SF Art Events: Week of 11.30.25
THING ONE: Alex Kanevsky: Field Trip
Alex Kanevsky Madrid
December 4, 2025–January 31, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, December 4, 5:30–7:30 pm
Featuring subjects steeped in myth, history, and legend, Alex Kanevsky’s oil painting glimmer with a fluid, sensual energy. Heady gusts of air surge through the works, loosening the expressionistic brushwork, moving forms around, and creating quivering fissures. Fleshy bodies multiply as they appear and disappear, while perspectives shift and rooms transform. Here, water, sky, and foliage are locked in perpetual, colorful motion, as ambient light sources shift and fluctuate.
Everything Twice (excerpt)
by John Yau
Alex Kanevsky is a figurative painter who belongs to no school, follows no tendency, and has neither a signature style nor a recurring topic. Other than working on rectangular supports, his resistance to being pigeon-holed offers us a way to reflect upon his treatment of traditional subjects, such as the model, landscape, and still life. By rejecting familiar stylistic devices, such as surrealist dreamscapes, expressionist distortions, and impressionist views, Kanevsky has developed a unique approach to figuration. The result of this approach is a diverse group of paintings, which have been known to baffle even his most loyal viewers. The most common way these viewers have responded to their bafflement is by concocting narratives about the meaning of Kanevsky's paintings, and the motivations behind them. This has led to many misunderstandings which I will attempt to clear up in this essay.
LOCATION: Dolby Chadwick, 210 Post Street, Suite 205, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tuesday–Friday 9 am – 6 pm and Saturday 11 am – 5 pm
THING TWO: ROSE MARIE CROMWELL, A Geological Survey
November 8, 2025 - January 10, 2026
EUQINOM Gallery is thrilled to announce A Geological Survey, the first solo exhibition of Rose Marie Cromwell with the gallery. Featuring her most recent body of work, begun in 2022 and continuing to the present, the exhibition offers a deeply personal reflection on identity, coming-of-age, and familial relationships through the intertwined lenses of landscape, memory, and time.
Cromwell is a photo and video artist whose practice examines the effects of globalization on local communities and the delicate balance between the political and the spiritual. In A Geological Survey, she turns her gaze toward the American West—the region where she was raised—to explore the layered histories—personal, environmental, and cultural—that shape her understanding of place and belonging.
The series follows Cromwell, her mother, and her young daughter as they journey through the Western United States. Interspersed among these portraits are images of found and constructed scenes—ruins of mining camps, abstracted landscapes, and talismanic rocks—that trace both the scars and the resilience of the land. By reinterpreting the Western landscape, long depicted as a site of conquest and masculine idealization, Cromwell reframes it from the perspective of a mother and environmentalist. Her images propose a new way of seeing the land—not as separate from the self, but as an extension of identity, memory, and future generations.
“In this project,” Cromwell writes, “I examine the complicated history of the Western U.S. in the context of my personal experience growing up in the region. The work is grounded in memories of road trips from my childhood but reframed through my experience of motherhood and anxiety about my daughter’s future. I aim to create images that reflect my spiritual relationship with the West while acknowledging its long history of exploitation.”
Among the works featured in the exhibition is The Cave, inspired by a visit to Wind Cave in the Black Hills—sacred to the Lakota Sioux as the site of ancestral emergence. Cromwell connects this mythology to her own experience of childbirth, envisioning the cave as a portal between worlds and a symbol of transformation. In In the Dry Flowers and The Field, relationships between generations are tenderly portrayed as her daughter’s gestures echo those of herself and her mother, suggesting the cyclical nature of life and inherited memory.
A signature piece of the show, Fissure, a paper quilt, extends Cromwell’s photographic practice into material experimentation. Composed of three interwoven images, the work functions as a visual tapestry that contemplates time, impermanence, and the constancy of matter. The quilt form—rooted in traditions of labor, care, and storytelling—becomes a metaphor for the layering of memory and the fluidity of non-linear narratives within photography.
Throughout the exhibition, themes of reflection and measurement recur: the rings of a fallen redwood, the space between pebbles placed along a spine, and the mirror as a symbol of both self-awareness and landscape memory. The final works contemplate decay and extraction, aligning the collapse of mined terrain with the reclining gestures of her family lying in repose.
Evoking nostalgia, the unremitting passage of time, and an uncertain ecological future, A Geological Survey meditates on intergenerational bonds and the legacies we leave behind. By situating intimate family portraits within broader social and environmental contexts, Cromwell redefines the conventions of landscape photography and expands the boundaries of how we picture the land—and ourselves—within it.
LOCATION: Equinom Gallery, 49 Geary Street, Suite 417, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday 11 am - 5:30 pm
THING THREE: Yamamoto Masao
Nakazora #1025, 2003
Gelatin silver print
6 x 4 in.
December 4, 2025 — January 31, 2026
Robert Koch Gallery presents an exhibition of works by Japanese photographer Yamamoto Masao, featuring selections from his series A Box of Ku, Nakazora, Kawa=Flow, Bonsai, and Tomasu. Yamamoto’s pictures are grounded in Zen philosophy, seeking beauty in everyday life and the moments we often overlook. His practice centers on the belief that meditation and careful observation reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary.
Working in small format toned silver gelatin prints, Yamamoto photographs the natural world around him: landscapes, plants, animals, and the subtle details of rural Japan and beyond. What appears subtle at first glance, conceals an otherworldly magic in Yamamoto’s image making that compels a deeper look. Some of his photographs are hand colored or deliberately weathered through controlled creasing and surface treatments, a process that evokes the passage of time and personal intimacy. Animals appear throughout Yamamoto’s work with a subtle presence, sometimes meeting the viewer’s gaze. They inhabit his photographs as more than anthropomorphic subjects, bridging the physical and the spiritual while adding a surreal dimension to the intimate worlds he creates and offering reverence for the natural world we inhabit.
Yamamoto approaches his photographs as autonomous works that can stand alone, yet he also values their interplay when arranged together in groupings or installations. As he explains, “what overflowed from one photograph would flow into the next piece…like the layered notes of an orchestra.” This sensibility shapes the exhibition, where multiple series are arranged to create conversations between individual photographs and across different bodies of work,
LOCATION: Robert Koch Gallery, 49 Geary, 5th Floor, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Monday - Friday, 11 am - 5:30 pm and Saturday, 2 pm - 5 pm
