Of all the ingenious human inventions, boomerang is the most fascinating one, mysteriously connected to our inherent understanding of life cycles and things that “go around-come around.” As one of the curators of the Boomerang art exhibit, Mario Lemos, explained, the idea was to let each contemporary artist twist and throw a boomerang in his/her own way, let it fly away in space and/or time, and come back with something similar, yet very different, like in those amazing disparate pairs of images, penciled by Colter Jacobsen from some irrelevant old photos. Following their individual boomerangs, Timothy Cummings (see his amazing “Winter Bride”) presented his eerie portraits of old souls in underdeveloped bodies, Christian Toscano populated her wind-blown gouaches with inked birds, indistinguishable from leaves which conceal and trap them at the same time, and Sarah Smith incorporated metal leaf and rust into her time-defying pieces with poetic titles, like “dream all the dreams of the other dreamers” and “sleep close with the other sleepers.” Perhaps, the most direct excerpt from the vivid past was pronounced in collages by Lawrence Jordan, who apparently studied under Joseph Cornell, and carried that subtle influence into his own original artwork. Boomerang exhibit closed last weekend at John’s Hayes Valley Market gallery at 580 Hayes in San Francisco, but before the gallery itself follows suit later this year, there will be two more shows, according to Lemos, presented in its space.
