Jaimie Warren, an emerging photographer and performance artist based in Kansas City and Brooklyn, is the winner of the 2014 Baum Award, whose prize includes this solo show at SF Camerawork. She's also the co-founder of "Whoop Dee Doo," a touring project that produces live variety shows. Not so coincidentally, the staged color photographs she recreates from Photoshopped images she finds on the Internet have a let's-put-on-a-show, thrift-shop aesthetic that makes liberal use of props, garish makeup, prosthetics, bargain basement costumes, and a group of game co-conspirators. Warren, a mischievously campy pop-culture archivist of sorts, transforms herself into characters and celebrities she parodies, and doesn't flinch from the cheesy or grotesque, like the picture of the pickled human head in a glass jar that would be right at home in Hannibal Lecter's storage locker.
Plus-sized nudies surround a gleeful Santa Claus, for whom Christmas came early, and Warren inserts presence into a version of Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" -- with some adjustments, of course, such as the hand-painted minotaur mask that covers someone's head. Then there's my personal favorite: Ivana Trump as an artichoke on a bed of greenery, smiling like a flattened sun-kissed vegetable. The look of vapid determination is just right, but that mottled complexion needs some work; time for that facial. (Through June 21.)
Although "Mark Stock: Lives of the Butlers" at Modernism was not originally intended as a memorial exhibition, the sudden death of the Oakland artist in March has sadly made it so; the entire gallery is dedicated to his life and career.
An amateur magician, jazz musician and realist narrative painter, Stock creates a vivid sense of place in theatrical scenes so vibrant they tempt you to break the fourth wall and climb into his darkened rooms, often illuminated by a single luminous source, and participate in the discreet moments of an unfolding story. "The Butler's in Love -- Absinthe," first displayed 25 years ago over the piano at Bix restaurant, where Stock held court at the bar, was featured in movies, inspired a short film by David Arquette, and became legend. His butler alter ego has appeared in dozens of paintings, and in a new series of trompe l'oeil tableaux on view here, along with works from the 1980s and 90s, such as "Bellhop" (1984), an alert fellow in a smart crimson uniform and matching cap who could be on the staff at Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel." The show revisits the history of Stock's fictional character, a Chaplinesque figure subservient in demeanor and devoted to -- perhaps infatuated with -- his mistress, always formally attired in black coat and spotless white gloves, the serenely private man with a secret inner life who fades into the background.
Stock once told a Florida newspaper that his art had "an undercurrent of love, jealousy, loneliness, murder," which may be a clue to why, in the color lithograph "The Butler's in Love" (2001), the subject's forehead and hands are pressed against a wall, his eyes closed in nameless pain and suppressed yearning.
Also included are romantic paintings: "The Lovers" (1989), where a couple is lost in sexual passion on a river bank in a Delacroix-like landscape; and "Sunset" (1989), in which a young man lays reading on the grass, a scene with a golden Technicolor backdrop that could have leapt off the set of "Gone With the Wind." Stock's atmospheric, illusionist work has been compared to William Harnett, George de La Tour and John Singer Sargent, and has been associated with film noir and Chaplin, of whom he was a great fan. But as an artist, he was his own man. (Through June 21.)
If you were nurturing a desire to enter the dreamt-up world of a movie a la Mia Farrow in Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo," Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" (1966) would seem like a heavy place to start, but artistic collaborators Anne McGuire and Karla Milosevich have done just that. Raising issues of gender, aging and female identity, they inhabit the Swedish director's fraught Nordic psychodrama in their conceptual, performance-video installation Sinne Spegel (Mind Mirror) at Steven Wolf Fine Arts. The middle-aged artists, who know something about dysfunctional relationships having grown up amidst family alcoholism and mental illness, insert themselves into the movie, superimposing their ghostly images over actresses who were in their late 20s when they played these parts. Liv Ullmann is the neurotic, emotionally damaged thespian who can't speak -- now there's a metaphor -- and the great Bibi Andersson portrays her garrulous nurse. The three-channel video of the title is shown in large-scale projection, 25 feet wide by 16 feet high, and is accompanied by a 1970s-style reflection box with another video inside. (Through June 14.)
Save the date June 19, because Marilyn Monroe is back in town, though she never really left the building and, by virtue of an early death and a relentless hunger for her image that continues more than 50 years after her suicide, she didn't age. Approximately 30 rarely-seen photographs of Monroe, taken by a variety of different photographers and collected by the founder of Limited Runs, Pierre Vudrag, are part of a traveling exhibition on view for one day only at the Sarah Stocking Gallery. The camera loved her, and was more faithful and true than the parade of men -- and photographers -- obsessed with the fantasy she embodied. MM vamps by the pool in a modest white two-piece; fairly bursts out of tight sweaters and strapless tops; but what's most touching is seeing vestiges of the young, sweet Norma Jean and the aspiring ingenue, so full of hope, before an abusive past, Hollywood fame, failure in love, and pills got their hooks into her. (sarahstocking.com)