Times and embroiders the headline images, with partially sewn pics of John McCain and Alberto Gonzales dangling by threads. DiCioccio's organza replicas of plastic shopping bags drift on clotheslines overhead, their cheerily sewn "Thank You"s and "Have a Nice Day"s ghostly reminders of our throwaway culture. Lelah, meanwhile, quilts photo-realistic collages drawn from her family album. Snapshots of parents and siblings emerge from bits of velvet and corduroy pieced together with nervous cross-hatchings — testaments to the ties that bind.

Radialvedic
@ Johansson Projects, 7/18/08
With its allusions to prayer wheels and mandalas, Johansson Projects' latest show Radialvedic offers up meditations in the round. Although these three artists work with different materials — paper, glass, and mixed media — they share a fascination with lines that curve, bend, and spiral. Jill Gallenstein's pen-and-ink drawings resemble seedpods bursting; Kristina Lewis turns zippers, straws, and coffee stirrers into molecular creatures and voluptuous fronds; and Japanese-born Kana Tanaka, trained as a glassblower, sculpts pendulous raindrops that reflect orb-like universes. Visitors should leave the gallery, heads spinning with radiant energy, but at peace.

Holly Williams and Justin Gabbard
@ Park Life, 7/18/08
Holly Williams' Los Angeles shimmers with the sequined lights of movie marquees and deco hotels, but the burnished glow masks a deeper unease. Inspired by photographs, her paintings swim in a photorealistic blur and have the bleached-out look of overexposed snapshots: a movie-theater audience fading to white in the dazzle of the screen, beachgoers wavering in a sun-filled mirage. Williams' work appears alongside paintings and drawings from New York-based Justin Gabbard, whose flare for sharp, angular lines and color have landed his illustrations in Good magazine and the New Yorker.

Timothy Cummings
@ Catherine Clark, 7/19/08
Timothy Cummings skipped art school and taught himself to paint, honing his craft by taking cues from the Old Masters and soaking up the Spanish Catholic and Native American imagery of his Albuquerque hometown. From this strange brew of influences, Cummings concocts portraits of naïve creatures who hover somewhere between the disturbing sensuality of a Balthus nymphet and the plastic creepiness of a Bellmer doll — with a little Rembrandt gravity and El Greco mannerism thrown in for good measure. Waifs with wide, soulful eyes masked in lace and feathers flit through his tableaux, resembling guests at a Venetian ball or a surreal Victorian tea party.

Ground Scores: Guided Tours of San Francisco Past and Personal
@ Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 7/19/08
Dedicated flâneurs will appreciate the YBCA's series of unconventional strolls and bus rides through San Francisco's hidden corners. Performance artist Michael Swaine riffs on an Umberto Eco short story by leading a pilgrimage to several of the city's home libraries, while Jonn Herschend invites guests to visit sites of his own emotional crises. Other, less esoteric tours include a visit to the Presidio's Lovers' Lane, a look at land use on Treasure Island, and an "unnatural history" walk through Golden Gate Park.

The Ron Stoner Show
@ Mollusk Surf Shop, 8/8/08
Ron Stoner rode a wave of acclaim over mid-'60s SoCal beach culture, legendary for the vivid eye he brought to surf photography. Curls and pipelines, bikinis and boards — Stoner caught them all with the golden glow of Kodachrome for the pages of Surfer magazine, as stars like Dickie Moon skimming Pacific swells captured the essence of the big blue. But in the late '60s, Stoner succumbed to the lure of drugs, dropped out, and finally went missing in 1977, sealing his mythic status as a talent whose time in the sun was dazzling and tragically short-lived. The Ron Stoner Show features Stoner's bright azure prints, very much at home in the Mollusk Surf Shop.

Kwatro Cantos
@ 21 Grand, 8/15/08
Filipino collective Kwatro-Kantos sets up shop at 21 Grand for a monthlong tagay — a ritual toast over a round of drinks — but this time the ceremony is fueled by art rather than alcohol. The Pinoy collective explores the collision of American capitalism and Filipino history, peppering its work with references to both cultures. King Kong echoes in the imagery of the bulul, a primitive totem. Disney cartoons, Catholic iconography, Spanish conquistadores, and graffiti mingle in a biting commentary on American pop culture.

Julie Heffernan: Broken Homes
@ Catherine Clark, 8/30/08
In Broken Homes, Julie Heffernan's canvases echo with whispers of the old masters — a hint of Velásquez here, Cranach and Bosch there — and yet her paintings are resolutely contemporary. In these so-called self-portraits, Heffernan appears as a languid, naked nymph sporting outsized floral headdresses or sweeping skirts bedecked with dead hares, deer, and egrets that could have been plucked from a Flemish still life. But modernity — in the shape of power lines, skyscrapers, jet planes, and urban sprawl — always threads its way into these gardens of Eden.

Shen Shaomin: Experimental Studio: The Thousand Hand Buddha and Bonsai
@ Frey Norris, 9/4/08
Chinese artist Shen Shaomin uses mismatched groups of human and animal bones (some real, some cast in plaster) to form skeletal creatures that wouldn't look out of place in a natural-history museum's evolution display. On closer inspection, though, any semblance of science gives way to mysticism. The Thousand Hand Buddha traces the nine stages of development of a many-armed Vishnu-like being whose remains are proof of both life and death. Shaomin continues these natural manipulations in his Bonsai series — inspired by ritual foot-binding, he uses metal grips and vices to contort miniature trees into aesthetic studies.