Barry McGee @ Berkeley Art Museum

Sorry for the lack of updates.. I'm currently overseas in USA for a few weeks to check out some art shows and some tennis at the US Open! The first big show opened last night, Barry McGee's Mid-Career Retrospective at BAM in California. Here's some selected pics from the opening night and details from the artwork:

At the centre of the exhibit was a recreation of the Street Market installation.. Originally from a joint exhibit with Reas and ESPO. This was a mini version of Ray Fong's 99c store.

A recreation of early 2000's style frame collage with the dirty yellow inkwash covering the wall.

The exhibit was sectioned off into era's of around 5 years. This is the view from the 2006-2012 section on the third level. You can see one of Barry's trademark wall 'pimples' to the left.

These guys broke out into a set of short, fast and loud punk songs about halfway through the night.. When they weren't playing, there was a great DJ playing a lot of shoegaze type stuff throughout the night. There was one track by an old band called Iron Curtain that was amazing!

A little combo of the piggy-back and overturned van pieces from over the years!

Ready for a mission! This is the Arnold Schwarzenegger version of getting ready to go out at night.

A straight up view of the Street Market structure.

The geometric pattern clusters have been taking on some interesting shapes over the past couple of years..

I was hoping that this bathroom was going to turn up at the show and I wasn't disappointed! All of these mannequins had some sort of animatronic aspect to them.. normally the spray can arm swinging back and forth.

Photograph of a fire extinguisher tag.. There was a big "Snitch" sprayed up along the side wall of the museum facing the University of California.

One of the classic Barry McGee images.. this was a small room built out of rusty metal panels. There was a doorway near the head, which lead to a small room featuring a handful of Margaret Kilgallen images.

Detail from a huge bottle cluster.

Details from a red wall installation.. These would have been from around the same time as the Art:21 feature from about 10 years ago.

Detail from the framed picture cluster from the start of this post. This image was pretty interesting because you rarely see characters interacting with others or themselves in ways like this.

Characters like these are fairly recent, along with the brick pyramids.. As far as I can tell, these particular images only started popping up around 4 years ago.

Another Amaze animatronic.

After flying halfway across the world to be at the opening of this show, the icing on the cake was being able to meet Barry. He was a super nice guy, and was even stoked on the Bad Teeth Megaburger shirt.. He even pointed it out to his daughter!