Watch timelapse video of Wallworks pieces being created:
Watch an interview with artist Leslie Shows
Watch an
interview with artist Amanda Ross-Ho
Watch
an
interview with artist Edgar Arceneaux
YBCA presents Wallworks the highly anticipated curatorial debut of Betti-Sue Hertz, YBCA’s newly appointed Director of Visual Arts. For the exhibition, YBCA commissions local, regional and international artists to use the literal aspects of YBCA’s architectural space, built in 1993 by acclaimed architect Fumihiko Maki, as a starting point to create new large-scale works directly on the walls of both its galleries and its public spaces.
Wallworks artists crisscross between the visual and tactile qualities of the material that they use, and their interface with an audience conceived in the manner of a skeptic. Drawing the vast encyclopedia of signs inwards, their visualizations are subjective readings of spatial contingencies, as if groping around in the dark for glimmers of what is to come next.
Curator: Betti-Sue Hertz, Director of Visual Art at YBCA.
RELATED EVENTS
Artists InSight—Wallworks Artists in Conversation
FREE w/ Gallery Admission
» Sat, Jul 18, 2–3 pm: Leslie Shows
» Sun, Jul 19, 2–3 pm: Odili Donald Odita
» Thu, Jul 23, 6:30–7:30 pm: Chris Finley
» Fri, Jul 24, 6:30–7:30 pm: Makoto Aida
» Sat, Jul
25, 12–1
pm:
Yehudit Sasportas (via Skype)
» Sat, Jul 25, 2–3 pm: Amanda Ross-Ho
» Sun, Jul 26, 2–3 pm: Tillman Kaiser
» Thu, Jul 30, 6:30–7:30 pm: Edgar Arcenaux
Sat, Aug 1, 12–3 pm: Artists InSight: Wallworks Artists Roundtable Brunch
Sat, Aug 8 & Sat, Sep 12, 3 pm: Architectural Tour with Designer Larry Peifer • FREE w/ Gallery Admission
Sat, Aug 29, 3 pm: Wallworks Curator’s Walkthrough with Director of Visual Arts Betti-Sue Hertz • FREE w/ Gallery Admission
Wallworks is made possible in part by Artis – Contemporary Israeli Art Fund. Wallworks Open Studio period is made possible by Back to Earth Organic and California Pizza Kitchen.
PUSH PLAY> YBCA Summer Festival is sponsored by:
By: James Im - Oct/8/2009 2:21 PM
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Yehudit Sasportas
b. 1969, Ashdod, Israel. (Lives and works in Berlin and Tel Aviv)
Referring to her works as mental landscapes Yehudit Sasportas creates complex and multi-layered large-format paintings of landscapes that are rendered in a precise black and white tonal range. These deeply disorienting and dreamlike panoramas reveal a kind of alienated German romanticism turning nature into an active organism at odds with itself. There are swamps and deep forests where strangely comported opposites lurk—delicate and heavy, idyllic and menacing, representational and mutational—each clamoring to be seen on the same uncertain plane. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, Domus Artium 2002, Spain, and Matrix 200, The Berkeley Art Museum. Recent group exhibitions include Real Time: Art in Israel, 1998-2008, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Sommer Show, Lehmann Maupin, New York. She also represented the Israeli Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Bienniale in 2007.
Odili Donald Odita
b. 1966, Enugu, Nigeria. (Lives and works in Philadelphia)
At the confluence of personal memory and cultural history, Odili Donald Odita’s vibrant and disorienting colored geometries take into account a host of references including his parents' native Nigeria and his memories of the colors of houses in Columbus, Ohio, where he was raised. His palette, however, is not only a bi-product of experience, as he employs various theories of color interaction to organize dynamic spatial pathways that suggest a sense of place or even a linear narrative. Equally influenced by post-colonial thought, his room-sized painted installations are structured to realign the kinesthetic experience of the viewer to a world of dynamic spatial tensions constructed through color shapes and reflect, if obliquely, the precarious balance of being a citizen and artist straddling two vastly different worlds. Odita has had recent solo exhibitions at the Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, as well as Jack Shainman Gallery and the Studio Museum in Harlem, both in New York. He was included in the 52nd Venice Bienniale in 2007.
Chris Finley
b. 1971, Carmel. (Lives and works in Rohnert Park, California)
Chris Finley’s handsome and sleekly designed constructivist-inspired imagery is often derived from digital manipulations of his surroundings and is reminiscent of Roberto Matta’s early surrealist paintings and the organic forms of Pevsner’s early plastic sculptures. For this project Finley will focus on YBCA's Fumihiko Maki-designed building to create a series of works in his signature style in which curving splintered spaces intersect with its architectural host. Finley has had recent solo exhibitions at ACME, Los Angeles and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco. Select group exhibitions include, California Modern, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, and Eureka, The Eureka Fellowship Awards 2002-2004, Berkeley Art Museum. Finley was also a 1999 recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Award.
Edgar Arceneaux
b. 1972, Los Angeles. (Lives and works in Los Angeles)
Edgar Arceneaux subjects his meticulous draftsmanship to a variety of translations of preexisting images so that the works take on a mysterious relationship with the source. He often erases, redraws, or cuts up imagery such as scenes of car crashes and portraits of famous personages that then become elements ripe for reassembly, resulting in the reordering of our relationship to memory—the blur replacing specificity and emotion trumping rationality. Arceneaux has had solo exhibitions at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Galerie Kamm, Berlin. Group exhibitions include Social Strategies: Redefining Social Realism at the University Art Museum, Santa Barbara; Urban Aesthetics, African American Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and One Planet Under a Groove, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York.
Makoto Aida
b. 1965, Niigata, Japan. (Lives and works in Chiba, Japan)
Spanning the disciplines of painting, video, installation, and Japanese manga, Makoto Aida’s often outrageous imagination has made him one of the leading outliers to the consumer driven norms of artistic production in his native Japan. While much of Aida’s work is characterized by a dark cynicism, he also employs a lighter side drawing on low-brow humor in works that tackle culturally specific themes including parody, fear and absurdity. Each is handled with an assured understanding of traditions in painting and printmaking. Aida has had solo exhibitions at IBID Projects in London, Lisa Dent Gallery in San Francisco, and Andrew Roth, Inc. in New York. He has been included in such group shows as Berlin-Tokyo, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; The American Effect—Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan, International Center of Photography, New York.
Amanda Ross-Ho
b. 1975, Chicago. (Lives and works in Los Angeles)
Granting presence to sites of absence, Amanda Ross-Ho’s fascination with generative processes in recent years is evident in her large-scale installations wherein silhouettes, traces, residues and other negative spaces abound. She works between the function of pattern in textile arts and the place of production, often referencing the place where something is made while it hangs displaced in a gallery setting. Images of lacing flow through the work, either by perforating a wall or cutting canvas to imitate the shape of a macramé wall hanging. Her reclamation of kitsch domesticity is pierced with mass media images and hints at the viability of girl culture as it confronts urban grit. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles and the Saatchi Gallery, London. Group exhibitions include, Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Make Room, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta. Ross-Ho was also included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Tillman Kaiser
b. 1972, Graz, Austria. (Lives and works in Vienna)
With his playful romp through European modernism, Tillman Kaiser revisits tropes from various movements including Dada, Futurism, and Geometric Abstraction that are then formally linked to wide ranging references to art deco theater buildings, sci-fi urban spaces, and experimental geometries. His works are near replicas to those pasts but then bend to more contemporary references as though remnants of a post-nuclear future. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Wilkinson, London and Honor Fraser, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include, Unreal: Altered Perspectives in Painting, the Saatchi Gallery, London, and Jan Koch, Tillman Kaiser, Danielle Tegeder, Klaus-Martin Treder, Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin.
Leslie Shows
b. 1977, Juneau, Alaska. (Lives and works in San Francisco)
Constructed through paint and mixed media collage, Leslie Shows’ work forefronts the geological underpinnings of land formations while turning to the imaginary to visualize the energetic waves, both scientific and metaphysical, that hover around large masses of land and its contiguous relationship with the sky and bodies of water. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York and ODC Gallery, San Francisco. Group exhibitions include, Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA, Oakland Museum of California, and A Mind Meld is a Terrible Thing to Waste, Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco. She also participated in the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach and was a 2006 recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Award.
Watch videos of Odili Donald Odita's works at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati
Read the San Francisco Chronicle on Chris Finley
Read the New York Times on Edgar Arceneaux
Read Art in America on Makoto Aida
Amanda Ross-Ho at the Saatchi Gallery
Read Frieze Magazine on Tillman Kaiser
Visit Leslie Shows on the Web
Read the SF Chronicle feature on Leslie Shows and Wallworks
Read the San Francisco Chronicle on Wallworks
Read the Art Forum Magazine on Yehudit Sasportas