This article was originally published on August 3, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

By Hugh Leeman
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Gil Batle's show Almost Sanctuary at Catharine Clark Gallery delves unabashedly into the artist's dark past through symbolism and storytelling that speak of the artist Filipino American identity, a life of freedom and incarceration, as well as self destruction and creativity all intricately rendered in faux blue-and-white porcelain, hand carved ostrich eggs and two trophies made from the reassembled glass of broken whiskey bottles celebrating his victory over the demons of addiction. 

Batle, a Filipino American raised in San Francisco, California, was first incarcerated at 14. Early struggles with drug addiction led to forging checks and IDs, leading to two decades in the California state prison system, from the infamous San Quentin Prison to Jamestown, known amongst inmates as the "Gladiator School" for its violent reputation [1]. At the end of his last stint in prison, a prison counselor suggested he move to the Philippines to break his cyclical entanglement with crime on the streets of San Francisco [2]. The counselor used the money Batle earned from prison jobs to buy the plane ticket that would change the course of his life when he moved to his parents' native Philippines. He continues his current art practice from a remote island in the archipelago.  

While in prison, he drew portraits of inmates' loved ones and began teaching himself to tattoo using soot from burning plastic chess pieces, mixed with shampoo or lotion, to create black tattoo ink [3]. This skill earned him fame among inmates, providing him protection and income. The intensity of circumstance channeled into his creativity, at which Batle marvels, "Deprivation brings out the creativity in any man. It's unbelievable, the creativity there [in prison]. Unbelievable."

From a previous body of work, Almost Sanctuary exhibits two of the artist's phenomenally skilled carvings on ostrich eggs, from which he first gained renown. Batle went from showing the carved eggs at a convention center trade show to art museums through recounting his experiences incarcerated in bas-relief on the 1/16-inch-thick surface of the egg, using a high-speed dental drill [4]. The egg for the artist is a symbol of new life and fragility, while the stories are a testament to his transformation from the darkest parts of society. Of this precarious journey, he says, "If you go past that sixteenth of an inch, you practically destroy the egg. And I think that kind of fragility is where I stand emotionally, I think.”[5]

In the two ostrich eggs on display, the shell is carved away to create chain link forms, exposing the egg's interior. Handcuffs frame a prison scene as an inmate gets a tattoo on his head, or a blind man with a cane attempts to find his way, stepping from tree trunk to tree trunk in an endless forest of the unknown. Carved above the scene of the man searching for his next step are Common Swifts, a motif associated with prison tattoos that, as the artist notes, is a species of bird that spends much of its life searching for sanctuary. 

Two trophies, each standing over a foot tall, made from the shattered glass shards of whiskey bottles, etched with personal symbols created with the same dental drill used on the ostrich eggs, are soldered together to celebrate the artist's overcoming addictions from his dark past. The artist notes, "I struggled with drugs and alcohol. During that struggle, in anger or sadness, there were times I would smash my whiskey bottle in a drunken stupor. Today, I know [sic] longer fight with alcohol. These glass trophies are an evolution from that struggle of drinking to conquering it. The symbol of victory made of shattered whiskey bottles." [6]

Trophies and ostrich eggs aside, Almost Sanctuary's focus is Batle's blue-toned paintings on plates that take on the appearance of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, which was traded to the Americas through the Philippines during Spanish colonization of the islands. Yet, these artworks are neither porcelain nor is the blue pigment the traditional cobalt glaze associated with Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. Instead, the works are ceramic and acrylic, reflecting the resourceful nature of Batle's creativity while alluding to his past as a forger. Batle's early profit from his artistic ability was making hand forged cashier's checks [7] to support his meth addiction. Batle saw the forgery of checks as a form of art, saying, "The only thing I knew best was art, which was fraud and forgery." [2]

On several plates, flowers grow atop prison shanks, knives handmade in prison from a single piece of metal, with cloth wrapping one end to protect the aggressor's hands. The shanks are delicately rendered, as if roots stabbed into the soil, which resembles a close-up of the layers of skin, epidermis, dermis, and subcutaneous tissue. From the steel shaft of the prison shank, tiny roots branch out into the surrounding environment. Above the shank's cloth-wrapped handle, the detailed bouquets blossom. A decorative pattern in black rounds the plate's basin. The simplicity of the pattern bears the heavy weight of Batle's long-time reality of counting days served, as upon closer inspection, the pattern recurs in several of the show's plates, featuring roman numeral hashmarks bundled in countless clusters of five encircling the plates' central scenes.
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In Pineapple (2025), the fruit that is a major export crop of the Philippines, reveals its prickly patterned surface to be rows of inmates with their heads bowed and their hands behind their backs. On one side of the plate's edge is a prison watchtower, on the other a paradisal beach.

Beyond flora, birds form another recurring theme in the artist's visual vernacular. Swifts escape from cages with prison yards and towers, on the plates' lips, the Swift's freedom contrasts with Maya Chestnut Munia (2025), in which six Maya Munia, the national bird of the Philippines, sit on a branch, chain-ganged together, the edge of the plate depicting the tropical fauna of the Philippines.

While the bird paintings are largely allegorical icons in The Tinikling Bird (2025), a layered narrative appears in linear depth perspective. The Tinkling, a bird woven into the cultural fabric of the Philippines, is revered for its dance-like movements that enable it to avoid traps and navigate through difficult terrain, inspiring generations of folk dances in the Philippines [8]. In such performances, a dancer stands in the middle of two bamboo poles, both several feet long, held by the dancer's companions, who move the poles back and forth, striking them together, forcing the dancer to hop and dance to avoid having their ankles smashed between the poles. In Batle's rendition, the bird replaces the dancer, and instead of performance companions, corrections officers move the poles, surrounded by the community clapping and playing percussion with the steep palm tree topography of the Philippines as backdrop.

Self-portraits add to the show's central theme of unflinching honesty intertwined with self-actualization. In a particularly nuanced piece, Fil-Am Self Portrait (2025), a double-headed Carabao, the traditional draft animal of the Philippines used for plowing rice, looks in opposite directions. An inner conflict of the shadow and the self arises from the Carabao's back, as two versions of the artist confront one another. One with his hands raised, ready for a fistfight, wears a prison-style knit hat and a standard-issue shirt, while the other wears no shirt, his head crowned by a traditional conical rice farmer's hat adapted for the sun's heat. In this case, his raised hands gently hold a bird as if readying it for flight. Covering the Carabao's body is a combination of Tagalog, the widely spoken language that serves as the basis of the island's national language [9], and English text. Words like "Im Busy" in English are aside phrases like "Salamat Po", meaning "thank you", with the word "Po" denoting respect to an elder. Interlocked handcuffs threaded with cloth, as well as Carabao horns inscribed "Fil-Am" (Filipino American), relate complex elements of the artist's life: incarcerated and free, fighter and sustainer of the bird. 

Striking a deeply vulnerable tone through a recurring motif in his oeuvre, a belt in Precarious (2025), inscribed with the words "I beat you because I love you," encircles a naval officer squatting on a spinning sphere emblazoned with keys, locks, and barbed wire. Batle's father was a naval officer; the belt appears in previous series aside scenes of abuse endured as a child. 

The artist's survivor spirit appears throughout Almost Sanctuary, yet in Caudal Autotomy (2025) it is most apparent: a realistically rendered lizard turns to look towards its missing tail; in place of its spine is a broken chain, while around the plate are dozens of lizard tails broken off the reptile's body. The work and its title reference the biological phenomenon in which lizards can detach their tails from their bodies, releasing themselves from a predator's grasp, and eventually regrow the tail. The painting suggests that this phenomenon is a skill the artist developed to survive life in prison, which, combined with creativity and dedication, empowered Batle as an ex-convict outside prison.

Life after prison has been a challenge in itself that Batle has taken on through his art. Encouraged by his brother Agelio to "create something that is you," the artist says he had no idea who he was yet, as he thought about it, his brother said, "what makes you angry, what makes you sad, what makes you alive." Ultimately, the word anger stood out, and then he realized the answer was prison. He started carving stories from prison, asking his brother if it was ok. His brother said, "It's not that it's ok, it's true, it came from a real place." [2]

In a world starved for truth, Batle's art speaks from a place unafraid to remove the mask and reveal a history of afflictions beneath the eggshell veneer. Fragile as it may be, when mixed with his creativity, something remarkable happens; we find an artist and artwork that are astonishingly and refreshingly human.

This article was originally published on July 1, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

By: Hugh Leeman

​Taiwanese artist Yuan Goang-Ming's major exhibition, Everyday War, at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, uses allegorical single-channel videos to place the viewer at the threshold of being overwhelmed by the immensity and dynamic complexity of Taiwan's socio-political existential threat, pitting history and ideology against one another over China's long proposed "reunification" with its "breakaway province."

Goang-Ming, the father of Taiwanese film art, subsumes the museum visitor within cinematographic symbolism to introduce a war waged on the ordinary Taiwanese citizen’s psyche, caught in a web of historical threads amidst decades of the daily threat of invasion from mainland China. To immerse the visitor in this reality, the artist includes domestic furniture that furthers his allegorical narrative and a single pencil drawing which offers insight into the very chairs which the viewer has used to view his emotionally charged videos. 

Central to the historical conflict is the Chinese Civil War, which concluded in 1949 with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong, over the Nationalist Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek. Following the defeat, the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan. On the mainland, the Communist Party asserts authoritarian rule, while Taiwan has evolved into a democracy.

Everyday War, both the name of the solo exhibition and a single-channel video installation that premiered at the 2024 Venice Biennale, was curated by Abby Chen, the Contemporary Art Curator at the Asian Art Museum. Chen brought Everyday War and additional videos, spanning a decade of the artist's career, to San Francisco amidst the ever-evolving potential of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. 

Before entering the exhibit, the viewer encounters a single vertical banner bearing the show and artist's names in both English and Chinese, hanging at head height. The vertical banner takes on a tone of significance relating to the modern history of vertical banners used in pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong to protest mainland China's Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 and, more recently, in 2014, Hong Kong protesters unfurled a massive vertical banner stating, "Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow Taiwan." The latter banner, connecting Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement and Taiwan's Sunflower Movement, both of which protested Chinese influence on their democracies. 

As the viewer ducks under or walks around the title banner, a dimly lit room is entered with the exhibit's only wall text, once again vertical, first in English and then in Chinese. The wall text in the vertical banner style begins with a tone that reads like a defiant poet's staccato: "sirens, explosive blasts, sudden pounding, a slow tempo anthem, and a child's babbling." It ends its first paragraph posing questions to the visitor: "Is this a site of allegory reflecting the past and present? Or a prophecy of the human future told through an exhibition? To Yuan Goang-Ming, a second-generation war refugee born, raised, and living with his family in Taiwan, it's likely both."

Moving past the entry vestibule's wall text, one enters a sprawling exhibition space of darkness lit only by the brilliant glow of the artist's videos. The first screen, some 12 feet tall by 15 feet wide, is from the artist's 2018 single-channel video with sound, Everyday Maneuver. The video shown on both sides of the large screen pulls the viewer into a disconcerting reality. 

Once on the far side of the screen, viewers can sit in slightly reclined white beach chairs to watch the 5:57-minute video. Beyond the vastness of the image and the drama of flying above a bridge towards a metropolis, the intensity is heightened by an air raid siren.

The visuals transform just before the bridge ends, with the new perspective boxing in the viewer between the city's skyscrapers. While looking down from above, not a soul is in sight at the height of the day as the siren wails. The camera pans past a plaza and towards Taipei's central subway station, which doubles as a bomb shelter for Taipei residents. The sirens, the empty streets, and the station are a testament to the reality of Taipei's transformation into a ghost town during the Wanan air raid drills held annually since 1978. Each drill lasting 30 minutes readies residents to shelter in place in the event of an invasion from mainland China. 

Importantly, the significance of the chairs the viewer sits in is revealed through the artist's nearby pencil drawing, What Lies Beyond Us? (2024). The chairs are just like the ones observers sat in to witness the development of nuclear bombs tested on April 18, 1951, on Parry Island of the Marshall Islands in the West Pacific. In the realistic drawing, just as at the actual event in 1951, the viewer sees the now-familiar white beach chairs filled with civilian and military brass, wearing specially designed protective goggles, turning the world-changing moment into a spectator-like event. 

After the unsettling aerial fly-through of Taipei, the air raid sirens come to an end as the screen fades to black. The journey through Taiwanese citizens' reality, backdropped by the threat of war seen on the exhibition's largest screen, is not yet finished. Comfortably seated as modern spectators on the beach furniture, the next video comes into focus. 

The same screen's second video, The 561st Hour of Occupation, 5:56 minutes, (2014), takes us inside the internal conflict of Taiwan's Sunflower Movement, a rebellious protest within the democratic chamber of Taiwan. The video's opening view emerges inside the legislative building in March of 2014 when students protested Taiwan's free trade agreement with China, the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement, seeing it as a threat to democracy and Taiwanese businesses. 

The camera pans in on unfurled vertical banners hanging from above the parliament floor as youth occupy the space, displacing the politicians from discussing the trade agreement for 23 days, ultimately preventing the agreement's ratification. The scene transforms from a peaceful protest filled with dozens of youth into a vacant parliament that looks as if a rowdy fraternity party got out of hand. What remains are the strewn-about banners in Chinese and "Free Taiwan" signs in English, as well as numerous tripod-supported cameras of the press. 

Taiwan's peaceful Sunflower Movement stands in stark contrast to those in 1989 when hundreds, if not thousands, of student protesters were killed in China's Tiananmen Square Massacre. The discrepancy in the death toll largely depends on who you ask and where they are from. A fact that is underscored by Goang-Ming's video, slowly panning across dozens of press cameras and their tripods focused on the parliament floor. The imagery is testament to one of the great ideological divides between Taiwan and China. In China, access to information and freedom of the press are deeply restricted, whereas in Taiwan, the press's cameras and their freedom to report to the people highlight the profound ideological distance between the opposing shores of the Taiwan Strait.

Beyond the videos, the museum visitor comes to a table set comfortably with a white tablecloth, crystal wine glasses holding healthy splashes of white wine, and full water glasses awaiting dinner guests. The optimistic scene is shattered, and the viewer is shocked to their senses as hidden haptic sensors intermittently rattle the table, as if a bomb has dropped in the distance, its reverberations have shaken the hopeful scene to the darkest potential lingering in the back of Taiwan's mind. The table's invited guests will never come. The table and the domesticity of the installation prepare the viewer for the headline video, Everyday War (2024), 10:33 minutes.

For museum visitors witnessing Everyday War, the artist has exchanged the reclined beach chairs for couches with a side table topped by a dimly lit lamp, seemingly straight out of a Dwell magazine domestic fantasy. Sitting comfortably on the household furniture, facing an oversized screen that loops the artist's single-channel video, a camera pans in on an apartment scene, then back out, over and again, always in slow motion.
The video opens from the far side of the working-class Taiwanese apartment furnished with a couch, kitchenette, coffee table, bed, bookshelves, and a modest flat-screen television. Tranquility, intimacy, and symbolism create an uncomfortable peacefulness that the viewer knows is about to end. The artist heightens the intimacy by creating the entire scene within his own house. What's about to happen gives a glimpse into the foundational fears of the nation's nightmare, seemingly creeping towards a reality. 

The immediate symbolism of a Chinese language newspaper on the coffee table while an English language newspaper sits on the bed is clearly the home of a person with their feet in disparate realities. 

A coffee mug, filled nearly to the brim, sits beside a MacBook laptop, actively displaying a multicolored screensaver. Just beyond the MacBook, true to 21st-century form, yet another screen showing a first-person video game, with a soldier running through an urban setting and shooting at houses. No one is guiding the video game soldier. This screen within the screen asks the viewer what our role may be as the onlooker in a world inundated with the perverse entertainment of warfare. 

The video slowly pans in towards goldfish in a tank, then the first bullet pierces through the tranquility, shattering the window behind the TV screen with the video game. The first bullet is followed by several more, destroying the coffee maker, which vomits up water. The lamp above the couch is hit, and its glass comes raining down. Distracted by the bullets, the camera has now fully zoomed in on the goldfish calmly swimming in their watery world, unaware of the chaos. 

The camera begins to pan out from the fish. More bullets ring across the room, shattering dishes, a Coke can, and all manner of domestic appliances that once hit by bullets dance through a slow-motion state of destruction before collapsing to the floor. The camera pans in towards the fish again. Are the fish an allegory of the privilege to be unaware, or is there simply nothing they can do? The camera pauses at the back of the room.

Once again, in slow motion, it pans back in, and flames skim books on the shelf beneath the fish. As the camera zooms in for a close-up of the fish and their tank, an even greater eruption causes the books to be engulfed in flames, thrusting the paperback Art and Power from the shelf. Its information collapses to the floor beside leaves from a plant that once sat on the window ledge.

The camera pans out one last time; at the back of the room, pink and white flowers are overwhelmed by bullets shot through the apartment's window and walls. Still, the goldfish swim in a tank isolated within their artificial reality. A bullet hits a cushion, and its feathers flutter like oversized snowflakes. The book 1949 precariously teeters on the shelf, its title marks the end of China's Civil War. Albert Camus' The Rebel explodes off the shelf in flames, its cover fully facing the viewer in slow motion. Camus published the book just two years after China's civil war. In it, he critiqued Soviet communism and revolutionary ideologies that justify violence and oppression in the name of history.

The most striking part of the Everyday War is the video game never stops amidst the frenzy of bullets and an accompanying audio clip, presumably from one video game player to another: a man with an American accent recounting a youthful story says in part, "We had airsoft guns, and we would shoot canoes next to the Boy Scouts… We took it seriously. We wore ghillie suits. We would wear camouflage throughout the night, dude, it was a special operations mission for us."
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Suddenly, it seems the intended audience was always the United States, entertained by war, and long protected by oceans of security like the fish from the bullet-riddled frenzy. A map once untouched above the bed is now singed from the explosions; the West Coast of America and Taiwan get the worst of it. 

Finally, though it's the fish's turn, the tank is hit, creating a waterfall that rushes over the bookshelf. Slowly, its emptying cascade becomes a mere drip; the camera focuses on the fish tank's shards of glass suspended in time, now empty, the tension released, everything is still. 
The video returns to the peaceful domesticity where it began, just a day in the life of an everyday war.
Yuan Goang-Ming doesn't decorate homes and museums with the subjective nature of beauty or send viewers home with a happy Hollywood ending. Instead, he is giving us what great art offers: ideas that challenge our understanding of history, ideology, and the world as a whole. In this world, all things are up in the air, fluttering like the feathers of the shot-up couch cushions, from America's global influence to the mental health of those who live through the menace of invasion, and most especially Taiwan's autonomy.

This article was originally published on July 20, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review

By: Hugh Leeman
Michael Reafsnyder's exhibition, Summer Jam of impasto acrylic action paintings at Scott Richards Contemporary Art offer viewers a painterly portal into a world of partially combined ebullient colors that create space for the story-making machine of the mind to turn off and tune into a state of experiencing the self unadulterated by the knee-jerk reactions that today's attention economy depends upon. 
Reafsnyder's layered paintings transmit a genuine sense of the rare artist immersed in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi termed a flow state, where one finds the self enveloped in a sense of joy, losing track of time, and achieving optimal experience. Csikszentmihalyi described achieving the optimal experience as "...a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like." [1]

In an era of seeking instant gratification and generative artificial intelligence, planting its seeds of fear of displacement in fields far beyond the image makers of the arts, Reafsnyder's works remind us that the aspirational role of painting today can be what it has been for thousands of years: a mechanism to express connections with the sublime, be they ecstatic emotional states, the gods, or spirit realms. He says that "when I go through intense periods of painting, kind of, the world slips away and I get seduced by this world that's evolving and materializing on the canvas." [2] Academic Susan Magsamen, in her book, Your Brain on Art, writes of similar possibilities, "When you make art and you don't know what's going to happen, you're involved in the mystery that life really is." [3]

Reafsnyder's streaks and splatters of paint leave maps of the unknown behind that, if we could follow them, suggest they might lead us to the places humans have sought for millennia, a path towards self-transcendence. Telling of the flow states that Reafsnyder's paintings seem to record is the common acknowledgment that one achieves such a state by intrinsic motivation as opposed to society's external rewards. 

The artist's paintings speak of someone who for moments of their making forgot not just about society's rewards but about society altogether and for the betterment of those who see his artworks as they call to mind 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal's suggestion that, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." [4] With his paintings' thick layers acting as an abyss in which we can follow our emotions and wander through thought, we can get delightfully lost in a room alone and perhaps find ourselves. 

His paintings blend elements of Gerhard Richter's Abstract Picture artworks with Pollock and de Kooning's energy. Reafsnyder speaks of his inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, yet not being weighed down by its post-war angst; instead, he sees his painting as a place of joy and pleasure. In the place of Abstract Expressionism's indirect support from the CIA to illustrate, amongst other things, what was possible in a capitalistic society [5][6], Reafsnyder reminds us of what is possible today in a similar society, but in a very different way. He exchanges today's fallacy of efficiency for the magic of making with one's hands, without a predetermined destination, to celebrate an exuberance of being amidst his kaleidoscope of color. Were it not for his skill, the paintings could easily collapse into the chaos with which they skim the surface. 

The artist's use of his hands to paint evokes the raw connection between the creative medium and the self of cave painters and uninhibited children. Paintings like Beagle Break (2025) illustrate what it looks like when one can paint with the freedom and joy of a child, yet the equanimity of a master.

Beyond his hands, Reafsnyder relies primarily upon palette knives and, to a lesser extent, found objects that unveil an immediacy of emotion, such as in Pastry Store (2025) and the unbridled intensity of color with its ability to influence our mood, such as in Rippin Good (2025).
Works like Jet Stream (2023) pass through the spectrum of greens and blues, mixing with white along the way to relate a process in which the artist is loosely guiding his painting until being guided by it. When this ends, the world that seduces the artist begins evolving and materializing on the canvas.
With so much impasto paint collecting on the palette knife, an intense flipping motion of the wrist towards the canvas from a few feet away splatters entropic dollops over the streaks of paint, such as in Chop Shop (2025). Reafsnyder impossibly layers a multitude of tinted colors in Summer Glide (2024), his streaks of cake icing thick colors’ uniform direction interrupted by paint scraped from the artwork, revealing elements of what came before, returning at times nearly to the canvas itself. 
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The artist's canvases both record and evoke emotion over an attempt to convey direct meaning, similar to Abstract Expressionist action painters of the post-World War II era. Summer Jam's works through the artist's use of his hands to apply paint, the paints unplanned movement and thickened formations convey an instinctual passion that invites viewers to stare off into their embers of emotion calling to mind how prehistoric cave painters whose painting, while meant to be seen, were also made to be experienced in the dark depths of a cave, acting as a portal to an inner world that both the creator and the participant could experience. The prehistoric participants were those who dared walk into the cave, risking discomfort, to find something deeper within. Great thinkers have long proposed that places of seeming abstract nothingness are significant sources of inspiration. 

Carl Jung noted that, "Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Notebooks: 'It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud, or like places in which … you may find really marvelous ideas.'" [7] Reafsnyder's paintings embody such places that foster marvelous ideas, which can allow for a deep sense of joy amidst his painterly voids, blending a landmark in memory of what life should be like with the mystery that life really is.

Citations:1. "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive." Internet Archive, 25 Oct. 2021, archive.org/details/flow-the-psychology-of-optimal-experience-pdfdrive.
2. McEnery, Miles. "ARTnews | in Conversation With Michael Reafsnyder." Vimeo, 13 July 2025, vimeo.com/383828033?fl=pl&fe=ti.
3. Magsamen, Susan, and Ross, Ivy. Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. United Kingdom, Random House Publishing Group, 2023.
4. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. United States, Dover Publications, 2013.
5. Cockcroft, Eva. "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War." Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, edited by Francis Frascina, 1st ed., Harper & Row, 1985, pp. 125–133.
6. Saunders, Frances Stonor. “Modern Art Was CIA ‘weapon’ | the Independent.” The Independent, 21 Oct. 1995, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html.
7. "Man And His Symbols : Carl Gustav Jung : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive." Internet Archive, 1964, archive.org/details/B-001-004-443-ALL.

This article was originally published on August 18, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

By: Hugh Leeman
     Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen's show, Yesterday as in Tomorrow, of six small oil paintings at Municipal Bonds, invites the viewer's imagination to wander amidst muted tones, flattened shapes, and simplified forms, offering just enough to consider the past without telling us of its details. In detail's absence, the artist allows the rich tactile nature of texture to speak as canvas tooth shows through paint, or the rough fiber of burlap becomes an artifact acting as medium as much as support, and a fraying book cover that appears found at the far edge of memory establishes the fringes of a contemplative landscape. 
     
​     Cabrillos Jacobsen's artworks recall the paintings of early 20th-century French Impressionist Pierre Bonnard. Jacobsen, like Bonnard, often focuses on the realm just beyond our current place in the picture, past a window on the other side of a threshold, varying applications of paint permit one's eyes to pass through previous layers of paint on a visual journey into the artwork. Bonnard unlike many impressionists would not paint from life instead he would paint from memory [1] and this is where Cabrillo Jacobsen situates the viewer as what pulls one in is not what is in front of us but that which is beyond the doors and windows in an ambiguous space where brushstrokes record the beauty of banality over burlap adhered to canvas, uneven seams, and the fraying book cover lending a sense of confidence from a soul's well worn introspection.
  
     The works share a joy of solitude that consoles the yellowing pages of aged books whose earthy aroma takes us to an era of analog life. Bibliosmia is the pleasant smell caused by the chemical decomposition of binding glue and paper that supports the word's ink, its subtle sensory experience wafting into nostrils, softly whispering, one day I will be no more. Cabrillo Jacobsen's paintings remind us that memories' ultimate eventuality is to be forgotten, yet in their nebulous nature, on a journey to obsolescence, is the space left for imagination. 
     
     Such a space for imagination appears in the door in Untitled Yellow Home, where we stand before a modest table that hints at the quotidian through a coffee mug, a bowl of ripening fruit, and a vase with two yellow flowers blending with the monochromatic palette. Untitled Yellow Home shows a brown bookshelf with a plant hardly seen in brown greens, a humble wooden chair with an artwork on the wall, no details shared; it's simply a textured screen to explore. The potential in the painting comes from a vanishing point that borrows the bookshelf's brown and plants' green to construct a void, like a miniature Barnett Newman painting, line down the middle, here, separating the dark space from the door whose tiny knob transmits just enough information to mark the trailhead of what is just after the light. The entryway's orthogonal boundary furthers the effect of focus that the artist frames through a geometric cage rendered in a soft yellow-green, slightly obscured by later layers of ochre, recalling Francis Bacon's use of a similar structure. 

     Untitled Home arranges a similar scene to Untitled Yellow Home through open space created by a door's frame and the trapezoidal structure of its open door, inviting us into a place, at once certain and barely there. Unlike Untitled Yellow Home, here, after the threshold in the second space, the light is at its best, coming from a nondescript place with structures formed by soft edges heightened by the rounded corners of the canvas. The true call to curiosity is the textured strip of burlap upon which the second room is rendered with its fading details telling of a landscape just past yet another open door, pulling our eyes onto a terrace overlooking the soft topography of hills and a valley below. Eventually our eyes leave the distant topography's texture and return to the foreground, a room in browns the same tone as the unpainted portion of burlap peeks out at the top of the painting as subtle as the wooden wardrobe whose open door suggest the storage chest of mind upon which a vase, once again, supports two yellow flowers all hinting at metaphor through the sequence of open doors.
   
     The pensive atmosphere turns playful in When the Parents Away, the Cats Will Play as cats in soft silhouettes walk across the picture plane. Bonnard added cats to several of his paintings, lending his interiors a relaxed tone. Cabrillo Jacobsen performs a similar act through the cats to challenge the room's muted blues and softly shaped landscape under the dusky light of the sky seen past the wood slats of a window that leaves a lingering sense of contemplating change. Contemplative atmosphere aside, the cats, the title, and division of space between floor and wall created by a sloping seam in the canvas along with Cabrillo Jacobsen's flower vase from which two stems emerge sits all too close to the table's edge alluding to mischief indicating a story that sits untold with the books on the painting's shelf.

     Stories like memory shift with time, yet stories' malleability allows the seams of disparate memories' threads to be tied together. In Woman Reading the season shifts as early spring or late fall is rendered just past the window in leafless trees. Comfortably sitting inside, the space's protagonist, face devoid of detail, wears a shirt whose grid pattern, like the tablecloth's squares, visually connects to the several squared seams binding otherwise separate portions of canvas into a coherent whole. The show's recurring motif, a vase from which two yellow flowers emerge, sits atop a table, this time beside two mugs, one red, one blue, and a purple teapot signaling someone might sit, share tea, and a story like those of the countless others sitting on the shelves. 

     In Moonwatching, the room, its doors and windows left behind, underpainting's orange peeks from beneath a blue-purple sky, highlighting the moon's glow around the edge of leaves. Two figures in conversation, perhaps the fading memory of a first kiss, a distant horizon, and rising moon reflect across the water, story intimately interwoven with memory recalls Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest in which Algernon Moncrieff says, "Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us."[2]

     The stories from such a diary of memory are best told in Nightsky painted on a found book cover whose tattered edges and fraying fabric frame a landscape rich with elements of a Rothko in hand-held size. The book cover's red color vibrates around the border of green trees and through a thin beige wash forming a field all while enriching a purple night sky whose gradation tells the passage of time, a sense redoubled by the stars fading light that having finally reached our eyes carrying memories of places left behind, the ones we'll never know, their abstract truth like stories well told. In six small paintings, Yesterday as in Tomorrow holds the viewer through giving us places that, amidst their muted tones and simplified forms, allow us to set aside distraction and recollect with wonder how fleeting yesterday was and tomorrow will be. 


Citations:
1. “The Open Window.” The Phillips Collection, www.phillipscollection.org/collection/open-window.
2. Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. Boston: W. H. Baker Company, 1920. Baker’s Professional Plays. PDF file. Internet Archive, https://ia601308.us.archive.org/12/items/importanceofbein1920wild/importanceofbein1920wild.pdf.

By: Hugh Leeman
This article was originally published on June 17, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

     Masako Miki's show, Midnight March, at San Francisco's Institute of Contemporary Art, transports the viewer into a mythological realm that connects a deep folkloric past with contemporary social circumstances asking the viewer to question the stories society is built upon. 
    The artist's brightly colored, rounded sculptural forms made from densely matted felt, supported by tiny wooden legs within the ICA's dimly lit basement, backdropped by black walls of a stylized star-crowded night sky, transform the banality of the basement into a place where a distracted society can begin to gain a new angle on the shadows cast across the social landscape.
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      In addition to the felt sculptures, the artist shows three paintings on paper and three small bronze sculptures. The ICA's new location was formerly the Bank of America's flagship San Francisco branch, with the small bronze sculptures appearing alongside empty lockboxes of former bank customers.
The artist is at her best with the three dimensional felted sculptures, which draw from her Japanese heritage, inspired by Japan's oldest religion, Shinto, and its supernatural beings known as yōkai. While viewers who follow Miki's work will see images they are familiar with from previous shows in the three paintings that pull from Shinto folklore, like her cheerfully stylized fox, it is the felted yōkai sculptures that are the central theme at the ICA and so prevalent one feels that we inhabit their space as opposed to the other way around.

     To enter Midnight March, the viewer descends a staircase aside a wooden terraced forum. One can imagine the terraced forum allowed the seated, when still a bank, to take in corporate talking heads giving presentations on interest rates. For Midnight March, viewers are presented with an entirely different perspective as one can look down past the seating and steps into what used to be the bowels of the bank at a half lit world of Miki's furniture sized felt sculptures. After the viewer walks down the steps, they enter a fantastical space populated by the artist's brightly colored, mostly ambiguous entities, giving the sense that they are encountering a visual representation of what 20th-century author Joseph Campbell referred to as the poetry of metaphor in mythology.

     The yōkai's role in millennia-old Japanese folklore ranges from malevolent to benevolent spirit-like forces understood to inhabit nature's awe-inspiring landscapes, from mountains, waterfalls, and forests to the commonplace corners of a dark closet. Whatever the intentions and location may be with each yōkai, they come out at night or the times between the changing of light when day breaks to dusk, acting as warning signs or simply inciting fear. Despite the foreboding nature of their appearance in Shinto belief, Miki has recreated them as cute, soft characters that seemingly challenge perceptions of their power.

      As the show title, Midnight March implies, it is the darkest hour of night when, according to the Japanese folkloric tale famous for its yōkai spirits, Hyakki Yakō, the supernatural breaks into the real world. The yōkai's midnight march from Japan's Hyakki Yakō and into the ICA traces its way through a rich tradition of stories deeply woven into the Japanese landscape and loosely understood as a manifestation of pandemonium. 
   
     The show becomes a fitting first site responsive exhibition for the newly relocated ICA as the ancient mythological spirit world the artist has created in rainbows of colored felt break into our real world through the darkened ICA basement once stacked with the real world of bank lock boxes and filing cabinets of financial spreadsheets. The timely exhibit speaks through metaphors that pull from the past and connect to today's society, deeply searching through the fabric of its cultural history amidst what seems to be an era enmeshed in a pandemonium populated by forces inciting fear and warning of what could come or already is. 

     Dozens of Miki's colorful yōkai sculptures sitting throughout all parts of the subterranean space allow viewers to come face to face with some as tall as 6 feet while others barely reach the knee. Yet, save the rare pair of closed eyes or lips that hang from the ceiling, the forms are largely unfamiliar, allowing the viewer to experience the potential of myth to pull us from time and place and situate us in the collective unconscious. 

     Miki's installation of the felted yōkai sculptures compels us to an internal place of pondering rather than paving the way for escape. Entirely unlike the escape of dopamine drenched infinite scroll rabbit holes of internet culture that can spread pandemonium, in Midnight March, we are taken to a place that has existed all along yet is often forgotten. A place where cultural myths, when questioned, often become unstable stories swaddled in candy colors appealing to the cultural imagination. Miki's show asks us if we examine these stories, can they act as reminders of society's contemporary folklore that can then be buried in the graveyards aside ancient beliefs to which society no longer subscribes? 
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     Masako Miki's Midnight March allows us to consider the greater potential in our understanding of the cultural imagination by contrasting the dark history of yōkai in the dimly lit basement with soft, fuzzy, colorful felt forms all too large for the support of their tiny legs. Through this visual metaphor, the artist suggests the stories embedded in cultures' collective imagination and their invisible forces connected to contemporary culture's pandemonium can be toppled. This poetry of metaphor pulling from seemingly disparate sources points to art's potential for profundity and speaks directly of Miki's creative prowess.