SF Chronicle

Baker, Kenneth. Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday July 23, 2005, p. E1

Los Angeles artist Bari Ziperstein gets a room to herself at the SFAC in her first San Francisco outing.

Ziperstein can claim a context for what she does in work by such artists as Joseph Beuys, Imi Knoebel, Jason Rhoades and Jessica Stockholder that blurs the line between display and storage.

For her centerpiece, Ziperstein has built a loose floor-to-ceiling monolith of cardboard boxes. She has coated many of their inward-facing surfaces with neon-bright color. Its reflected glow seeps from the structure’s interior.

With “10 × 10: 8 Week Lease (Reluctant Monument)” (2005), as she calls it, Ziperstein has cut a new middle path between the geometry and blankness of minimalism and the consumer culture reference of Pop art. (Think of Andy Warhol’s seminal “Brillo Boxes.”)

Imagine Ziperstein’s work without that background and you begin to see it as a thin accomplishment.

Install View