“Near Misses,” an exhibition featuring recent works by Professor Imin Yeh and San Francisco based artist Jon Gourley is on view at Bass & Reiner Gallery in San Francisco, October 13 to December 1. Clever prints, quirky sculptures, and a nostalgic video installation litter the space with languages (written and visual,) finding moments of incongruity that both provide a clarity of meaning and comic relief.
The opaque and often hermetic language of contemporary art can rankle the average viewer, presenting an inside joke as a means of exclusion and obscurance, something which only select individuals understand or have the necessary guile to convincingly fake understanding. The methods most often employed by Yeh and Gourley (counterfeit and wry wordplay) pose no such problem by allowing the viewer, at bare minimum, to comprehend that which they don’t “get.” The joke is plain and apparent, even if the punchline is often a near miss.