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"STREET
SKINS & Other Tactile Encounters " Gallery hours: Thursday,Friday 3:00-8:00pm, Saturday, Sunday 12noon-5:00pm66 Balmy 591 Guerrero St. Solo Mujeres 18th Annual
Exhibition of Women Artists “Mujeres Visionarias / Visionary Women” February 18th through March
25th, 2005 MCCLA invites you to experience the world through the eyes of Latinas. Solo Mujeres 2005, entitled "Mujeres Visionarias/Visionary Women," reflects the rapidly changing world perceived by the Bay Area's most prominent Latina artists, their understanding of the world's current course, and their aspirations for the future. This exhibition commemorates the women artists of our community and will showcase fine art paintings, drawings, mixed media work, sculpture, and installations. Shopdropping @ Pond Gallery
Shopdropping is an exhibition that both catalogues and instigates the insertion of art into public places of commerce (specifically, conglomerate retail stores). The artwork--ranging from social sculptures to gentle gestures of gift-leaving-is presented in the exhibition in the form of multiples/duplicates or audio/photo/video documentation. Using beauty, humor, and intimate address to invite shoppers' self-reflection and second glance, the works eschew a reductivist commodity critique in favor of complex strategies that detourne situations, present alternatives to normative systems of exchange, and graft together alternate economic regimes. One tactic characterizing interventionist art is a reliance on the artwork's (re)assimilation into the language and space of hegemonic symbolic systems. Packard Jenning's Il Duce Action Figure involves both the insertion of a hand-made Benito Mussolini doll into Wal-Mart and documentation of the ensuing comical conundrums (a spycam video of confused workers assigning a value to the item, the manual entry of 'Mussolini' onto the receipt, etc.). An alternate strategy employed by interventionist art is the insertion of a 'mute' or 'impotent' commodity-a commodity whose non-functionality rejects or halts the flow of signification/consumption. For instance, Steve Lambert's ultra-genericized cereal boxes employ the language of advertising to create a meta-commodity. Devoid of purpose or motive, Lambert's art works like an insect's abandoned carapace, pointing out the absence of what was. In Lost in the Supermarket, a collaborative led by Marijke Jorritsma, involving instructors (Marisa Aragona, Melissa Orzolek, Tara Foley) and youths from the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco, hand-crafted ceramic commodities (lotion, dishwashing soap, spice bottles, soup cans) were reverse-shoplifted into a local grocery conglomerate-a process that offers a delightfully humorous narrative of the encounter between shoppers/workers with these 'inadequate' or 'fallible' products made by kids. But perhaps more importantly, the process proved wildly startling for youths, ranging in age from 7 to 14, who were fascinated by the prospect that "you could really do such a thing" (i.e., that you could put something 'not real' onto the shelf with other 'real' products). For youths, then, to realize their agency within the economy, by extension comes the demystification of commodity logic. Many interventionist artworks situate themselves not as 'disruptive' (a term which, for some, can connote a privileged position at the expense of the unwitting shopper) but as gestures of 'gift-giving.' For Shopdropping, various text-based artists and writers were asked to create labels or tags that were later pinned to garments in a local upscale department store. Asked to incorporate elements of site-specificity and intimately address the shopper, the tags are intended to function as stowaway gifts. Commenting on the characteristic of the gift to connect with its receiver, the anthropologist Lewis Hyde writes, "It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection... a gift makes the connection." The shopdropped tags, then, can be considered a process of bestowal that symbolically imports the logic of gift exchange into the realm of commodity exchange. Ultimately, Shopdropping expands the discourse and field of interventionist art, asking us to consider its nuanced range of representational strategy, intention, context, and references. Pond: 324 - 14th St. b/w Valencia and Mission St. Opening Reception Gallery Hours Special Event: Digestion: Changing the Nature of Nature Four
War Years Posters Against Bush @ ATA In March 2003 the second Gulf War officially
began, millions of people worldwide demonstrated against Bush's war, and
thousands of people shut down San Francisco. Two years later the war
grinds on, with more and more US casualties, thousands of Iraqi deaths, and no
end in sight. To mark this anniversary, ATA will host an exhibit of
"in-your-face" creative street art against war and occupation. Featuring
posters from Katie Burkart, Karen Fiorito, Juan Fuentes, Valerie Jacobs, Josh
MacPhee, Doug Minkler, Claude Moller, Isis Rodriguez, and the SF Print
Collective. Cheap art for sale with proceeds going to artists and their street
campaigns. March
1, 2005 - March 28, 2005. Artists' Television Access Laura Splan @ Femina Potens
Splan will be showing
a series of inkjet prints on watercolor paper combined with drawings. The
photographic inkjet images are of various surgical implants and instruments
combined with blood taken from her fingertips and then drawn over them with a
fine pen. The artists
statement “My
mixed media work explores perceptions of beauty and horror, comfort and
discomfort. I use anatomical and medical imagery as a point of departure to
explore these dualities and our ambivalence towards the human body. I often
combine scientific images with more domestic or familiar ones. This
juxtaposition creates a response that fluctuates between seduction and
repulsion, comfort and alienation. This dichotomous experience is evoked by
enticing and formal images that upon closer inspection reveal some
uncomfortable truth about our cultural and biological conditions. My work
attempts to challenge our constructed responses to these images by triggering a
double take in which the viewer re-evaluates their initial perceptions of an
object or image. My
work often develops out of inspiration in the inherent qualities of a material
or process. I then begin to decipher and manipulate the narrative implications
of those qualities. I am interested in an exploration into the historical and
contemporary meaning that a culture projects onto an object, material, or image
as well as in an investigation into its technical attributes. I like to see how
the work can be reflexive and self-contained--how not only the form of an
object can reveal meaning but also the materials and process by which it was
made.” A San Francisco
based artist, Laura Splan’s current drawings evoke the delicate fragility and
extreme complexity of the human body. Her work has been exhibited at many Bay
Area venues including SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery, San Jose Institute of
Contemporary Art, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission
Gallery, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Southern Exposure. She has also
shown nationally at Nathan Larramendy Gallery (Ojai, CA), Nexus Gallery (Philadelphia,
PA), Galerie Lelong, (New York, NY), and Delta Axis Gallery (Memphis, TN). Her
work is currently traveling with New American Talent 19 with Arthouse (Austin,
TX) and will be included in SubAnatomy at the Museum of Contemporary Art at LBC
(Santa Rosa, CA) in 2005. Splan’s work will
run at Femina Potens from March 4th - 25th. Reception:March
4th from 7 - 10pm Exhibition run: March 4th - 25th. Gallery hours are MTWF from
1 - 5pm. Femina Potens 465 South Van Ness San Francisco, CA SOEX presents Solo Shows Southern Exposure (SoEx) presents four solo exhibitions by
Adriane Colburn, Frederick Loomis, Kerry Tribe and Jessica Tully, an On-Site
Education Program led by Jessica Tully, and in the OVERLOOK Project Space a project
by California College of the Arts’ MA Curatorial Practice students, as part of
our March/April 2005 programming. These exhibitions run from Friday, March 4
thru Saturday, April 9, 2005. Colburn, Loomis, Tribe and Tully will
participate in a discussion of their artwork at 7 PM on Friday, March 4th with
an opening reception to follow from 7 PM - 9 PM. "Domestic Chaos and Other
Inconveniences " @ 66 Balmy Gallery
New
works by Natalia Cerqueira & Nicole Ganas March
24 thru April 10, 2005 Reception
Friday, March 25th, 7-10pm 66
Balmy Gallery 591
Guerrero St. The Unexpected in Public
Space @ SOEX The OVERLOOK Project Space features The
Unexpected in Public Space, an interactive exhibit of places, objects, and
events that intervene in one’s everyday experience in public environments. The
project is organized by students in the MA Curatorial Practice Program at
California College of the Arts, and is inspired by the students’ research on
public art practice. In particular, the students have investigated inSite,
a network of contemporary art programs and commissioned projects that
investigate the border zone of San Diego-Tijuana. The Unexpected in Public
Space endeavors to generate a discussion about public art practices in San
Francisco through presenting interviews with curators and artists as well as
soliciting the public's response. To learn more about this project and to
submit your own encounters with the unexpected, please visit: www.theunexpected.org
or email: info@theunexpected.org Art: the Other Voice of
America @ SOMARTS Free
Panel Discussions – ASL / Sign Interpreted - Saturday, March 12 & 19,
2005 Art: the Other Voice of America is about images that prompt
one with the impulse to make a difference, in our push against injustice,
despite all the denial that abounds. Political art is a dialogue and a
human visual response to political and social issues and their consequences,
both at home and abroad. Mary
Lou Nevarez Haugh, Curator Panel Discussions Panel I -
Saturday, March 12, 2005 FREE 4:00 – 7:00
p.m. Discussion Topic: Bridging the Gap: Art
& Social Justice • Dr. Michael Nagler - Professor Emeritus of Classics
and Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, American Book Award Winner, 2002 Panel II - Saturday, March 19, 2005 FREE 4:00 - 7:00 p.m. Discussion Topic: The Artist’s Role in Social Change •Dr. Peter Selz - Art Historian, Professor Emeritus
of Art History at UC Berkeley
The Red Poppy Art House |
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@ 66
Balmy