January 20 – April 14, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, January 20, 6 – 8pm

Artists: Luca Antonucci, Reenie Charrière, Jonathon Keats, Phil Ross, Daniel Small, Heather Sparks and Gail Wight

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery is pleased to present, Vast and Undetectable, curated by Aimee Le Duc featuring work by; Luca Antonucci, Reenie Charrière, Jonathon Keats, Phil Ross, Daniel Small, Heather Sparks and Gail Wight. This exhibition explores space that is either so large or so small we cannot conceive of it with our known processes of sight and comprehension. We have to invent systems and vernaculars (from physics to astronomy to science fiction to visual art) to be able to talk about these spaces. The artists in the show, from Jonathon Keat’s founding a Microbial Academy of Sciences for cyanobacteria to Heather Sparks’ lenticular photograph of pixelated scans of her own skin, are establishing systems dedicated to measuring and positing what exactly these kinds of space look like, how they behave and how they affect our daily lives. Additionally the artists strive to comprehend how time passes within these spaces and how objects move within them.

The artists in Vast and Undetectable are creating work that runs the gamut from the most microscopic existence to the vastest reaches of space and time. They are creating objects, and forms of order to articulate these spaces and the shapes they might take. Through the use of photography, video and installation, the work engages matter within these unfathomable spaces as both source material and subject matter.

Read the recent press for Vast and Undetectable.

Exhibition Locations and Artists:

SFAC Main Gallery
401 Van Ness Avenue (at McAllister), San Francisco, CA 94102

Artists: Luca Antonucci, Jonathon Keats, Phil Ross, Daniel Small, Heather Sparks, Gail Wight

SFAC Gallery Window Installation Site
155 Grove Street, San Francisco, CA  94102
Gallery Hours: Viewable 24/7

Artist: Reenie Charrière

Project Descriptions

Luca Antonucci, The New Nothing
The New Nothing is a series of embossed prints of star clusters and other significant astronomical events are stripped of the empirical data of color or depth that renders them remarkable. The prints are displayed with the metal plates that were used to print them in an attempt to open up a dialogue between the representation of these images and the data itself.

Luca Antonucci and Daniel, Small Frist Light
Recently, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field imaging system unveiled the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind that reveals the first light from 13.5 billion years ago. The exposure lasted for eleven and a half days and is as far back as any human eye has seen to the origins of the universe. Luca Antonucci and Daniel Small deconstructed color-coded maps created from the Hubble data using a CMYK screen printing process resulting in five prints, one for each of the color channels, and one for the composited image.

Reenie Charrière, Floe
Floe is a site-specific installation located in the SFAC Gallery window installation site at 155 Grove Street. Using plastic, detritus and various materials of mass production, Floe is an investigation that focuses on the juxtapositions of natural and synthetic matter all around us. These juxtapositions are revealed through their placement within the installation, creating rhizomatic structures that question how inorganic material moves organically or vice versa.

Jonathon Keats, CELESTIAL OBSERVATORIES FOR CYANOBACTERIA
Jonathon Keats provides bacteria with the resources to undertake basic research into the nature of the universe - and potentially to develop a viable theory of everything - by founding a Microbial Academy of Sciences. The Academy will provide research colonies of cyanobacteria with telescope access. Rows of petri dishes filled with brackish water - teeming with cyanobacteria - will be set up atop a flat screen monitor laid flat on its back. The monitor will glow with images of the cosmos provided by the Hubble Telescope.

Phil Ross, Leviathans
Leviathans is a video depicting the slime-mold Physarum polycephalum. The slime-mold though diminutive in size, is able to travel relatively large distances in a short period of time while searching for food. This is due to the way its body pulses and moves, which can be imagined as a harmonically rippling jellyfish like thing, propelling itself along on oscillating waves of its own body. In moving, the slime-mold computes the physical world, and resolves analog problems in a way that is incomplete and messy while also being highly efficient and fast. Leviathans’ images were originally captured at SymbioticA in 2007. Editing by Marcella Faustini. Scott Arford created and produced the soundtrack.

Heather Sparks, Within My Nature, breakdown, between the lines
Within My Nature is a kaleidoscopic video piece, originated with scans of Heather Sparks’ skin, which were then digitally manipulated into candy-colored fabrege-esque landscapes, and animated into a rippling, undulating movement, reminiscent of atomic test patterns. breakdown shows a transparent color-field breakdown of the human form in a 6" x 6" book composed of transparent gels of color- each representing a colored pixel from a scan of the artists' skin.

between the lines is a Lenticular print on a 24" x 60" lightbox of lines of color extracted from pixels from a scanned image of the Sparks’ skin.  As viewers pass by, the colors will change and vibrate.

Gail Wight, Ground Plane
Ground Plane is a series of ultrachrome prints in which the images are constructed from hundreds of exact-scale photographs of squirrel, marmot, snake, frog, and other animal bones, with no repeats within each image. Borrowed from the Hadly Lab collection at Stanford University, these bones are one to ten thousand years old. These finished images became a way for Wight to think about deep time and the earth's crust as a crowded record of that time, a conduit of information about the past, and the space upon which we draw our present lives.