To Bright Disturbances

The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Main Gallery is excited to present To Bright Disturbances, a group exhibition curated by SFAC Acting Director of Galleries and Public Programs Jackie Im, featuring work by Carmen Argote, Sky Hopinka, Kija Lucas, Aspen Mays, and Bonnie Ora Sherk. The exhibition will explore land use, and in particular the ways in which we utilize the land can be at many times extractive, devastating, and at times, restorative.  

The title, To Bright Disturbances, comes from the poem “Crowd Source” by Canadian poet and activist Cecily Nicholson. In the poem Nicholson draws parallels between the movements and sociability of crows with that of humans. How the collective can read with fear and danger, but also reclamation and possibility. The works in the exhibition similarly explores how we exist with the land and with nature—we can be harbingers of harm or of renewal.  

Los Angeles-based artist Carmen Argote’s work is a process of searching, digesting, and conversing with the spaces and places she inhabits. For To Bright Disturbances, Argote will show works from their Exile series—sculptures created from palm fronds, braided and folded together—as well as a new work and performance that looks at the boundaries and lines we create in the spaces we occupy.  

Sky Hopinka’s work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, and language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, non-fiction forms of media. In addition to selections from Hopinka’s Breathing series (2020), the exhibition will feature Fainting Spells (2018), a film that explores family, landscape, tradition, and healing told through a mythical narrative about Xąwįska, or Indian pipe plant, used medicinally by Ho-Chunk people to revive those who have fainted.  

Bay Area artist Kija Lucas uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage, and inheritance. The objects and plants featured in Lucas’ work are charged with meaning, imbued with significance by the owner and through historical research. In To Bright Disturbances, Lucas will create a new work that delves into the history of the Civic Center area and looking back to what this land was before colonization.  

Aspen Mays’ work in To Bright Disturbances looks at extraction and behavior. On the large wall of the gallery is the facade of a barn located at the Hastings Natural History Reserve in Carmel Valley. Scaled to the gallery, the facade shows the bored holes made by Acorn woodpeckers to store acorns for later consumption. Often done on oak trees, the woodpeckers’ compulsion can sometimes destroy the very wood they use to store their food, echoing our own compulsion to extract and exploit our resources.  

Bonnie Ora Sherk (1945-2021) was a landscape-space artist, performance artist, landscape planner, and educator who lived in San Francisco for over 50 years. Sherk was the founder of The Farm, an art and community center at the corner of Cesar Chavez and Potrero, and A Living Library, a project that engages communities in creating unique ecological transformations. The exhibition will feature work where Sherk looked to create more harmonious landscapes, often reclaiming developed land. Her practice asks questions of how we can live with more balance with nature, with access for all.  

“To Bright Disturbances looks at the different ways we live with and on the land,” states exhibition curator Jackie Im. “There is a tension in our interactions with the environment, and the exhibition asks us how we can be more considered and more intentional with the world around us. The artists in the show explore these different modes of communing with the landscape, thinking through our histories, mythmaking, and our impulses behind our use of the land.”

 

Image credit: Kija Lucas, Untitled (Tule Grass), 2025 (detail). Courtesy of the Artist.