Past Exhibitions

In partnership with PhotoAlliance, Take Me Away, a juried photography exhibition featuring 18 regional artists and over 100 works, encouraged photographers to reflect on both real and imagined spaces one might visit in order to leave the everyday. The chosen works represent a myriad of places to escape, ranging from virtual space to locations as close as home. In advance of the call for submissions, the jurors selected three established Bay Area photographers to present larger bodies of work. David Gardner’s series about people who trade stability for life in a motor home will sit beside Alice Shaw’s renowned series People Who Look Like Me, which depicts the artist stretching her own identity in order to look more like another person. Rebecca Horne’s domestic scenes contribute an unsettling and fantastical vision of daydreaming gone awry. The exhibition ultimately examines human connections to respite, adventure, and fantasy, through ideas and spaces related to escapism.

The visions of landscapes put forth by four California photographers reveal sites that should either be ignored or passed over, such as freeway overpasses, dilapidated urban sidewalks and roadsides. Nothing to See Here is an examination of how we interact with or are repelled by these spaces, and features images that, for the most part, are devoid of any human presence. The exhibition seeks to add to the ongoing dialogue created by Bay Area artists' preoccupation with landscape, honing in on works by photographers examining a particular kind of site that is not entered into but acted upon or in front of.

The Air & Space Museum grew out of artist Randy Colosky's desire to create a site-specific work of art for passersby that would evolve slowly over the course of the exhibition – allowing viewers to experience the changing installation as well as the complex and interdependent constructs that support it. Colosky’s newly commissioned work consists of an involved synthetic growing station that provides a proper environment for rearing plants ranging from fast-growing groundcover to large sunflowers. Part of the nature of the project is creating the infrastructure necessary to grow plants in a place they wouldn't ordinarily grow, and having the lights, ventilation, dehumidifiers, and water systems all in balance to make this happen without any effects on the structure they are being grown in. The Air & Space Museum is also about technology, innovation and a desire to create something that pushes the boundaries of sculpture and installation. Over the three month installation period the artist will create a stop-animation film that documents the plant growth. 

Stretch & Expose is dedicated to celebrating the rich diversity of contemporary screen printing and the artistic minds that choose to manipulate this media to embody and expose their vision. Today, screen printing by hand is considered obsolete for large-scale industrial printing runs, but is still utilized in the production of small run posters and t-shirts. Why would artists still choose to screen print when the prevalent method for printing has become digital? When the curators posed the question to the participating artists, each answer was different, however there seemed to be common ground rooted in both the desire to control the work through a particular physical process, and also enjoying the random inconsistencies the process produces. Additionally, screen printing is an economical way to produce duplicates, and it allows for a myriad of experimental possibilities.