“6 Pack” at The LAB (SF)

Earlier this month, The LAB in San Francisco presented six compact solo shows under the title “6 Pack.” One of the artists was jammed into the entry way, and the rest were spread along the walls of the main space. That area looked uncluttered for a change, but still ungainly and decrepit. However, the show was pretty good.

I especially liked the white TV set by Matthew Cox, entitled “Static” (photo at top). The pattern on the screen is rendered in graphite.

There was a large array of photo-collages by David King, brimming with campy magic. Below are two faves (images from the artist’s website). The first is called “Lighting the Way,” and the second is “Breezes for Lila.”


Sarah Applebaum presented several of her large ink-on-paper drawings from a series she calls “Pelts.” Below is a detail of one of them (image from her website). Applebaum's other main body of work (not represented in the show, but documented on the website) is a world away from her delicate drawings, though appealing in its own extroverted way.

Sarah Bereza has created a collection of women-as-tropies in a series called “Conquests.” The style of painting could be more distinctive, but the objects as a whole have a bizarre pizzazz. Of the two examples below, the second is a self-portrait. Bereza also showed paintings of young women engaged in pillow fights, but these paled in comparison to similar but far more developed work by local artist Laura Ball.


Working in an illustrational style, Joseph Rizzo presented work that usually struck me as under-developed. But he’s capable of more interesting efforts, for example these two paintings:


The final artist was Meredith Miller, who makes photographs of obese women in an attempt to renegotiate how the women are viewed. Three examples are shown below. I found this project less compelling than the erotic self-portraits by Rachel Weeks, a local photographer who is a large woman.