Send in the Clouds

If you’re a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, it helps to live among them. Charlotte Kay lives 200 feet above the already high Russian Hill on the 22nd floor of an apartment building. The clouds regularly engulf her — the difference between clouds and fog is small and of no consequence to the CAS. As a member in good standing, she’s pledged “to fight blue-sky thinking” wherever she finds it. The society is a piece of work: Its manifesto begins, “We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned/And that life would be immeasurably poorer without them,” and continues along exactly like that for five more stanzas. Kay follows the tenets of the society most spectacularly by hauling herself out to her balcony and photographing the cloud/fog. The pictures in her solo exhibit, “Atmospheric Conditions,” are sublime and exalted, full of William Blake dreaminess and Walt Whitman dreaminess and William Wordsworth dreaminess — all is dreaminess, up there in the cloud/fog.

An artist’s reception starts at 5 p.m.
April 29-May 27, 2009