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The Potrero has always been one of my favorite parts of San Francisco, and now Andres Guerrero's groovy new
Guerrero Gallery has joined the neighborhood, spitting distance from Southern Exposure and Flour + Water. I stopped by the gallery this afternoon after the England-USA match to see Brett Cook's show
Supernatural, and Guerrero's light, airy space is the perfect venue for Cook's elaborate shrine-like installations. Five of the pieces in the show are "power figures" of Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh, Arundhati Roy, and Julia Butterfly Hill that were started in a collaborative art-making effort when Cook was a resident at the Headlands Center in 2004, their central portraits surrounded by tree branches, brooms, LED lights, photographs, postcards, texts, and other assorted decoration. Paintings of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Angela Davis on mirrored Plexiglass hang nearby, an invitation for some literal self-reflection by the viewer. From all of this work I get a strong sense that the political is deeply personal to Cook, but his installations are more inspirational than they are preachy. That personal aspect of his work becomes even more clear in the piece pictured here that is based around a snapshot of Cook as a young boy in his Batman Halloween costume, but it is most striking in his "Documentation of a Grandma" which serves not only as a tribute to his own grandmother but to grandmothers everywhere. Cook's dense arrangements of pills, perfumes, nail polish, jelly jars, jewelry, framed family photos, etc, reminded me of a Dia de los Muertos altar, a beautiful way to capture and share memory and to relate to others at the sa
Engineer's Daughter: supernatural
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