The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery presents

Transplanted

Three commissioned projects by Bay Area newcomers

Pawel Kruk, Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe and Richard T. Walker.

September 24 , 2010 - January 8, 2011

Opening Reception: Friday, September 24, 6 – 8pm

The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Gallery is pleased to present Transplanted, featuring three large-scale commissioned projects by Bay Area newcomers Pawel Kruk, Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe and Richard T. Walker.

How long do you have to live in the Bay Area to be considered a local artist? How quickly do new arrivals influence our cultural landscape and help establish defining regional aesthetics? How quickly does the Bay Area influence the artistic production of newcomers? These are a few of the underlying questions posed in Transplanted.

For Transplanted, each of the exhibiting artists was asked to create new work that reflects on how living in the Bay Area has influenced their artistic practice. Kruk, a performance artist, Suarez-Wolfe, a sculptor, and Walker, a video artist,  each arrived with extensive, international exhibition experience, and in the past three years have caught the attention of local critics, philanthropic organizations and major institutions (see bios below).

Gallery Director and exhibition curator, Meg Shiffler, adds, “This is the final exhibition in the SFAC Gallery’s 40^th Anniversary season, and we thought it was important to examine more closely what it means to live and create in a City where we have a significant population of artists living nomadically. Through the selection of newly transplanted artists who are committed to their lives in the Bay Area while remaining connected with their international network we can further the SFAC Gallery mission to promote a dialogue around how our local art production fits into an expansive, global contemporary art discourse.”

Locations, Project Information, and Biographical Information

Pawel Kruk
Winning the Water
Saturday, October 16
9am, the artist enters the water at Alcatraz
10am, anticipated arrival time at Aquatic Park
Free and open to the public

Continuing his artistic inquiry into the heroic nature of athletes and athletic feats, Pawel Kruk will swim from Alcatraz to Aquatic Park surrounded by a group of friends contributing to the performance in various ways. As the public cheers from the shore, Kruk’s swim will be accompanied by the two-person band Coconut performing live music on a small vessel propelled by oars, a videographer and photographer documenting the sounds and scenes of the performance, and another vessel carrying a group of spectators, whose presence will also contribute to the work. San Francisco’s South End Rowing Club’s history and their role in the dynamics of the interaction between people and the Bay will underlie the entire event. Documentation will be posted on the SFAC Gallery web site.
Kruk, a performance artist originally from Warsaw, spent a short time at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2002, and then returned as an Affiliate Artist in 2007. In 2008 he was a Fellow at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. Kruk exhibits internationally and in 2003 was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s major exhibition The American Effect. He had a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at San Francisco’s David Cunningham Projects in 2009 and is currently a finalist for the 2010 SECA Award at SFMOMA.

Acknowledgements: David Cunningham, Buck Delventhal, Juliette Delventhal, Luther Green, Colter Jacobsen, Milena Korolczuk, Justin Limoges, Owen B. Mehegan, Paul Nordquist, Kimberly Peinado, Airyka Rockefeller, Richard T. Walker, Tomo Yasuda and Members of the South End Rowing Club  and Electric Works Gallery.

Richard T. Walker
attempting to define the parameters of wanting
SFAC Main Gallery
401 Van Ness Avenue (at McAllister)
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 5pm
This exhibition continues Richard T Walker’s ever-evolving investigation into the natural landscape and its use as a contextual tool to mobilize thoughts and self-reflection. With strong nods towards the European and American Romantic periods, Walker uses spoken dialogue, music and performance to facilitate engagement and analysis that is both contemplative and active. The work questions how we perceive nature as well as how we imagine nature perceiving us. It is attempting to define parameters of wanting features works in media including video, photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation.
Richard T. Walker arrived in San Francisco from London in 2007 to become an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts and a 2008 Fellow at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. Over the next twelve months he will attend the Djerassi Artist Residency Program, the Headlands Center for the Arts Residency and also be a resident at the Montalvo Art Center. In 2009 he received the coveted Artadia award, given to artists living in the Bay Area. He is currently a finalist for the 2010 SECA Award at SFMOMA. Walker exhibits internationally and is represented by Christopher Grimes Gallery in Los Angeles.
Special thanks to Rick Mellor.

Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe
Forward-Looking
Grove Street Window Installation Site
155 Grove Street
Gallery Hours: Viewable 24/7
Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe’s site-specific installation takes as its point of departure the physical inaccessibility of the gallery space. The Grove St. Site is never open to the public, which forces the viewer to look into the space from the sidewalk.  Forward-Looking plays off of the gallery’s limited or focused range of viewing to question and draw attention to the public’s curiosity to look into the work – both literally and figuratively. The work reflects on the experiential aspect of relocation by emphasizing the act of looking into.
With a background in both architecture and visual art, Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles. Prior to his arrival, his works had been seen at ACE Gallery in LA and New York, and Blum & Poe in LA as well as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and High Desert Test Sites. From 2005-08 he co-edited the InterReview Journal, a publication on conceptual art. Recently Suarez-Wolfe has been awarded a commission from the SFAC Public Art Program, is teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, and has had a solo exhibition at the Taubman Museum in Roanoke, VA.

Media contacts:

Meg Shiffler, 415.252.2568 or meg.shiffler@sfgov.org
Aimee Le Duc: 415.554.6080 or aimee.leduc@sfgov.org

Photographs available upon request.

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About the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
Located in the heart of San Francisco’s Civic Center, the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery makes contemporary art accessible to broad audiences through curated exhibitions that both reflect our regional diversity and position Bay Area visual art production within an international contemporary art landscape. By commissioning new works, collaborating with arts and community organizations and supporting artist’s projects, the SFAC Gallery’s programs provide new and challenging opportunities for contemporary art to engage with a civic dialogue. The SFAC Gallery was founded in 1970 and is the exhibitions program of the San Francisco Arts Commission, the arts agency of the City and County of San Francisco.

About the San Francisco Arts Commission

The San Francisco Arts Commission is the City agency that champions the arts in San Francisco. We believe that a creative cultural environment is essential to the City’s well-being. Our programs integrate the arts into all aspects of City life. The Commission was established by charter in 1932 (Charter sections 5.103 and 16.106).