A Farewell Kiss:
Two artists revisit
the Bush Theater of the Absurd

Show opens: February 6, 7:00 p.m.
Additional Art Murmur Reception: March 6, 7 to 10 p.m.
Show Closes: March 14, 5:00 p.m.
Galalery open for this show: Fridays and Saturdays, 2-5pm 2/6 through 3/13

DeWitt Cheng curates two California artists at Oakopolis, Mark Bryan and Bruce Yurgil, who have made compelling and hilarious political artwork.

Bryan's satirical oil paintings depict the psychological realities behind and beneath the public relations illusion: a Cabinet meeting is in fact a mad tea party out of Lewis Carroll, with Cheney and Rumsfeld presiding; a cathedral is in reality a lumbering tank, spreading geopolitical coercion. The artist has preserved these Bush paintings as an integral body of work and has shown them, but rarely, in Sacramento at the Solomon Dubnick Gallery and in San Jose.

Yurgil's parodies of lurid pulp magazines from the 1940s and 1950s feature the familiar Executive Branch cast of characters--Bush and Cheney are the recurring antiheros--engaged in manly dramas that they apparently never quite outgrew. These Photoshopped digital collages, adapted from scanned old magazine covers, show an unerring instinct for combining visual and narrative ideas in perfect synch; it may sound like art-historical or political blasphemy to say so, but they can be compared with John Heartfield's scathing anti-Nazi photomontages of the 1930s and 1940s.

The show is curated by Bay Area art critic and teacher DeWitt Cheng.

Mark Bryan	Bruce Yurgil