Service Tension

SAN FRANCISCO, May 1, 2025 — The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Main Gallery is excited to present Service Tension, a group exhibition curated by Elena Gross and Leila Weefur featuring work by Salimatu Amabebe, Ricki Dwyer, Xandra Ibarra, Sasha Kelley, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Autumn Wallace. The exhibition will explore the messiness and complexity of the queer body.

Service Tension opens on May 29, 2025 at the SFAC Main Gallery in the War Memorial Veterans Building and will be on view through August 23, 2025.

The title, Service Tension, is an interpolation of “surface tension,” a phrase that signifies a resistant relationship between two surfaces and the title of the exhibition suggests a playful interrogation of sex, penetration, and power. The works in the exhibition trouble notions of masculinity within queer dynamics as well as sexual desire.  

“The San Francisco Arts Commission is very excited to present this thought-provoking exhibition at the SFAC Main Gallery,” said Ralph Remington, Director of Cultural Affairs. “Elena Gross and Leila Weefur have curated an exhibition that encourages conversations around the queer body, power, and representation. At a time when LGBTQIA+ rights are coming under increasing attacks, we are proud to provide space for meaningful and provocative dialogue.”  

Oakland-based artist Salimatu Amabebe will create new work for the exhibition that explores the connections between traditional African spirituality, sexuality, and resource extraction through multimedia sculptural installations. Amabebe’s work transforms Ijaw wooden sculptures into contemporary rubber objects, creating a juxtaposition of sacred objects and BDSM aesthetics, examining histories of exploitation in the Niger Delta while also reclaiming space for Black queer expression. 

Ricki Dwyer’s work considers the intersections of material, industry, and the somatic. Dwyer’s work acknowledges drapery as a kind of negotiation that things never fall the same way twice. For Service Tension, Dwyer will be exhibiting a large textile piece that will be suspended from above the gallery, responding to and in tension with the architecture of the space.  

Working across performance, video, sculpture, and photography, Oakland-based artist Xandra Ibarra creates work that addresses abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects. In the exhibition, Ibarra will show a new series of photographs that look at the play of power and desire, exploring dominance and subjugation in relational dynamics.   

Sasha Kelley is an Oakland-based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the topics of intimacy, collective archives, and collaboration with black/brown/queer communities. The photographic diptych in the exhibition foregrounds a sense of erotic empowerment through portraiture. With a subject whose playful gaze draws viewers into voyeuristic complicity, Kelley’s work transforms looking into a seductive negotiation—an intimate theater of power that unfolds when a body becomes both subject and spectacle.  

Tiona Nekkia McClodden is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social commentary. McClodden’s work in Service Tension are part of a larger series of works entitled NEVER LET ME GO, incorporating rope and leather to play with the concept of being bound.  

Philadelphia-based artist Autumn Wallace creates work that examines myth gender, sexuality, and the black femme experience. Wallace’s paintings and sculpture often feature figures tangled and wrapped up with each other; limbs holding, stretching, and curling around each other’s bodies. Unbound by physical restraints, the fluidity in Wallace’s work speaks to the rush of physical and emotional boundlessness with another.  

“Service Tension examines how abstraction becomes a vessel for queer desire—a way to hold what cannot be directly shown,” states exhibition curators Elena Gross and Leila Weefur. “The exhibition dances between raw exposure and poetic restraint, navigating the exquisite tension between witnessing and participating. We're interested in how these artists create work that doesn't just represent queer sexuality but embodies it through material, form, and gesture. The works transform the gallery into a space where power dynamics are not just displayed but actively negotiated. Viewers become implicated in these scenes of intimacy, forced to confront their own position as voyeur, participant, or something beautifully in-between. In this way, abstraction doesn't obscure the messiness of queer bodies in contact—it reveals the profound truths that explicit representation often fails to capture.” 

“We are thrilled to present Service Tension at the Main Gallery—an exhibition where abstraction meets being,” states Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez, SFAC Director of Galleries and Public Programs. “This show pulses with urgency, intimacy, and resistance, and we can’t wait to welcome visitors into the space.

About the Curators 
Elena Gross is an independent writer, curator, and culture critic living in Oakland, CA. She specializes in representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Her research has been centered around conceptual and material abstractions of the body in the work of Black modern and contemporary artists and most recently in queer artistic and literary histories of the late 20th century. Elena is the co-editor, along with Julie R. Enszer, of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture (Rutgers University Press), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Anthologies.  

Leila Weefur is an artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Through film and architecture, they examine the performative elements connected to systems of belonging, present in Black, queer, gender-variant embodiment. Their research, across disciplines, explores religion, Black ecological symbols and colloquial language, Transnational Blackness, and practices of collectivity.  

Weefur’s writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including BlackStar Productions, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, CCA’s Wattis Institute, McEvoy Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and The Kitchen. Weefur is a lecturer at Stanford University and a member of The Black Aesthetic.  

EXHIBITION DETAILS 

Service Tension
May 29 – August 23, 2025 
SFAC Main Gallery, War Memorial Veterans Building 
401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 126, San Francisco, CA 94102 
Wednesday – Saturday, noon – 5 p.m. 
Free and open to the public

Opening Reception Details
Thursday, May 29, 6 – 8 p.m. 
SFAC Main Gallery, War Memorial Veterans Building 
401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 126, San Francisco, CA, 94102 
No reservation required. Free and open to the public. 

Public Programming Details
All programs are free and open to the public. For more information, visit sfartscommission.org/servicetension 

Surface, Service, Restraint: A Conversation with Tiona Nekkia McClodden   
Thursday, June 5, 2025, 6:00 p.m. (Doors at 5:30 p.m.) 
SFAC Main Gallery, 401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102    

Join curators Elena Gross and Leila Weefur in conversation with artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden as they explore the immense surface tension in McClodden's leather and rope compositions, examining how abstraction functions as a tool for interrogating queer dynamics, power exchange, and the messy complexities of desire within the exhibition. 

Office Kink: A Queer Peep Show 
Friday, June 20, 2025, 8:00 p.m. 
SFAC Main Gallery, 401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102    

Oakland based artist Chani Bockwinkel invites you to peer through the gallery wall to witness intimate encounters that blur the line between public and private space. In Office Kink, SFAC’s meeting room transforms into a voyeuristic playground where spectators become complicit actors of queer desire, gazing through a series of peepholes, breaking through the workplace veneer. Performers announced soon. 

Surface Tension: A Literary Evening  
Wednesday, August 20, 2025 | 6:00 p.m. (Doors at 5:30 p.m.) 
SFAC Main Gallery, 401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102    

Join curators Leila Weefur and Elena Gross alongside local poets for an intimate reading of works exploring queer embodiment and desire. Featuring selections from exhibition inspirations including Jenny Johnson's essay "Butch Blow Job."   

View Service Tension preview images on Flickr. 

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About the San Francisco Arts Commission
The San Francisco Arts Commission is the City agency that champions the arts as essential to daily life by investing in a vibrant arts community, enlivening the urban environment and shaping innovative cultural policy. Our programs include: Civic Art Collection, Civic Design Review, Community Investments, Public Art, SFAC Galleries, and Art Vendor Licensing. To learn more, visit sfartscommission.org.