GALLERY EXHIBITION

2023 JURIED MEMBERS EXHIBITION

JUne 3 – july 29

JURIED BY hoi Leung

Excursions brings together over 20+ Bay Area artists working across a diverse range of mediums including painting, sculpture, installation, and video.

Works by: Dalar Alahverdi, Alexis Arnold, Katayoun Bahrami, Lizzy Blasingame, Lisa Conrad, Carolina Cuevas, Lee Oscar Gomez, Emily Gui, Sabina Kariat, Ben Leon, Parul Naresh, Will Pang, Johanna Poethig, Callan Porter-Romero, Helia Pouyanfar, Leonard Reidelbach, Hilda Robinson, Eugene Rodriguez, Leyla Rzayeva, kaory santillan, AJ Serrano, Yana Verba, Amy Yoshitsu.

ARTISTS

Dalar Alahverdi: All of us have stories, and many narratives possess different facets. My paintings are metaphoric—the first thing you see is not the story I want to tell. I like to have people stop by, discover, and think about each frame. My artworks explore the different sides of stories through overlapping surfaces. This collection is a multi-layered acrylic paint on cardboard and plexiglass or glass, where the transparent layers overlie the solid-surfaced painting. This collection is a humbling opportunity to engage the audience in discovering the bottom layer of these combinations by changing the angle at which they view the work. In other words, the paintings reveal their message only when the viewer changes their central focal point to a different one. This interaction co-relates to our social life, where we need to change our vantage point to discover the concealed aspects of the happenings surrounding us. In this collection, I've focused on social justice, a topic that is close to my heart. I was born and lived in Iran for most of my life, and I know how it feels to live in uncertainty, tension, and injustice. Living in the Middle East trains people to consider many facets of each narrative. Therefore, my eyes got sharpened, and my awareness was heightened. Distortion and lack of truthful sources enriched my explorer mind.

Alexis Arnold: My sculptural, installation, and mixed-media 2D artwork explores the subjective perception and experience of light, space, and color. I transform and utilize a variety of analog materials and processes to create stationary works that seem digitally produced, alter optically, or appear kinetic through the movement of light or viewers.

Katayoun Bahrami: I am a multidisciplinary artist and curator originally from Iran and currently based in the Bay Area. My artistic practice explores the relationship between women's bodies and the boundaries that impact them, as performers and targets. Drawing from the history of Iranian women, my work combines social practice, performance, and textile-based installation to create mixed-media pieces, installations, videos, and photographs. My work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally, including at venues such as the LoosenArt Gallery in Rome, the Broad Art Center in Los Angeles, the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, and the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards Exhibition at SOMArts Gallery in San Francisco. I have also produced performances and artist-led participatory projects at various venues, including the Clarion Alley Mural Project, the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco, and Berkeley Art Practice. I earned my BFA from the University of Science and Culture in Iran and went on to receive an MA in Arts and Cultural Management—Museum Studies from Michigan State University in 2017. Recently, I graduated from California College of the Arts with an MFA in Studio Arts. Through my art and curatorial work, I seek to challenge boundaries and create meaningful connections between people and communities.

Lizzy Blasingame: These works are a result of wanting to create something soft in the world. That only a literal softness of form could communicate the need I have for kindness, for more people to be listeners, for office hierarchy to stop demanding a "Type A" response to all interactions. "The Scrivener" is a mix of my absolute love for domestic life and how completely frustrating it can be. I love cooking, sewing, knitting, house plant tending - considering it all care work, but wouldn't it be nice to receive that care too? "Earthly Delights" is a double entendre, playing with words to evoke physical pleasure and a mixed use public park as a social/ist design. "Desert Phenomenon" is an expression of Spring as a bittersweet time of year. I love the moments when wildflowers bloom, yet they are the most brilliant after a heavy, cold rain.

Lisa Conrad: 4 ½ ft (a reference to the standard width of railroads and the unique perspective afforded by their width, grading, and routes) explores the American landscape by bicycling along abandoned railroads converted to trails, illuminating a new line across the country. It navigates the tension between the romance of the railroads and the troubled history of their making. Working with Rails-to-Trails Conservancy I have mapped a prospective route across the United States, via established rail-trails (disused railroads converted into trails) and railroads with the potential to be converted into trails: a parkway that provides an alternate way to experience the American landscape. At its heart is the desire to undo what the development of the railroads did— “collapsing time and space”—and instead create a kind of continuous unfolding of time and space; by slowing down, being out instead of gazing out [from a train window], exploring towns and other areas left behind as train travel was overtaken by the national highway system. A team is bicycling the route in a series of rides, from west to east; we have completed three rides thus far. The composition of our line takes multiple forms: an ephemeral line drawn as we ride, large flags attached to our bicycles and photographed aerially; a digitally inscribed line of our GPS coordinates; and documentation of each day’s ride using a GoPro video camera mounted to my bicycle. The project has two components: the performative/experiential, and the reflective—the work created from documenting each ride. 4 ½ ft participates in a broader conversation about public/private and the commons; it is unique in that it engages with the rail-trail movement and combines the temporality, physicality and phenomenology of the bicycle, a kind of mark-making that re-embodies the land at a more human scale within the particular visual perspective of the railroad and the historical arc of the United States contained in it. My goals include creating awareness and support for a national cross-country trail, and to involve local communities in this re-imagining of place.

Carolina Cuevas: Hand to fabric, hand to clay, a hand to alter/altar. I hold, unfold, and clasp materials to shape a remnant of me, of those with me, of those before me. Passing the shuttle back and forth, from one hand to another, I see the slow progression of every single line of thread building up to create the whole. My works are multi-layered material explorations of oral traditions and the manifestation of time in the labor of making. My tongue ravels and unravels like a knotted string to make sense of my surroundings. Language exists in my mother's gaze, in my sister’s laughter, or in my partner’s skin. Language exists in the processes and materials that have existed long before me. They whisper their own histories and stories, and I tell them mine. I use impermanent materials and performance as a way to demonstrate the constant evolution of these stories and relationships. My work is about the tension of relationships and the meeting of the body and material. This tension exists in my mother praying for her children’s health to a god she has never formally worshiped but felt in her bones. It exists in my father growing his hair for six years to heal my mother when he had always declared to never believe in the miraculous. This tension exists between the labor of making and what is left to show for it.

Lee Oscar Gomez: Lee Oscar Gomez manipulates their fascination with light in a documentation approach, to demonstrate politically conscious images. Topics of gender, belonging, displacement and self identity are translated through photographic displays of performance, still lifes, and street photography. With analog film processes, Lee captures warmth and sensitivity to these topics as a form of radically archiving images, while dismantling their assimilation following the “American Dream.” This ongoing body of work has encouraged healing, while Lee uncovers environmental issues such as including recycled materials and biodegradable ancestral food sources, integrated in a consumption of still lives. As an immigrant, first generation, gender non-conforming, queer, visual and performing artist Lee, challenges their approach to photographing as an act of love and peaceful protest, to exist.

Emily Gui: My work re-materializes commonplace objects to examine the nuances of human relationships with ubiquitous materials, from meticulous personal collections to accumulations of garbage and everything in between. My recent projects explore remnant materials as ways to consider personal connections to capitalism, consumption, hoarding and scarcity mentality. I see the desire for objects and resulting garbage as openings to consider human behavior in the face of human-caused climate change. My practice is informed by ongoing research into pop science, psychology, print history and material culture. I use commonplace objects to openly reject function through flatness, facsimile, fragility and emptiness. At the brink of familiar, the work challenges habits of devouring images while encouraging slow-looking. My process draws on my own experience as an American consumer grappling with climate change, while trying to find my role and responsibility within the contradictory system that perpetuates it. The impulse to re-contextualize forgotten objects developed as a way to process my own engagement and anxiety around simple but ultimately harmful behavior. At the heart of my investigation is the knowledge that while individual behaviors must be examined, the systems of capitalism are at the heart of the destructive behavior that one individual person may participate in. Recognizing and confronting these habits, requires understanding of structural inequality, labor and class, which is ongoing work for me. By re-rendering the invisible, I’m interested in highlighting the mundane, forgotten and unused to invite the viewer to look closer at these systems and our built world. While my recent work on garbage and objects draws on my familial history of hoarding disorder, I am interested in learning more about drought, water and wildfires as a California resident. Along with exploring amazon.com boxes, packing blankets and other materials designed exclusively to protect more valuable objects, my current subject is green grass. Having spent most of my life on the East Coast, I am fascinated with fields and grass in the West. A lawn in the suburbs is a class signifier. Astroturf is a blanket. A golf course is a sponge for water in a drought. A rolling green hill of native grasses becomes kindling come fire season. As with my pulped cardboard work, this project identifies a familiar material, easy to ignore, but ripe for varied interpretations. Lingering in complexity, levity and anxiety, my work poses questions without answering them.

Sabina Kariat: I am an Indian-American story artist, animator, and educator based in San Francisco. My work revolves around my relationship to memory, co-creation as a praxis, and imagining futures of diaspora. As a 2nd generation child of immigrants, my relationship to memory holds a special gravity, anxiety, and connotation of loss. Memory is one of the only links to the place my parents came from. My identity is defined by loss of memory, loss of language, loss of culture, loss of ancestry, loss of ways of being, through the things I have forgotten in the diaspora journey of my family. My work is a way to redefine my relationship to memory, treating it as a means of restoration, as something we can access collectively. I would like to visualize memory as a balm and an antidote, a way to decolonize, to imagine a pre-colonial world and use it as a template for a post-colonial world. I am also interested in using animation as a community-based praxis, by co-creating with community and platforming radical voices. I have created animations for documentary films about the 1960’s civil rights movement, the history of Japanese-American internment in California, the impact of the criminal justice system on refugees, and loss of native languages among immigrants. To increase access to the arts through education and co-creation, I have worked as a teaching artist throughout San Francisco, have held co-creation workshops with Adivasi (indigenous) activists in rural India, and have co-created a film with Syrian-Turkish refugee youth in Istanbul. I would like to expand representations of what is possible for BIPOC and diaspora futures through animation.

Ben Leon: I like to build contraptions that play with moving light and shadows. They manipulate moving parts and light sources to produce random patterns, transforming shapes and colors in the process. These "analog projections" mimic the experience of light as I have sat on a train car, in airplane, in a dance club, or in bed staring at the night ceiling. As objects they are playful often interactive and designed with wood and screws, paper and pieces of DIY toy kits. The viewer is invited to exit out of narrative time and into a space where thoughts and feelings are conjured from the brains instinct to interpret moving flickering light. The changing shapes and forms are "an apt metaphor for the kind of non-synchronized, nonlinear and utterly dematerialized world." - Brion Gysin

Parul Naresh: I am a visual artist, textile designer, educator and an advocate of sustainable practices. With a meditative approach to artmaking, I derive inspiration from nature and highlight its beauty, honesty and perseverance. Being raised in the Himalayan foothills, I often found myself spending time outdoors on forest trails and established a relationship with nature at an early age. This connection has helped me grow as a human being and as an artist that I continue to nurture. While my textile work uses natural material and aims to blur the line between art, craft and fashion, influenced by elements of nature, my ink drawings on paper produce organic forms and textures through a mark-making process. I focus my practice around material and processes where each element is very much intentional. Being a color specialist and having studied color in detail, I understand how every color signifies specific meaning. Thus, for my drawings, over past few years I have continued to challenge myself to eliminate all colors but black and shades of gray. I intend to present a black and white picture of nature’s mesmerizing beauty and environmental issues surrounding climate change. In a subtle way, I am conveying to the viewer a clear message without leading them in any particular direction guided by a particular color. As a nature enthusiast, I enjoy every morning walk I take by myself and every trail I have hiked with my family in the wilderness. 'Marking Landscapes' and 'Flowers of Costa Rica', series of ink mark-makings on paper are my subconscious interpretations of hikes in California mountains, and the walks in rainforest of Costa Rica. Each subtle form whispers the intimacy I share with the tiniest of wildflower hiding under the grass and the immensity I experience on the mountain trails. Varying values of gray and creating depths, drawings tell a story of my rendezvous with nature and mysterious ways it continues to inspire me.

Will Pang: Will Pang's works are not the investigation and research of the current society or the social sculpture, but the visual innovation outside the tide of globalization, the image of the alternative world, and the retrieval and updating of the imagination of the mythopoeic age of human beings.

Johanna Poethig: This series of drawings on porcelain is shaped as corrugated roofs blown off by typhoons and based on family photos from work, school, vacations and friends of life in the Philippines taken during 1957 - 1972. These are drawings of the moments that make up memory, reshaped and reconsidered by the artist’s hand and sealed in the heat of vitrification. Informed and inspired by my formative years in the Philippines, identity, memory, perspective, views of empire, legitimacy and connection weave through this body of work. I am a visual, public and performance artist with a legacy and expanding body of work that bridges diverse communities through murals, public art projects, exhibitions and collaborations in the Bay Area, nationally and internationally. This body of work is personal. Many of them were taken by my father Richard Poethig and unearthed from the mountains of boxes that have been sifted through since his death in November, 2021. Others are taken by our extended family. In the archives of photos taken by Americans in the Philippines the colonial gaze is reflected back in the faces of the photographed. US colonial history in the Philippines is a history that few Americans outside of the diaspora understand. As I consider my family’s photos I present these three renderings, this gaze: the Magnolia popsicle vendor in front of my elementary school, a ZOTO Tondo housing project which was part of my father's work, our extended family, the Griños, at Pagsanjan Falls. The textures and surfaces of the ceramics change with the light. The shadows add hidden dimensions. The photographs are lovingly recreated by hand. They are fragile and yet hard as stone.

Callan Porter-Romero: Hands carry the weight of our labor and invisible hardships. Growing up in Oakland, CA in a Black, Japanese, and Mexican household has expanded my perspective on this topic, particularly for experiences that are relevant to Oakland. My artwork focuses on Black and Brown communities interacting with their environment through the perspective of hands. There are infinite stories within one’s hands. It does not matter if the story is unique or conventional. What matters is that the hand reflects a larger story of an individual's life. Making hands the focal point in my artwork reframes the lack of attention and empathy that society has had for experiences that I have witnessed. On canvas, I use recycled materials, such as cardboard and fabric, to make the hands more realistic. I am especially interested in how people reclaim their right to humanity in their quiet moments despite capitalistic society emphasizing their replaceability. Black and Brown people bore the brunt of this transactional exchange during the pandemic. While not all paintings feature large scale hands, hands do play a significant role in supporting the honest emotion of the characters within. Hands can show many feelings — be it curiosity, anger, dignity, and/or defiance. If no specific subject is depicted in the scene, I use my own hands as references, drawing the hand(s) first before completing the rest of the painting. Hands are carved out of cardboard with a knife or built onto the canvas using material, allowing me to experience and relive the story on my own terms.

Helia Pouyanfar: I am a conceptual artist whose work investigates the permanently transient state of the refugee body and its negotiation and reconciliation with Place. I utilize sculpture and photography to manifest this transient state through architectural objects, images, and videos narrating the idea of Passage and the relationship between liminal spaces and transit. Born into a family of Kurdish descent in Iran, I moved to the United States in 2014 after living as a refugee for three years. By referencing my personal history, I am able to humanize, edify, and narrate the deeply poetic and peculiar experience of forced exile. My interest in homes and bodily connection to Place begins by recognizing the womb-like character of the enclosed space and its nurturing qualities. What makes a home is the groundedness it offers to the body; Home is the permission to stay. Once the moment of exile arrives; however, this permission to stay gives way to a new reality for the exiled. Now Home is a metaphor that latches onto things as one moves through the world. Now Home is the decision to leave. Eventually, this uprooted sense of belonging finds solace in its permanently transient state. This ironic redefining of Home and its transformation from a physical structure to a metaphoric concept interests me the most. My sculptures turn consistent into transient and immovable into versatile. I see architecture as the poetry of the nomad and seek to translate this nomadic relationship to Place using photography. Attempting to create a narrative of my own and formed by the merging of multiple material languages, I create structures out of piles of bricks, collections of windows, series of doorways, and easily movable walls. Adding wheels, suitcase handles, or straps they become objects one can hold and carry; they become walls that travel with the body. Stripped of their original function, they are fragments independent of their origins yet longing for reunion. Within their disjointed reality, they find the freedom to roam around, travel, and act as ever-so-present haunting memories of a place that once was. Through this process, I hope to question who gets the right to stay in one place and who gets to be forcefully removed from another. I am aware that the Western political dialogue regularly conflates homes and nations and equates the need to protect borders to the need to protect one's home. I am interested in the politicization of the threshold, both in its physical and metaphorical sense. The act of passing through space facilitated by a threshold whether it be passing through the inside into the outside, private into the public, or familiar into the foreign, is indeed a political one; a “destabilizing” political act a refugee dares to commit. I endeavor to expand the refugee experience as a holistic one where movement is circuitous; to end is to begin, to leave is to arrive.

Leonard Reidelbach: My practice spirals around the relational, perceptual, and material complications of embodiment. Images and installations reflect impossible spaces and the movement of bodies, sf gay club scenes, psychedelia, ocean waves, social bodies of water, and material transformation. I use silkscreen to create variations in matrixes, bringing in the infinite potential of past and future realities. Pattern carries a history that I can reconfigure physically. The truth of a singular memory breaks apart and possibilities of the same moment are expanded. In each new variation of a repeat, I invite a more welcoming future. I think of this as part of a collective dreaming that exists naturally within trans existence. Trans study is a methodology in complicating possibility rather than defining bodies. I’m interested in what that complication adds to a conversation in craft histories. I make objects that engage the visual senses to elicit a kind of tactile synesthesia- exploring a conduit of seduction between those senses. Through a maximalist use of color and materials like velvet, fiberglass, latex, and silk, I embrace pleasure over a desire to be legible. My work is invested in opening up methods of seeing and relating. Visibility is a double edged sword for many transexuals; the way we are visually codified is often more tied to dominant society than a true sense of ‘self.’ As elements integrate into installation, I build a context that engages the viewer as an active voyeur, asking to consider the specificity of one’s POV and performance of seeing. In controlling what can be seen and experienced, I build a language of autonomy in being witnessed. My hope is that bringing a conversation of opacity to pleasure and that reforming matrixes through formal variations has a potential to open up a more nuanced, dialectical, and somatic understanding of perceptual difference.

Hilda Robinson: Everything I see becomes a part of my work. Because of this, my work is a document of my long life. I am pedestrian, waling , riding and watching. I record the movement of those passing me by or sitting near me. I remember what they are wearing how they interact with each other. From that memory I produce oil pastels on paper, rainbows of the human spirit.

Eugene Rodriguez: I am a Chicano artist based in San Francisco, California. My artwork explores the familial and cultural effects of alienation and follows it generation by generation on both a micro and macro level. I examine the forces of class, race, ethnicity, location, and sexuality. This exploration comes out of my experience of growing up in a working-class family striving to be middle class in the 1960's and 70's. Aesthetically, my art is a mixture of my family photo album, world histories, U.S. soap operas, and Mexican telenovelas with a touch of theater, neorealism, and surrealism. I then use multiple painting and storytelling approaches to create a kaleidoscopic hybrid. All my work looks at how the popular media promotes a thin and anemic interpretation of history. I ask, “What if we were able to do away with this makeshift account and consider a more complex chronicle where those who have been excluded are animated? How do contemporary image making practices influence how we imagine the future?” My Velvet Notebooks is my latest body of work and scrutinizes our fractured moment through the eyes of The Cracked Velvets, a manufactured, indie band comprised of three Chicanx rock musicians. The project begins with a documentary of the making of the band. While the members are excited to get a recording contract, they are also asking what it means to be an artist in a spectacle-oriented society. I am especially interested in how the band members take on the challenge to re-vitalize the arts (and themselves) with their unique perspectives about art, music and community building.

Leyla Rzayeva: If awarded the opportunity to work with Berkley Art Center I would exhibit my current projects into the mechanics of hospitality in the social and cultural practices. I propose to create an installation using a series of photographs and textile works: "Smoke and Mirrors", "Window" and "Dividers". The Juried Members Exhibition will prove invaluable to my collaborative approach to projects that reflects a deep understanding of the importance of building relationships. The intimate dimensions of the BAC exhibition space will create the focused environment needed for engaging with my projects and exploring the memory and personal history through photography and book arts. I envision displaying the textile and photography installation presenting the principal themes of memory creation, internal ecologies and movement of people, plants and animals in their post-colonial and imperial contexts. My focus and material research through the lens of immigration bring the personal knowledge of contemporary culture of West Asia and Central Asia to uncover the stories that have shaped my family and transnational history. In the process of listening, remembering and speaking about the past, I find invention and dive deep into the unimagined futures.

kaory santillan: The work that I’m interested in producing is reflexive and connective. by mixing states of being, the gap between antiquity and modernity is shortened in an attempt to balance the multiple facets that makeup one’s identity. past. present. future. with this in mind, the spatial differences serve to remind us of a sameness. we’re all connected, tied to one another and the world around us. i take traditional customs from my homeland; materials, techniques, and emotions to fuel my creative pursuits. i use an intuitive approach in my artistic process by letting my instincts influence ideas and guide bodies of work. through historical inquiry and theoretical frameworks, i am able to develop a lexicon of imagery and language to engage in discourses about migration, power inequalities, and decolonization.

AJ Serrano: I have a fascination with blue: cobalt-colored glazes; blue and white azulejo and talaveras; the uncoordinated choreography from Madonna’s 1986 music video for ‘True Blue’; basking in the occasional blue skies over the Bay Area; the hanky code meaning of navy blue; and that blue feeling I’ve experienced for years. I connect with my surroundings with ceramics, photography, video/video performance, and installations; I relate with viewers through themes of pop culture, queer life, memory, location, diasporic culture, and mental health; yet, I invite all to view my experiences through blue-tinted glasses. I am a lifelong Bay Area resident currently pursuing my MFA in Art at San Francisco State University.

Yana Verba: "Klee’s Angels are in Kyiv now" On January 24, 2022 Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a continuation of the war that started in 2014. As my whole family is under daily bomb attacks, it has been the most difficult, the most challenging year. This body of paintings “Klee’s Angels are in Kyiv now” came out of the daily thinking and out of reflection on the current situation in Ukraine. It came out of the rumination about life and death. As a starting point I looked at Paul Klee’s angel paintings that he worked on during his life career and especially towards the end of his life. The angles are layered with street graffities from Kyiv, that I took pictures of during my last trip to Ukraine in 2021. Also the words and elements of the text, that have been visible on the streets during this year, are appearing throughout the paintings. Word such as (ДЕТИ) children, that have been seen outside of Mariupol Theatre before it was bombed on March 16, 2022, also word (Укриття) shelter, signs to the shelter, that have became visible in every city. The angels are put in Ukrainian surroundings as an intent of hope that Klee’s angels will look over my Ukraine.

Amy Yoshitsu: I am a sculptor, designer, and socially engaged artist deconstructing the interconnections between power, economics, labor, and race. I seek to illuminate these systems’ foundational impacts on personal schemas and interpersonal relationships. The concepts, imagery, and materials of my work are informed by infrastructure, which encompasses the act of supporting, the undergirding for creation, and the workforce maintaining our unsustainable global practices. The objects I make embody the reality that systemic forces are driven by economic and social incentives in power structures, which play greater than acknowledged roles in our individual material, cognitive and emotional conditions. The intersecting histories and consequences of omnipresent apparatuses—from taxation to electrical grids to the maintenance of “racecraft”*—are foundational to the tapestry of human existence. I employ sewing and textiles to interweave the effects of entrenched systems on the body, the delicate, the intimate. * Fields, Barbara J. and Fields, Karen E., Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Verso, 2014.

curator

HOI LEUNG is the Deputy Director of the Chinese Culture Center, overseeing the internal culture, programs and operations of the organization. Leung was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the US in 2004. Previously, Leung was the Curator at CCC for 4 years, where she established a distinct practice specializing in Asian diasporic contemporary art, developing emerging artists, and designing community engagement in immigrant neighborhood settings. Leung’s curatorial projects included “dawn_chorusiii: the fruit they don’t have here” by Sofia Cordova (2019 - 2021), an experimental video foregrounding the stories of six Bay Area women who journeyed to the United States as refugees, and “Interior Garden” (2022), a major solo exhibition of large-scale ceramic-based installations by Cathy Lu exploring the dream and dystopian states Asian America. Leung’s projects have received critical acclaim in KQED, Hyperallergic, Artforum, Artsy, and SF Arts Monthly. She was also named one of five new game-changing curators by SF Arts Monthly in 2021. Leung is an emerging leader in the field as she devotes her unique background in artist support and community curation into building a healthy, sustainable, and imaginative arts ecosystem.