Past Exhibitions

A multimedia exhibition about young people finding and claiming their place. Multimedia artist Katharine Gin and sound artist Kjell Nordeson lead this installation along with 11 young San Francisco writers who developed their poetic voices in WritersCorps, a creative writing program serving urban youth. Since its inception in 1994, WritersCorps has helped more than 15,000 young people from neighborhoods throughout San Francisco improve their literacy ? and inspire them to learn. Visitors view short films, listen to audio recordings, respond to writing prompts, and even exhibit their own writing.

Immediate Future features the recipients of the 2008 Murphy & Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts sponsored by the San Francisco Foundation. This exhibition provides a first-glance at what is being produced by promising artists within regional graduate programs. For many featured artists this exhibition marks their first major exposure, and for all participants it represents an opportunity to share what they have been developing in their graduate studios with a broader audience.

Gordon’s work focuses on the integration of contemporary folk aesthetics with the emergent technology of sound imaging. A wide range of sources, including science fiction, patterns recurrent in nature and collected sounds are synthesized to create inhabitable sculptures. For this commission the SFAC Gallery asked Gordon to step outside of her normal strategy and create a sculpture that cannot be entered, but instead is viewed from the outside via the windows. The resulting multi-sensory installation compels passersby to look through an oblong viewfinder reveals a cave-like structure inspired by spacecrafts and the nests of solitary insects. At the end of the hole the viewer finds a series of LED light bulbs that illuminate in synchronicity with altered sound recordings collected from the neighborhood’s natural soundscape.

The works in A Complicated Dominion depict an unnatural collision of culture and nature, demonstrating four attempts to come to terms with responsibilities and attitudes toward the ever-evolving circumstances of our interdependent existence. A formal dinner is set for a pack of feral pigs. Cuttlefish are corralled into a perfect circle. A squirrel personifies Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols. Through graceful and often humorous means, each of the five exhibiting artists share their varied political viewpoints, while also provoking broader lines of questioning about our environmental, and geo- and sociopolitical values.