Articles by Victoria Gannon

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | The Magic Window

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | The Magic Window

Victoria Gannon on the drawings of Desirée Holman and the alienations of nuclear family life.

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Catalog Crimes

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Catalog Crimes

What happens when fashion becomes a signifier of altruism? Victoria Gannon on the aspirational identities catalogs weave around desirable objects.

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Waking Dreams

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Waking Dreams

Victoria Gannon ponders the mystery of an evening’s early nightfall in the context of images by Chris Fraser, a Bay area artist.

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Seeking Refuge

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Seeking Refuge

Victoria Gannon considers a bird sanctuary in Oakland’s Lake Merritt in terms of landscape and the meaning of refuge.

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Random! Jason Fulford and His Many Coincidences

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Random! Jason Fulford and His Many Coincidences

Victoria Gannon considers the role that randomness plays in the photographs of Jason Fulford, and in her own life.

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Blackout

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Blackout

Can a photograph stand in for an experience we had, but don’t recall? Victoria Gannon on the aesthetics of intoxication.

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Suburban Seriality

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Suburban Seriality

We were not the same, though when we came together, we acted as one. Growing up together, seven girls in the suburbs of Northern California, we told each other’s stories and …

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Both a Science and an Art, Part 2

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Both a Science and an Art, Part 2

    Alison Kendall creates drawings and paintings in which viewers’ expectations are breached by dreamlike intruders. The San Francisco–based artist went to school for scientific illustration, learning to draw animals …

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Both a Science and an Art

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Both a Science and an Art

Every Wednesday night, my grammar teacher takes chalk to blackboard to underline subjects and circle direct objects. White dust falling to the floor, she puts brackets around prepositional phrases and …

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Hungry in San Francisco Part 2

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Hungry in San Francisco Part 2

New relationships are often built over food. We sit down to share a bowl of soup together and rise knowing each other better than before. But food’s not just a …

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Hungry in San Francisco

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Hungry in San Francisco

One hundred feet below the Starbucks and suits of San Francisco’s financial district, Grubhub.com’s posters beckon from the BART station walls. The online food delivery service offers every kind of …

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Coded Cloth

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows | Coded Cloth

We speak in code when words aren’t safe to say. Faced with threats, our language goes subterranean, carving new passageways of communication. Encrypted messages use accepted forms of expression—recognizable letters, …

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows: The Plaid Fad

Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture

Bedfellows: The Plaid Fad

In November 1991, Nirvana played on all of our car stereos. We smoked clove cigarettes and drove through the Oakland hills with Nevermind blaring over the speakers. Kurt Cobain drowned …

Going to California: Nightmare City, Part 2

Going to California: Nightmare City, Part 2

“It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone’s memory is no true …

Going to California: Nightmare City

Going to California: Nightmare City

Every few decades, people decide it’s a good idea to move to California. First, it was for the gold. Then aerospace technology, then Los Angeles. In the 1960s, it happened …

Going to California: Gina Tuzzi, Part 2

Going to California: Gina Tuzzi, Part 2

Nostalgia is the longing for a home that never was; its subject is an idealized place where the troubles of today hold no sway. In paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Northern …

Neil Young. "Neil Young," (Reprise Records, 1968). From the writer's collection.

Going to California: Gina Tuzzi

Going to California: Gina Tuzzi

It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and … all that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and …

Going to California: David Wilson, Part 2

Going to California: David Wilson, Part 2

Albert Bierstadt bathed the Sierra Nevada in heavenly light while Ansel Adams photographed Half Dome as though it were on the moon. Many artists depict California’s natural features as mythic …

Going to California: David Wilson

Going to California: David Wilson

My hometown of Lafayette, California, encompasses a 925-acre nature area, the boundaries of which press up against the town’s suburban roads and cul-de-sacs like a face against glass. When I …

Going to California

Going to California

Many people in the East … have been to Los Angeles or to San Francisco, have driven through a giant redwood and have seen the Pacific glazed by the afternoon …