David Gurman, The Nicolas Shadow, 2009

David Gurman’s The Nicolas Shadow installation at St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco is pretty great. Though I’m quite secular, I really enjoyed my visit to the church, which is on the corner of the USF campus. The exhibition in Manresa Gallery, Icons and the Iconic, is an interesting mix of traditional icons, modern icons in the traditional style, and a few modern and contemporary works. Gurman’s installation is stunningly beautiful in a meditative way, and yet its content (a large bell tolls every hour counting the number of civilian casualities in Iraq) is explicitly political.

I also attended Claire Fontaine‘s artists’ talk at the Wattis Institute tonight. The Paris-based collective has been showing interesting conceptual work with radical interests at the Wattis and the Tate Modern for a few years, and it was really cool to see the artists speak with such intellect, humor and humility. Their work at the Wattis consists of texts spelled out in fluorescent tube light fixtures, in what they coined “K-Font” (sp?).