Burgess Franklin Collins (a.k.a. Jess) Is the Nexus of New SFMOMA Exhibition
Hyperallergic's Clayton Schuster guides readers through a new exhibit at SFMOMA that looks closely at Jess Collins's legacy in the region (and beyond). Schuster notes that "explorations into the region’s artistic history generally fall into one of three categories: evocative solo shows, milieu studies, and wide-ranging surveys. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is taking a fairly novel approach by merging those categories in its new exhibition, titled Mythos, Psyche, Eros: Jess and California." From there:
The show positions Jess — born Burgess Franklin Collins — as the center of a creative nexus, bringing together artworks from his own wide-ranging oeuvre with those by a smattering of well-known and lesser-known creators based in California. Or, as the introductory panel on one of the gallery’s walls describes, “the West Coast’s unusual romantic legacy.”
Efforts to establish this “legacy” are reminiscent of last year’s immersive Way Bay exhibition cycle at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), which was designed around the ways in which artworks’ qualities played off of and interrogated one another. Mythos, Psyche, Eros accomplishes that trick by naming three of the show’s four rooms after the title’s antiquity-themed keywords. It’s a little more organized and certainly tighter than Way Bay, but the idea is similar.
The reasons for placing particular artworks, by Jess or otherwise, in each themed room are a bit opaque. The “Psyche” room is dominated by Jess. A technicolor work from his Translation painting series, made between 1959 and 1976, makes an appearance, alongside a small paste-up, but the majority of the works are abstract or amorphous landscapes and still lifes. Seeing so many of these landscapes and still lifes together is nothing short of intoxicating. They’re not only the least investigated part of his oeuvre, but they provide a refreshing counterpoint to the dense pieces in the other rooms.
Read more at Hyperallergic.