The artist Gary Simmons is best known for deploying a technique called erasure. Using as his source material pop culture detritus ranging from the pre-World War II racist “Looney Tunes” character Bosko to the titles of long-lost Jim Crow-era “race” films like “The Bronze Buckaroo,” Simmons paints and draws, sometimes directly onto a chalkboard, then blurs the image with his hand — a gesture that gives his work the eerie quality of a lapse in memory. Erasure also happens to be the unofficial theme of “Altered States,” a group show Simmons has organized at the recently opened gallery Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco. The works, by six Los Angeles-based artists, include sanded metal paintings by Josh Callaghan reminiscent of Simmons’s own smudged chalkboards and photographic self-portraits by Genevieve Gaignard, which are composed as if the sleek nostalgia of Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” were transported to a suburban sprawl but with a voyeuristic anxiety. “You see certain threads in the work around you. There are common interests,” Simmons says of the exhibition. The summer group show is a beloved art world tradition, and now also a sign that galleries may be returning to normal.
M.H. Miller
