by Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle
One artist among the 20 in Gen Art's 2006 "Emerge" show, Kimetha Vanderveen, happens to have taken a clue from Morandi.
She makes tiny monotypes in oil, in shades of gray, on gray paper. The resulting patterns hold their own as abstractions, but they also wink with suggestions of landscape, still life or slightly spooky interiors. We can no more hurry the discovery of their ambiguities than we can those in Morandi. Like his work, and unlike nearly everything else in "Emerge 2006," Vanderveen's work invites us to slow down and breathe.
Perhaps ambition explains the held-breath temper of so much work in "Emerge," or perhaps political frustration or foreboding does. In any case, I left the show gasping for air, despite enjoying and admiring several things in it.