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"Lines" at Limn: The group show "Lines and Curves"
at Limn Gallery -- never mind that mathematically all lines are
curves -- warrants a visit because it contains new work by a few
familiar names and introduces a couple of unfamiliar but intriguing
newcomers.
Sid Garrison shows several of the obsessive colored pencil abstractions
for which he is known, including an especially lovely new one, "May
27, 2005," that quavers with echoes of traditional Chinese
landscape painting.
Former Bay Area artist Robert Strati turns in a tough little wall
piece he calls "Squiggle" (2005), a little arrested tornado
of heavy wire and fishing line, unaccountably satisfying. It and
the drawings of Janice Caswell, which seem to map
private memories, bring Richard Tuttle to mind, a risky thing when
his retrospective is a few blocks away at the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art. Maureen McQuillan shows handmade abstract drawings
in which she has somehow stretched and twisted tidy grids without
messing them up.
But C.E.B. Reas nearly steals the show with ink-jet prints and a
randomly varying projection of coursing, proliferating and dissolving
lines generated by custom-written software.
The withdrawal of the hand from drawing in Reas' work and its strange
simulation of vitality make it look like some sort of turning point.
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