Sights and Sounds is your weekly guide to the Bay Area arts scene through the eyes and ears of local artists. This week, Jenee Darden speaks with magician, writer and actor David Hirata to talk about three events happening around the bay this weekend.
- Strange at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive until January 19
- How to Fall In Love in a Brothel at Catherine Clark Gallery through December 21
- Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble at Florence Schwimley Little Theatre, Friday at 7 p.m.
The art exhibit "Strange" is about the spirit of surrealism. Explore how surrealism intersects with the power of the unconscious , the value of irrational thoughts and imagery and our fascination with strangeness in art. This exhibit goes beyond the well known European masters of surrealism and takes a multicultural approach to the idea of irrational thoughts and ideas, by featuring artwork from the Americas and Asia.
"How to Fall in Love at A Brothel” is an interactive and immersive art installation set in in a replica of a 1950s Korean shoji-room. Artists Sunhui Chang, Ellen Sebastian Chang, and Maya Gurantz are the curators. Through video and audio, viewers will be taught to create peepholes in the walls. This comes from a rural tradition where villagers would watch couples consumate their marriage on their wedding night through a peep-hole. At this exhibit, viewers, will peep into holes and see collaged stories of racial histories and family secrets from various parts of the world.
The Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble is a group of extremely talented local young people who have performed around the country and abroad--their band director Sarah Cline has taken them on four tours to Cuba.
They’re performing this Friday as part of their fall concert season.
David Hirata's new solo show about a Japanese magician from the mid-1800s is called A Box Without a Bottom: Soko-Nashi Bako. See it by December 1 at the Marsh Theater in Berkeley.