"Ruff Wear"
Daphne Ruff's installation "Ruff Wear" looks like what Alice might have worn had she gotten lost in her Cuban Jewish grandmother's closet in a Miami Beach Wonderland. Ruff set up shop for one week in the Luggage Store gallery's 1000 Market Street Annex, where she took appointments from the public for private couture fittings. She spent time with each client, collaborating on designing and collaging recycled materials directly onto their bodies. The results -- which hang in a faux store window -- Ruff sees as a kind of portraiture. The work has a silly, substantive feel to it, from a rubber Baby Gap-like outfit to sandals adorned with pacifiers to a swimming get-up made partially of bright yellow, red, and orange plastic fruit. Ruff will close this truly interactive installation with a fashion show of the outfits on June 6 from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Luggage Store's Annex, 1000 Market, S.F. Free; call 255-5971.
"Url"
When Octavio Paz wrote of an "enormous city that fits in a room/ three yards square/ and endless as a galaxy," he was in a sense summing up "Urban Renewal Laboratory." Although the overall aesthetic of the show isn't very arty (the net look is Goodman-Lumber-meets-the-cyber-age), its ambitious goal -- to examine the way history, community, environment, geology, technology, and politics shape the urban space of our town -- has been met in a terribly thorough collection of multimedia installations by 16 artists, architects, and designers. Hidden Noise, an image/audio piece by Zane Vella, Julio Morales, and Natasha Ogunji, exists in the gallery and at several different locations around the city. The piece in the gallery comprises large transparencies that show images of found objects that the viewer can look at over a light box. To the right of the box is a CD player with headphones, from which come the tender voices of students from the Youth in Action Video crew giving their versions of the life of a found bone, old camera, or spark plug. The show exists simultaneously online at www.exo.net/url through June 20 at Southern Exposure, 401 Alabama (at 17th Street), S.F. Free; call 863-2141.
"Paintland"
Rick Arnitz is a master at walking that art-historically loaded line between abstraction and figuration. "Paintland" teases the viewer with the suggestion of dimensionally rendered spaces while adhering to the tenets of conventional abstract painting. Using a roller instead of a paint brush, Arnitz rolls on repetitive bands of color -- rosy reds, bright burnt mustards, and compelling navy blues -- that hint at becoming something in the material world, but never fully cross the line. In Where History Meets When, light and shadows play an important role in defining the rows and rows of dark red rectangular-shaped somethings -- things you can't quite place because their rich imagery calls up so many things at once: honeycombs, blood cells, masses of people. "Paintland" opens Thursday, June 4, at 5:30 p.m. (and runs through July 3) at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery, 49 Geary (at Grant), S.F. Free; call 433-6879.
-- Marcy Freedman
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