A ‘Foul Odor’ Worth Sniffing Out

It’s good to be honest about what it takes to live and make art in a place like San Francisco. The sights, sounds and, yes, smells of this city are not always pleasant, but a certain amount of grime is preferable to the alternative: an overly slick and sanitized scene of easily digestible, easily marketable work.

Foul Odor, an exhibition of painting, sculpture and video work by six Bay Area artists, revels in energizing imperfections, Dada-ist urban acts and gritty textures. With the subtitle “An Exhibition on Survival,” the show says: We are alive, and life is messy, so don’t sand those edges down.

San Francisco’s Upper Market Gallery is the perfect venue for this gathering. Clearly a space with previous, unknown uses, it’s full of strange architectural remnants. As a result, Foul Odor puts art in odd places: one painting hangs off a box that drops down from the ceiling, Haley Summerfield and Tuesday Iverson’s ceramic wall work is mounted low, and a video projects behind a curtain in a shallow back room.

The show’s largest element comes from Quinn Girard in the form of a metal, papier mâché, enamel and foam sculpture. It’s a shopping cart turned into a monstrous contraption — part roller-coaster tracks, part battle bot — that resembles a Tim Burton set piece. One gets the distinct sense that it rolled here, spikily, on its own.

Girard harnesses other cartoonish gestures in Town Square, a painting that prominently features the Muppet Count von Count, and Camera, a sculpture perfectly positioned to look down at gallery visitors with googly, blood-shot eyes.

Many of the sculptures in Foul Odor exhibit a lumpy handmade-ness, in keeping with the show’s stated interest in the so-called Funk movement. Victor Saucedo’s Vamos Al Norte, glazed earthenware on a piece of found wood, looks like it actually could be from the ’70s. But Saucedo’s other contribution to the show, a grotesque tangle of ceramic letters spelling out “No Mex,” is distinctly of the present moment. Racist language and exclusionary practices are presented as a dark, twisted mass, completed by a wig that looks like it was pulled out of a bathtub drain.

Found objects take another form in Julio Rodriguez’s work, where the focus is on bits of urban residue like traffic cones and a-frame barricades. In Rodriguez’s two paintings, jumbled piles of the stuff become rosy-hued near-abstractions. And in the looping video Hush, he cosplays as a city employee erratically painting walls white, appearing official with just the addition of a hi-vis vest.

Hush tosses a bit of absurdism into the city’s workings, emblematic of the show’s overall wrench-throwing sensibility. Our urban environments may shape our movements and habits, but the artists in Foul Odor resist passivity, absorbing some of that energy and tossing it back as art.

Yet some of my favorite works in the show are more sedate, bringing the outside into the gallery through materials rather than imagery. Tajo McBurnie’s four paintings are oil on plaster, giving the surfaces a deeply satisfying sandiness. Made in muted hues with repeated, enigmatic iconography — egg shapes, coiled springs and apple cores — they’re inheritors of a distinctly Bay Area slipperiness when it comes to categorization.

The ’70s are now half a century ago. Funk art and those who bucked against the term have been thoroughly examined, memorialized and rediscovered. And yet its weird, slightly off-putting scent lingers.

The curators of Foul Odor, the collective Off Hours (Katherine Jemima Hamilton, Shaelyn Hanes and Ebti), are mindful of the traps of declaring this show, or any show, zeitgeisty. Once you gather and define something as “counter” to the mainstream, have you institutionalized it?

I would argue, in this instance, no. Putting together a coherent group show that eloquently speaks to the present moment in an out-of-the-way gallery space is clearly in the spirit of underground, DIY culture. But to be extra sure nothing is set in stone, Off Hours have invited the Oakland collective This is A House Gallery to intervene in Foul Odor starting next week; they’re free to do whatever they want with the show so long as they don’t damage the space or the art.

Make sure you visit Foul Odor during the last day of its current incarnation, Friday, Aug. 9, 6–9 p.m. for a whiff of this sublime show.

‘Foul Odor’ is on view at Upper Market Gallery (4690 18th St, San Francisco) through Aug. 31, 2024. After Aug. 9, check with This Is A House Gallery for their open hours.