Bay Area Now 5

Ala Ebtekar

Ala Ebtekar has returned time and again to his initial passion of drawing and painting. With meticulous attention to conceptual intent and physical execution, he deconstructs and reconstructs time, space, and history, creating an organic, hybridized visual narrative fertile with infinite interpretations.

Ebtekar is as much influenced by the mythology and folklore of his Iranian heritage as he is by the legends and lore of hip-hop culture. The figures in his compositions inhabit a space where past and present collide. They frequently emerge from the boundaries of old book pages and from the austere vastness of large pieces of paper like parables from another time. Yet the surprise of seeing a modern combat helmet and rifle bandolier in the midst of traditional armor, or the silhouette of a tank overlaid with sword-wielding soldiers on horseback, prompts a consideration of the present. Timelines mingle in a complex dance of ideologies, allegories, and consequences. Ebtekar imagines this world with a measure of grace and civility, the latent conflict frozen in the moment, with its participants wearing expressions of calm and resolve, as if they knew how history would be written all along.

—Kevin B. Chen

Ala Ebtekar, born in the United States to Iranian parents, was raised in both Iran and the U.S. As a young teenager he joined the K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), working with artist Tim Rollins on collaborative artworks involving groups of urban youth. His work has been exhibited in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. He was recently featured in the exhibitions One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, a touring exhibition originating at the Asia Society in New York; and in the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. In 2006, Ebtekar was awarded the Stanford University Paris Studio, participating in a seven-month residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris, and is currently in residence at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Ebtekar holds a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Stanford University.

Ana Teresa Fernández

Of what use is a woman’s body? In one of Ana Teresa Fernández’s paintings, a woman is hidden behind a sheet, her body both obscured and outlined by the work of pinning it to a clothesline, only her stilettos visible at the hemline. In another, a woman is bent down on her knees, propping herself up, mopping the floor with her hair. In the suggestion of wind whipping against the folds of a dress and the unceremonious slap of wet hair against concrete, the real becomes surreal, familiar and strange. A luminous longing possesses them. Each brushstroke is an articulate extension of their determination: backs bent with purpose, even their shadows, impossibly tangible, carry the weight of their intentions. Rendered in plaintive and dramatic light, Fernández’s figures are neither menial nor domestic. They are imbued with mystery and dignity, aggressive affirmation, defiance and resilience, resignation and reverence. Their chore, like the physical performances the artist documents in them, is to bruise and bless the body by wiping our expectations of it clean.

—Robin Ekiss

Ana Teresa Fernández was born and raised in Tampico, Mexico. She has exhibited her work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York as well as in Haiti and Mexico. Fernández received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute and is the current Tournesol Awardee at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She has also completed residencies in Jakmel, Haiti at the Fondation D’Art Jakmel, and in Juarez, Mexico through the LEF Foundation. Fernández is a recipient of the Murphy Cadogan Award and was also chosen for the National Association Latino Art and Culture Award and the Cultural Equity Grant. She is currently working on a public permanent light sculpture through the Richmond Art Center as the artist recipient for the Neighborhood Public Art Grant Project.

Brian Conley

Thousands of Americans belong to gaming communities that play out historical battles with miniature soldiers on handmade dioramas. They may fight the battles of ancient Hittites and Babylonians, the Napoleonic wars, or World War II. Games begin with historically accurate scenarios.

They are not reenactments, however, because events proceed via war strategy and rolls of the dice, and arrive at divergent historical outcomes.

At Games Expo in Las Vegas on March 19–21, 2007, I asked a group of gamers to “play”/fight three battles from the war in Iraq, using recent information from Western and Iraqi news sites, and real-time reports from Iraqi bloggers. The gamers built a diorama that was used to represent a town in the Zarga region near Najaf for the first two games, and a neighborhood in Baghdad for the third. An onsite research team investigated and selected the scenarios.

The first game restaged an attack by a group called Soldiers of the Sky on a police barricade, on January 28, 2007, during the Ashura pilgrimage from Najaf to Karbala. This game was based on reports from Western news sources. The second game restaged the same event as seen through the eyes of civilians whose clan, the Hawatim, was involved. The last event followed a live hostage crisis that had begun in Februrary, 2007, when Hannelore Kadhim and her son Sinan were kidnapped from their Baghdad home by a group called the Arrows of Righteousness.

The players who collaborated on this project are absent from the current installation, as are the soldiers, civilians, and politicians involved in the war.

—B. C.

Brian Conley’s artistic practice operates between the divide of science, art and politics, from radio performance to sculptural and sound-based installations. He has shown projects in Bitstreams at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Statements at ArtBasel; and a commission from the ArtPace Foundation for Contemporary Art. He was included in the exhibition Becoming Animal at MassMoca, North Adams, MA; and the exhibition Insight/Out: Eight Americans at the Wanas Foundation in Sweden. He is founding co-editor with Sina Najafi of Cabinet Magazine, an international art and culture quarterly. He is also on the faculty of the Fine Art program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Canan Tolon

A colony is a country ruled by another country: a group of people of the same nationality or ethnic group, doing the same work, or living in the same circumstances, who reside together or near one another. It is also a group of animals, insects, or plants of the same kind that are living together and dependent on each other. A colony is also a localized mass or growth of organisms, bacteria for example, in or on a nutrient medium. As immigration becomes an increasingly sensitive issue, I keep coming back to this word’s different definitions.

I once held a passport that was undesirable and was told, point blank, that people like me grew like mold in the thickness of the walls, settled in hidden places, multiplied like pests and lived on discards. Ever since, I have wanted to make a visual expression of this insult.

Whether it is by force or by choice, people migrate to find better and safer living conditions, but often end up permanently adopting a lifestyle once thought to be temporary. Most are expected to serve, to take on undesirable jobs, to fall into the cracks and remain invisible. They are expected to live within the city’s obscure fabric, as if in a play that gives unimpeded motion to the machine, and are to come out of their hidden places only when needed again. Bearing all of this in mind, I wanted to work with the visible and the invisible to express these illusions and disillusions.

—C. T.

Canan Tolon was trained as an architect, and holds degrees from UC Berkeley, Middlesex Polytechnic in London, and Fachhochschule in Trier, Germany. Tolon’s work has been exhibited internationally, in Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris, Vienna, and Istanbul. Her work has also been shown at the 3rd International Istanbul Biennial, the Istanbul Modern Art Museum, the J. P. Morgan Chase Collection exhibition, and at SantralIstanbul. She is represented by Galeri Nev in Istanbul and Ankara, and Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco.

DocFest

DocFest is presented over two weeks in October by SF IndieFest, at various venues around the city. They showcase outstanding, provocative documentaries from around the world, curated by a programming team headed by Jeff Ross and Bill Banning of Roxie Releasing. Recent premieres include the anti-consumerist doc What Would Jesus Buy?; Manufacturing Dissent, which turned the tables on Michael Moore; and the Academy Award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side.

Jeff Ross founded SF IndieFest in 1998 and currently produces three major annual film festivals in San Francisco, the other two being DocFest and Another Hole in the Head. His background is in event planning and promotion, and before starting his own festivals Ross worked for four years at the San Francisco Film Society, presenters of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Donald Fortescue and Lawrence LaBianca

This collaborative project derives from the book Moby Dick by Herman Melville, which has been a long-standing inspiration to both of us. Our fascination with Moby Dick comes, in part, from its detailed description and evocation of the bygone crafts of sailing and whaling, and the struggle of men at sea, combined with its powerful and ever-relevant dissection of monomania. In this work we hope to conjure the period of the book through the use of period forms such as a cabriole-legged table and hailing horn, while making the work very much of the moment by including contemporary sound recordings. Constructed of steel rods, the table was filled with beach pebbles from the black sand beaches of Marin and then lowered into Tomales Bay for a month to accumulate living accretions from the ocean. Atop the table is an oversized sound-amplifying funnel reminiscent of the hailing horns used on whaling ships, but is constructed of laser cut panels of phenolic lashed together with fine wire. Sounding provides a direct link to the living oceans surrounding the Bay Area through sight, sound, smell, and touch. In both form and concept, it links to the historical, literary, and metaphorical oceans of Moby Dick.

—D. F. and L. L. B.

Donald Fortescue is chair of the Furniture programat California College of the Arts, San Francisco. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from University of New South Wales; an Associate Diploma in Visual Arts from Canberra School of Art, Australian National University; and a Masters of Creative Arts from University of Wollongong. Fortescue has had several solo exhibitions at John Elder Gallery in New York and at the Center for Contemporary Craft in Houston. In 2001, he was an inaugural winner of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Experimental Design Award. His work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; National Gallery of Australia; Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia; and other public and private collections.

Lawrence LaBianca sculpts metal, ceramic, wood, and glass into forms that explore humankind’s relationship with nature from within a technological society. His work has appeared in many galleries and museums on the West Coast, including the Dorothy Weiss Gallery and The Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco; the Richmond Art Center; and the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco. His work has also been featured on stage, through collaborations with choreographers Joanna Haighgood and Amelia Rudolph of Project Bandeloop. He holds a BA in Environmental Design from University of Colorado and an MFA from California College of the Arts.

Edmundo de Marchena

Hyper-sexed and sexually compulsive people have been stigmatized throughout history despite providing necessary regulating functions in society as well as an important cathartic release from social tension. People labeled with descriptors such as “faggot, wanker, or bitch” have appropriated these terms and laid claim to them in order to turn their derogatory meaning into more positive identifiers. My piece similarly seeks to rearrange that balance. By paying homage to the sexually compulsive, I am proposing them as sexual revolutionaries and rebels who fulfill an important role that has never been praised or tolerated. San Francisco is a very well-documented place of the sexual avant-garde, after all. In my work, I approach these explorations with humor, joy, and playfulness.

–E. de M.

Edmundo de Marchena, born in Venezuela, draws on culture from todo el mundo to explore both the glamour and the separateness of life in familiar and foreign places. His multimedia art has been featured in museums and galleries in Venezuela, New York, and Europe. De Marchena has appeared in numerous cultural publications, been interviewed for Globovision TV, and is included in such prestigious collections as the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas, Venezuela and the University of Salamanca Art Collection, Spain. De Marchena received a scholarship from Parsons School of Design where he later taught in the Product Design department.

Elaine Buckholtz

In Middle Sticks, the viewer enters a deep blue room with black benches placed around the perimeter of four walls. A large print hovers just above the floor in the middle of the space, appearing to be in constant motion as video is projected onto it from above. Buckholtz transforms a Miró painting by placing a print of it on a motor, then shaking the camera while filming, in order to translate the color of the paint into light. The result is luminous.

Middle Sticks explores the concept of moving light, and its ability to enliven aspects of objects and space, to create a dynamism that would otherwise remain hidden. By sampling the color palette of a painting and translating a static work into a time-based poetic abstraction, the piece investigates Buckholtz’s interest in what lies beneath that which is visible in full stationary light. A once-familiar painting is transformed into a mesmerizing, shifting, chromatic spectrum.

Elaine Buckholtz has worked as a lighting and visual designer in the Bay Area for 20 years; she has also worked with Merce Cunningham and Meredith Monk. Her most recent work utilizes video and light in relation to sculptural forms, digital prints, and preexisting sites in architecture and nature. She has shown work at the Claremont Museum in Southern California; the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art; Y2Y Gallery, The Luggage Store, Fusion Art Space, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, all in San Francisco; Pierogi Gallery in Leipzig, Germany; the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University; and the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho. Buckholtz holds MFA degrees from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and Stanford University.

Erik Scollon

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I’ve always pursued a body of work that is simultaneously familiar, strange, utilitarian, sculptural, and often domestic or intimate. I’m therefore interested in ceramics for its versatility. Recently though, I’ve been questioning assumptions about gender and identity in the production, use, and display of domestic objects. The way something is made, how it is used, and how it is displayed is telling not only of the work, but also of the producers and receivers of it. There are many associations to exploit within the tradition of blue and white pottery because of its multiple historical and cultural connections. Using this, I want to remix and update our received cultural associations in order to take apart and then rebuild our notions of taste, display, identity, and personal space. By inviting the audience into the work (or vice versa), I hope to create an exchange that tempts the spectators and the artist to switch back and forth between the roles of producer and receiver. By focusing on everyday objects, I attempt to insert art back into everyday life.

—E. S.

Erik Scollon’s studio practice consists of working with porcelain objects that mix historical references and blend functional concerns with aesthetic ones. His critical writings examine the overlap of art, craft, and design in how material culture affects social relations. Scollon holds a MFA in fine arts and a MA in visual and critical studies from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Recently, his work has been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art, the Eagle Tavern, the M1 Gallery, and the Tricycle Gallery, all in San Francisco.

Ian McDonald

There is a large mound in Rome that stands as a testament to early urban culture, design, and influence. The mound is called Monte Testaccio and it is composed almost entirely of fragments of broken ceramic vessels or “amphorae.” The volume and number of these transport containers indicate the amount of food and import that was needed to sustain the Roman Empire. Many of the vessels were imported from what is now Spain and Northern Africa, and bore the names of their producers, illustrating early partnerships in trade and workshops.

Monte Testaccio also hints at reuse and manufactured obsolescence. Due to their curved design and cheap production costs, many of the amphorae that make up the mound were never intended for further use, or a second journey. Now surrounded by a working class neighborhood, Monte Testaccio serves as a warning to contemporary civilization: The amount of twenty-first century “broken amphorae” it will take to support our built environment will illustrate to future populationsour complex struggle for meaning in material, culture, design, and, ultimately, power.

—I. M.

Ian McDonald has shown in both the U. S. and Europe, including solo shows at the Rena Bransten Gallery and A.O.V Gallery in San Francisco. Group show venues have included The New Wight Gallery at UCLA; Nieuwe Vide Gallery in Holland; and Sophienholm Exhibition Hall and The Svendborg Kunstingbygning Museum, both in Denmark. In 2007, he was awarded the Premio Faenza from the Museo Internazionale della Ceramiche in Faenza, Italy. McDonald has completed residencies at the European Ceramic Work Center in Holland; the International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark; and at the de Young Art Center of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He has been on the faculty at San Francisco Art Institute since 2002. He is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.

John Roloff

Yerba Buena Gardens may be seen geologically as an Anthropocene structural deposit of various origins resting uncomfortably on Cretaceous era, accreted marine sediments of the Franciscan Complex. This relationship was initially examined symbolically and materially by the public sculpture, Deep Gradient/Suspect Terrain… in the form of a descending ship made of steel and green glass, containing ocean floor sediments extracted four miles off the California coast, installed on the Yerba Buena site in 1993. Deep Gradient Complex structurally and conceptually extends this inquiry further into the Yerba Buena site—by tectonic installation of green filters and video imagery of the construction of Yerba Buena Gardens and gathering of sediment for the original work—to the architecture of the YBCA building. An expression of research into the allochthonous origin of the aluminum cladding of the Center for the Arts is also intended as an element of Deep Gradient Complex.

The symbolism of transparent green—referring to the deep-sea depositional environment of the Franciscan Complex sediments and analogs of transport and displacement of sediment, both in time and distance—is extended and reconfigured in Deep Gradient Complex through analogous displacement onto YBCA’s windows. In conjunction with the green depositional symbolism, the video documentation of raw materiality and process examines an analog of humanity as an agent of denudation and formation, at some level indistinct from that of nature.

–J. R.

John Roloff works conceptually with site, process, and natural systems. He is known primarily for his outdoor kiln/furnace projects done from the late 1970s to the early 1990s as well as other large-scale installations investigating geologic and natural phenomena. In addition to numerous environmental, site-specific installations in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, his work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; UC Berkeley Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Photoscene Cologne, Germany; the Venice Architectural and Art Biennales in Italy; and, most recently, The Snow Show in Kemi, Finland. He is currently chair of the Sculpture/Ceramics department at San Francisco Art Institute.

Joshua Churchill

Sound both defines and affects our surroundings, whether we are consciously listening or not.

Joshua Churchill’s installation work often focuses on elements of sites that are either inaccessible or generally overlooked by the public in everyday life. For his installation at YBCA, he has mined the subterranean underbelly of the building’s grounds, including mechanical and electrical rooms, for sound and vibrational recordings. Built primarily of materials found onsite, Churchill’s installation evokes both the literal and conceptual foundation beneath us, as these abstracted sounds resurface in unison with flares of light emanating from the seams of the floorboards. In addition to the audible and visible, subsonic vibrations underfoot contribute to the feeling that the structure itself may not only contain certain energies, but that it may also have a pulse of its own.

Joshua Churchill is a crossdisciplinary artist who works primarily in the media of sound and light. Churchill is also an active experimental sound performance and recording artist who often creates noise under the moniker T/R, and is involved in a number of ongoing solo and collaborative projects. He has exhibited and/or performed at the Meridian Gallery, San Francisco; Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland; Triple Base Gallery, San Francisco; The Recombinant Media Compound, San Francisco; 7hz, San Francisco; National Showa Kinen Park, Tokyo; Loop-Line, Tokyo; Contemporary Artists Center, North Adams, MA; New Media Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Post Gallery, Los Angeles; and Galeria Ze Dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal.

lauren woods

San Francisco the exquisite and its doppelganger are indistinguishable for me at times. More often than not, the ghosts are just as real as the living here and my obsession with them doesn’t allow me much rest in this fascinating city. Somewhere between the beauty of the natural landscape of the Bay Area and the power of invention, desire not fully realized produces a purgatory that is masked by fantasy and illusions of early retirement. I live and work from this place of in between, navigating the real-life matrix that is San Francisco. It is a schizophrenic state of being that induces bouts of masochism as I attempt to self-actualize in an environment that is constantly shifting and glitching before my eyes.

I calm myself by responding—shouting back, laughing out loud, resisting and submitting. Part historian, part archivist, part sociologist, part anthropologist, I research and observe, experiment and formulate in anticipation that fully understanding the unique relationships that people have with San Francisco will shed light on the conundrum that I feel is my existence here.

Mary Ellen Pleasant, the famous Abolitionist, understood the mirage, the power of performance, and the double that is this city. She harnessed its full strength and channelled it to the causes she felt just. I walk with her often—a guide to the infinite invisible cities of San Francisco to discover…

—l. w.

lauren woods creates hybrid media projects and video and sound installations. Challenging the tradition of the documentary/ethnography as objective, woods creates ethno-fictive documents of her navigation through the world—exploring invisible dynamics between and within cities and cultures. Currently, she is exploring how traditional monument-making and public site-specific work can be translated into new contemporary models of memorializing—substituting the traditional marble and granite for digital audio/visual media. Woods holds a BA in radio, television, and film with a minor in sociology from University of North Texas and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Woods’ work has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as internationally in Puerto Rico, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and France.

Leslie Shows

Maria Antelman

The hyperreal scenarios in Maria Antelman’s videos and photographs reflect Baudrillard’s claim that the “mystery of American reality exceeds our fictions and our interpretations.”[1] Chronicling a rich diversity of U.S. social phenomena from war re-enactments to extra-terrestrial channeling, her works constitute objective meditations on the existential anxieties of today’s world.

Antelman’s videos are comprised of visual elements that merge the past with the present and are complemented by soundtracks that encapsulate popular (mis)conceptions about the future. In Everland (2007), her 35mm camera captures the jarring juxtapositions of lush gardens, Roman statuary, and ancient Egyptian motifs, with contemporary architectural detailing—from neon strip lighting reflected in glass windows to paved pathways. While the jumble of associations never resolves itself, it might ultimately become clear to some that what we are seeing is the Egyptian Museum at Rosicrucian Park in San Jose, California. Reinforcing the artificiality of the environment, the title “Everland,” which is sometimes used as a term for Paradise, is also the name of a South Korean theme park situated in Yongin, a suburb of Seoul. For her soundtracks, Antelman hires voice actors to recite texts sourced from the Internet, and pairs these with eerie musical scores she composes from fragments of random sounds, noises, and melodies. “May we live long and die out,” repeats the sinister mantra that rhythmically punctuates Everland. It is culled from the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement’s website.

—Leigh Markopoulos

1. Jean Baudrillard, America (1986). New York: Verso, 1988. Translated by Chris Turner, p.98.

Maria Antelman was born in Athens, Greece. After studying art history in Madrid and publishing OZON, a cultural magazine in Athens for several years, she moved to the U.S. Her videos revolve around the fears and desires that emerge from our necessity to believe in something and the converse impossibility to believe in anything. Her work has been presented in shows at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece; the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland; Loop Fair in Barcelona; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; Video Art Biennial in Tel Aviv; Southern Exposure in San Francisco; La Casa Encendida in Madrid; and festivals including transmediale, Viper, Moscow International Film Festival, and One Minute Festival in Sao Paolo. Maria Antelman's work is represented by The Apartment, Athens, Greece

Misako Inaoka

My interests arise from the boundary between what we label as the natural and the artificial. I observe the physical and social environment in detail, to find hidden beauty and peculiarity in cell phone antennae shaped like pine trees, in hybrid species of birds, or in moss that grows between the cracks of a sidewalk. I emphasize these subtle details and exaggerate their illogicality to cultivate my own version of invented creatures. To arouse notions of existence and coexistence, I construct environments that are rooted in the reality of vanishing species and mutating nature. My minuscule sculptures and site-specific installations force viewers to focus on small details and take a harder look at their surroundings.

—M. I.

Misako Inaoka’s sculptural works have been shown at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco; the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; the Walter and McBean Galleries at San Francisco Art Institute; Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin, CA; and Southern Exposure, San Francisco. She has received residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the de Young Art Center of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Inaoka holds a BFA in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Mills College.

Paul Schiek

Paul Schiek roots his practice in an attraction to opposing forces: good and bad, light and dark, pleasure and pain. In his own words, Schiek explains: “I make work to try to help me understand the things about the world that religion fails to do.” It is this reliance on the self and on the physical world that informs works with titles such as similar to a baptism and good by angels. For BAN5, Schiek has made one of his trademark publications for viewers to take with them, the title inspired by a recent quote from Neil Young: “I know that the time when music could change the world is past.”

Paul Schiek is a photographer and founder of the four-year-old publishing company, These Birds Walk, in Oakland. Schiek holds a BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, where he studied closely with Jim Goldberg and Larry Sultan. He is represented by the Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco.

Praba Pilar

Reverend Praba Pilar of The Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno travels the world offering fantastical prophesies, outrageous sermons, incantations, neo-rituals, and a divinely inspired techno-communion with emerging technology. Inverting paranoid cries for precautionary principles, the Church’s liturgy consecrates these technologies—Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Neuroscience—forward into the neoteric millennium.

The Nano Bio Info Cogno convergence of the latter day will parse us to a rapturous paradigm shift. The sick shall be healed through the rub of a mouse, the blind shall be given sight through the miracles of virtual reality goggles, the hungry shall be fed through eBay auctions, and the Space-Time Continuum shall be forever altered in a post-bio uploaded consciousness universe, freeing us from the meat-ware of the human body.

The great Nano Bio Info Cogno singularity of the year 2012 is on our doorstep. Preparations are underway to surrender our cognitive memory banks to silicon chips so as to live forever in the realm of cyber life. Visit our ministries in Biopolis, Bangalore, Seoul, Tokyo, Doha, Ghana and right here in Silicon Valley to speed the shock waves of the future.

—P. P.

Praba Pilar is a performance artist, technologist, and cultural theorist who explores the intersections of emerging technologies, economics, and the environment through performances, installations, street theater, writing, and websites. A Bay Area/Colombian multidisciplinary artist, her collaborative and solo works have been featured at the Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg, Sweden; The Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Studio XX and the Darling Foundry in Montreal; and the Arte Nuevo Interactiva ’05 Biennial in Mexico. Pilar is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in performance studies at UC Davis.

Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe & Ginger Wolfe-Suarez with Moira Roth

Bombs Provide the Only Light plays with ideas of art as writing and writing as art, which the journal InterReview, founded by Ginger Wolfe-Suarez, has explored for the past six years. The project is based on a poem by Bay Area art historian Moira Roth with the same title, and investigates ideas of violence and protection. Bombs Provide the Only Light manifests as both a bomb shelter situated within the YBCA galleries and a publication. The three collaborators of this project have all demonstrated an interest in alternative forms of distribution and art presentation, and Bombs Provide the Only Light pluralistically encompasses their respective backgrounds in art practice, architecture, writing, and art history.

The built structure, designed by Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe, and the writings and images it encapsulates, intertwine metaphors of permanence and impermanence, violence and safety, interior and exterior. Using concrete and paper with light and darkness as mediums, it plays with the contradictions that make up our physical and social framework. The project was conceptualized to evoke or elicit an intimate and collective viewing experience that explores reading and writing as a kind of action.

Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe is a Cuban-American architect/artist whose practice has occupied built architecture as well as psychological and conceptualspaces. He holds an MFA in New Genres and Sculpture from UCLA. His work has been exhibited at the ACE Gallery in Los Angeles and New York; Blum & Poe Gallery, Los Angeles; and The Luckman Gallery of Fine Arts, in Irvine. A permanent outdoor installation titled Shut Up & Sit Down is currently in progress for The Frost Museum of Art, Miami, FL. Suarez-Wolfe’s work has been widely cited in both the fields of architecture and art, most recently in the book SPACECRAFT: Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts, published by Die Gestalten Verlag.            

Ginger Wolfe-Suarez is an artist, writer, and organizer. She founded the InterReview Journal in 2002, which has since produced ongoing publications,performances, and artworks with revolving collaboratorsand participants. Her written works have appeared in a number of art, feminist, and literary publications, including a one-year trilogy entitled “I Look” in N. Paradoxa, London. Wolfe-Suarez has an upcoming solo exhibition at Mills College Art Museum titled As Long As I Live, You Will Live.

Moira Roth, professor of art history at Mills College, is a contemporary art historian, who also writes poetry, plays and fiction. In 1998, she published a selection of her writings—Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage—and has been writing a series of essays, collectively entitled Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds. For the last five years, she has also been intermittently at work on a cycle of poems entitled From Far Away. The first of these poems (e.g. “Blood and Screams,” “Bombs Provide the Only Light,” and “The Boratha Cemetery”) were responses to the beginning of the Iraq War in Spring 2003, and then broadened to other histories and sites of strife (“Readings & Re-Callings: Iraq, Palestine, East Germany and Vietnam”).

Opening Night Party

Cover Feature in San Francisco Bay Guardian

The San Francisco Chronicle Review

Jonathon Keats Press Release