February 7 – September 8, 2024

Curated by Diana Nawi
Collection and Exhibiton Management by Patricia Cariño Valdez

Between Us is the inaugural presentation of the Olivia Foundation, established by Jana and Guillermo González. Drawn from their collection, which includes a substantial focus on abstraction by women artists, Between Us presents works that engage in intergenerational dialogues as well as a selection of individual practices in-depth. Across the exhibition, abstraction is intertwined with nuanced, personal figuration and moodily imagined landscapes, undoing the bounds between genres throughout the galleries and within single works.

Situated in the intimate architecture of this historic building —originally built as a residence in the early 1900s and reimagined by Alberto Kalach and Carlos Zedillo—Between Us highlights shared formal languages that emphasize the gestural and evocative possibilities of painting across generations and contexts. Artworks on view span the second half of the twentieth century through the present; works by Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner provide historical and conceptual grounding for the collection, while the Artist Spotlight features a 2024 painting commissioned from Sophia Loeb.

The exhibition begins on the ground floor with abstract gestural paintings by Cecily Brown, Jacqueline Humphries, Joan Mitchell, and Mary Weatherford, among others, that viscerally index the artists’ hand alongside a smaller selection of dense, meditative works by artists including Victoria Gitman and Shio Kusaka. Ascending the galleries, figurative paintings and prints that conjure psychic spaces and bodily memories emerge with major works by Rita Ackermann, Louise Bourgeois, and Tracey Emin.

The top two floors explore the formal relationship between artists whose works evade allusion to image and representation and those who use abstraction to depict the landscape as both an observed place and interior state. Artists including Jadé Fadojutimi, Shara Hughes, Mimi Lauter, and Chris Oli reflect the natural world as ephemeral and psychically charged. Throughout the exhibition, we witness abstraction as a mode of personal expression, a reflection of the sublime and the spiritual, and a vehicle for re-envisioning and recreating the world around us.

The Olivia Foundation is an exhibition space in Roma, Mexico City, showcasing artworks from the Olivia Collection, whose focus is abstract art from the post-war period to the modern day. The works are united by their aesthetics and exploration of color, materiality, and form.

Janaye Brown, Nicole Coson, Dickon Drury, Masako Miki, Emma Safir, and Mikey Yates

May 21-June 25, 2022

Curated by Patricia Cariño Valdez

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Midnight Murmurs, a group exhibition featuring Janaye Brown, Nicole Coson, Dickon Drury, Masako Miki, Emma Safir, and Mikey Yates.

The artists in Midnight Murmurs ruminate on the quiet and intimate moments, secrets, and untold stories that occur behind the scenes in the late hours of the evening. It encompasses the conversations, obsessions, and rumblings of memories and anxieties that keep us up at night and linger in our minds throughout the waking hours. The exhibition features depictions of dimly lit domestic spaces, intimate late-night conversations, and the surreal moments that occur when the mind slips from reality into a dream state, rendered through a variety of media, including video, printmaking, painting, photography, sculpture, and installation. Midnight Murmurs heighten moments of friction that exist during a time when our bodies ought to rest. Together, the works reveal how the night is full of mystery and potential that will shape our consciousness in the mornings to come.

For the past decade, Janaye Brown's video practice has captured the pregnant moments she observes in everyday life. Through an extended look at a narrative fragment, Brown makes prominent the subtleties in interactions, opening the viewer to examine the details within the mise-en-scène. In her intimate video, Bather, After Dinner (2016), Brown films a swimmer resting her body on a dock. The artist catches the soft light across the surface of the water and the relaxing sound of it lapping on the pier, marking the sunset and the earth's transition from daytime to night. As the seemingly serene moment carries on, tension arises: the viewer anxiously anticipates what is to come, as the subject is lost in their own thoughts. Sound and moving image build and sustain the viewer's awareness while emphasizing the passage of time. Rocking the viewer to a meditative state, the artist summons a tone of mystery, leaving us suspect to the night.

Punctuated in the gallery are Nicole Coson's large-scale monotype prints from her Exoskeleton series. Created through a laborious process of painting each slat and chord, Coson runs the window dressings through an etching press, applying 3000 lbs of pressure per square inch. What results is a unique transfer of mangled blinds onto the canvas, monochromatic marks full of tension, stress, and breakage. Coson has based her new works on the proportions of a single window in the back of the gallery. Blinds, which serve as screens in our homes to conceal us from the outside world and vice versa, have been transformed by the artist into bodily forms that reference external skeletons. By exploring the familiarity of these interior accessories in their proxy form, Coson creates a sense of dislocation, toying with the grasp of our surroundings and negotiating the terms of visibility of what we choose to disclose and reveal.

The night often invokes suspicions of paranormal activities. Investigating this sentiment and the possible presence of otherworldly creatures are Masako Miki's brightly colored, felt sculptures and watercolor paintings. Miki creates abstracted figures that draw inspiration from Japanese traditions of Shinto beliefs, specifically yōkai (shapeshifters), deities, or preternatural creatures that disguise themselves into many forms. She references the Japanese folklore of Hyakki Yagyō(Night Parade of One Hundred Demons), ghosts, and shapeshifters that parade during the night. Some are known as Tsukumo-Gami, shapeshifters of rejected aged tools, or everyday household objects that become animated only in the late hours of the day, advocating for their existence after being unwanted. For the artist, these ancient narratives of spirits serve as a metaphor to explore our imaginations, blurring boundaries and questioning the very myths that guide our daily lives. Miki shares, “Because of their unique characteristics, they do not conform to accepted identities; instead, they generate new ones."

Grounding us in our bodies and our connection with kin are the diaristic paintings of Mikey Yates. Sourcing from memory and family photographs, Yates’ paintings center on his experience as a Filipino-American and explore having both parents and siblings enlisted in the military. Having to relocate every few years to cities across the world makes gathering together a rarity. In his paintings, Yates illustrates tender portraits of connection and normalcy that occur in the calmness of the late hours of the evening. Confessional in nature, these paintings recount conversations that occur with cousins on the rooftops and the silence in playing a simple game of chess with family. Apart from the hyper-focused events in the paintings, Yates's interior spaces are accessorized with belongings collected from across the world, decorating a temporary home while pointing to many places at once. The artist's work, rooted in the personal, renders cultural hybridity, storytelling, and delicate markers of important and lasting memories that influence one's framework for joy, happiness, and hope for the future.

Dickon Drury's hyper-saturated, large-scale paintings render unpopulated interior landscapes packed with accessories of books, computers, kitchenware, opened food, and beverages, reminiscent of a person frantically preparing for an uncertain tomorrow. Unnatural light reflects and refracts from various surfaces, and stark shadows create a dynamic interior setting. In his stacked and flattened paintings, the artist reveals a bounty of visual markers that speak to the possible inhabitant. Light casts from open microwaves, brightly lit screens on laptops, and vintage lava lamps highlight an eccentric scene that mimics the occupied mind—one that is active, awake and refuses to remain still. Attempting to make sense of the scene, the viewer ponders what these remnants say about the house guest. Drury’s work speaks to the obsessive nature and anxieties of the day and a desire to control a world that feels chaotic. Through his oil paintings, he bends and skews the domestic space, reinforcing how the night's emptiness amplifies the restlessness of our minds and spaces.

A restful night benefits our ability to retain information; however, in that transitional phase, there are moments when our experiences persist and appear as abstracted dreams or amorphous memories. For the last several years, Emma Safir has explored connections between real and imagined memory, mediated through photography. Building a photo archive of spaces that she does not have physical access to, Safir captures when areas are blocked by curtains, windows, other buildings, or fences. Stretching, layering, and sewing these images in modular ways, Safir creates soft objects that pixelate a specific location, both named and unnamed. The works call to mind the fractured understanding of specific events. Enhancing this dissonance is her strategy of both layerings of the silk image and neoprene material and photographic digital collage work, which generate a moiré effect. In this optical illusion, lines and images are superimposed on another, resulting in a strange, wavy pattern. These mixed-media sculptures with varying volumes resemble upholstered furniture or television. The works hang and lean, floating just enough to emanate a glow back onto the wall. Safir's practice plays with our perception of the object and transience of memories through material manipulation, illustrating surreal perceptions that replicate the dazed delusion of a late evening.

Artist Bios

Janaye Brown (b. 1987 San Jose, CA; Lives & Works in Berlin, Germany) has exhibited at venues and film festivals, including Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; New York City's Studio Museum Harlem; Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY; the Dallas Video Fest; The Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada; Crosstown Arts, Memphis, TN; and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA. Residencies and awards include Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder, Trondheim, Norway (forthcoming); AIR Konstepidemin, Gothenburg, Sweden (forthcoming); KulttuuriKauppila Art Centre Residency, Ii, Finland (forthcoming), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; Fiskars AiR, Fiskars, Finland; the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, New York, NY, and Crosstown Arts, Memphis, TN. Brown received an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and her BA in Cinematic Arts and Technology from California State University Monterey Bay in 2010.

Nicole Coson (b. 1992, Manila, Philippines; Lives and works London, UK) is a London-based Filipino artist. She received a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins with first degree honors in 2014 and received her MFA from the Royal College of Art in 2020. She was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2020. Coson was also featured in Saatchi Gallery's London Grads Now exhibition last year. She has had solo exhibitions at Ben Hunter Gallery, London, UK; Silverlens Galleries, Manila, Philippines; Galerie Untilthen, Paris, France; and Annka Kultys Gallery, London, UK. She has participated in group exhibitions at South London Gallery, London, UK; Hales Gallery, London, UK; Silverlens Galleries, Manila, Philippines; Artist Room, London, UK; Fold Gallery, London, UK; Brigade Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Center for Book Arts, New York; and Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila.

Masako Miki (b. 1973 Osaka, Japan, Lives and works in Berkeley, CA) received her BFA from Notre Dame De Namur University in 1996 and her MFA from San Jose State University in 2001. She has had solo exhibitions at KMAC Museum in Louisville, KY (forthcoming); Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose, CA (forthcoming); ​​The Watermill Center, Water Mill, New York; Ryan Lee, New York City; the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; and CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco.In 2021, Miki completed a public art installation of nine bronze sculptures commissioned for Uber Technologies’ HQ in San Francisco. She completed an outdoor sculptural installation at the coastal cultural park in Shenzhen, China. Currently, Miki is developing functional sculptures for the Minna-Natoma Art Corridor Project with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Artist residencies include Kamiyama Artists in Residency, Tokushima, Japan; Facebook Artist in Residence, Menlo Park, CA; and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. Her work is held in several private and public collections including Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Facebook, The Byrd Hoffman Watermill Foundation, and ColecciónSolo in Madrid Spain.

Mikey Yates (b. 1992 Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Germany; Lives and works in Kansas City, MO) received a BFA from Missouri State University and an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2021. His works have been shown at Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA; Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK; RULE Gallery, Marfa, TX; The Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, Marrakech, Morocco; and CU Boulder Art Museum, Boulder, CO. He has been featured in BOOOOOOOM!,YNGSPC & Friend of the Artist, and was featured in the MFA annual issue of New American Paintings, curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody.

Dickon Drury (b.1986, Salisbury, UK, Lives and works in London) received a BFA in Fine Art Painting at Falmouth College of Art in Cornwall, UK and in 2016, he received an MFA in Painting at The Slade School of Fine Art in London, UK. Solo shows includeTo Be The Key, Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger in 2020, The Who‘s Who of Whos at Koppe Astner, Glasgow in 2016, IF THE SEA WAS WHISKEY at Frutta, Rome 2017, and Holed Up at Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, Norway in 2018. Exhibitions also include a solo presentation at Carlos Ishikawa for CONDO London and at Kendall Koppe Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland in 2021.

Emma Safir (b. 1990 New York City; Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) received a BFA in 2012 from the Rhode Island School of Design in Printmaking and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in Painting & Printmaking in 2021. She has recently had solo exhibitions in New York City at Baxter St at Camera Club of New York; SHIN HAUS at Shin Gallery; and participated in group exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York, NY; TW Fine Art, Palm Beach, FL; and Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. She is currently an Artist in Residence at the Textiles Art Center in Brooklyn, a participant in the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in Manhattan, and a Keyholder Resident at the Lower East Side Printshop in Manhattan.

October 30, 2021 - January 15, 20222

Featuring: Julia Goodman, Asma Kazmi, Laura Arminda Kingsley, Jenifer K Wofford

Curated by Patricia Cariño Valdez

Suspended Matter borrows its title from the environmental definition of an occurrence where tiny organisms, plants, and minerals naturally exist within a liquid or due to disruption such as heavy rainfall or a flood. The mixing of these particles creates a new composition, one that does not dissolve. The exhibition refracts our contemporary moment to examine the sentiments and materiality of these unsettled times. Through sculpture, video, photography, and paintings, the artists consider the intimate connections within ourselves, with others, and the domestic objects that shape our surroundings.

From the reconstitution of familiar fabrics into abstract shapes, as seen in Goodman’s sculptures, to a close examination of the domestic objects that we interact with in Kazmi’s work, the artists recognize the shifting interactions with our values, beliefs and the everyday objects that we keep. The otherworldly biological fictions by Kingsley and Wofford’s depictions of solitude and isolation remind us of the constant revaluation of our existence and our resilience in relation to the past and present. Collaborating closely with Berkeley Art Center, Valdez curated Suspended Matter as a dedication to her mother, a love letter to encapsulate the challenging past years. The artists in Suspended Matter, together with the curator, honor a time of respite during turbulent times, offering a moment for awareness, wonder, and hope.

Link to Berkeley Art Center website

October 24, 2019

Curated by Patricia Cariño Valdez
Chief Curator of Soundwave 9: Tanya Gayer

DIALECTS considers Szu-Han Ho’s personal history and delves into her interest in the tonality of language. It is one of the projects for Soundwave 9 and will take place at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.

The project germinates from stories of her family’s history in Taiwan: her great-grandfather’s murder, her family’s migration story to the U.S., and their history of owning a tamarind farm in Tainan. This performance emerges from a reflection on the tamarind fruit and its translation in Taiwanese <<giam seng di>> which means salty, sour, and sweet. Szu-Han finds inspiration in the ways in which language conveys not only meaning, but a method to transmit the quality of tones, sounds, and emotions. She asks how both a musical chord and a memory can sound salty, sour, and sweet. Language and sounds bridge time and distance: “I was separated from my mother at a pretty young age for a matter of months when she came to the US. She left a cassette recording of her voice and her singing for me. It’s probably what held me together in some ways. The feeling of being displaced or constantly looking for a home is one that is really familiar to me.” For Soundwave 9, Szu-Han performs DIALECTS with Bay Area collaborator Sandu Ndu, weaving together diasporic narratives with abstracted dance beats and harmonies to consider transformations and dynamism in migratory movements.

Soundwave is a San Francisco Bay Area organization operating at the intersection of art, technology, and music—co-presents this performance as a part of the ninth edition of their innovative Soundwave Festival, focused on the theme “of Time” at venues across the Bay Area. This year's festival features art parties, performance, dance, video, and music for our boldest, most interdisciplinary festival to date. Artists explore subjects like intergenerational history, the cultivation of safe spaces for healing and joy within black, brown, and queer communities, art grown out of migration and displacement, and our current political reality.

Camera and editing by Miguel Novelo

March 16 – July 21, 2019
Curated by Patricia Cariño Valdez

Super Sarap at Asia Society Texas is the second iteration of Super Sarap, which started in Santa Ana in 2018. Houston-born and Bay Area-based artist Charlene Tan joins the original crew of artists Mik Gaspay, Jeanne F. Jalandoni, and O.M. France Viana to revisit commonplace objects and food within Filipino cooking. Through sculpture, photography, and video, the artists elicit personal and collective memories and offer cultural connections that go beyond the Philippine diaspora.

The exhibition title, Super Sarap, fuses both English and Tagalog together, to hold multiple meanings. It can convey something that is extremely delicious, an expression of excitement and affirmation. It can also imply an exaggeration in terms of scale: something that is beyond, powerful, large, and exceeding the norm. In Super Sarap, the artists play with these definitions and mutate symbols, making them both strange and familiar, challenging cultural norms associated with food.

Installation view, Super Sarap, Asia Society Texas Center, 2019 © Nash Baker

November 3 - December 15, 2018

Gallery 6/67, now known as Erica Broussard Gallery Santa Ana, CA

Within the last several years, chefs and foodies from around the country have hailed Filipino cooking as the “next big food trend.” Although trendify-ing a cuisine allows it to enter into the larger cultural consciousness, it also raises the question: A trend for whom? It is a label that often appears only on “ethnic” cuisine or non-white food, and classifying it as such dismisses the historical nuances and communities that develop it. For many, a trend is not new or alien; it is familiar and the norm. In Super Sarap, three artists Mik Gaspay, Jeanne F. Jalandoni, and O.M. France Viana revisit the commonplace objects and food within Filipino cooking. Through sculpture, photography, and video, the artists elicit personal and collective memories and offer cultural connections that go beyond the Philippine diaspora.

Mik Gaspay’s practice examines mass-produced objects and explores them in relation to capitalism’s effects on migration and assimilation, class, and identity. In Super Sarap, his newest video work pixelates the clichéd island landscape, echoing oversimplified notions and assumptions of the exoticized foreign land. Recalling tourism symbols, Gaspay remembers the prominence of the decorative wooden spoon and fork sculptures that hang in Filipino kitchens. Using faux, wood-grain-patterned textiles, he renders a parody of it: a delicate, awkwardly large, pillar-sized replica. Jeanne Jalandoni also utilizes textile to evoke a memory of home by making “objects of comfort.” Using soft and plush material, she creates covetable toy rice cookers. In the exhibition, she premieres a series of quilts that stitch together the ingredients to create traditional Filipino dishes. With a keen focus on food is O.M. France Viana’s Color Palate series, minimalist photography looks like extraterrestrial landscapes. However, the work reveals themselves to be Filipino ice cream—purple ube, green avocado, pink guava. Viana’s vibrant neon “UBE” sign seduces with an intense violet color natural to the purple yam and is ubiquitous in Filipino and South East Asian desserts.

The exhibition title, Super Sarap, fuses both English and Tagalog to hold multiple meanings. It can convey something extremely delicious, an expression of excitement, and affirmation. It can also imply an exaggeration in terms of scale: beyond, powerful, large, and exceeding the norm. In thinking about the transformation of foreign to familiar, specifically, the indigenization of food, Manila-Born Food historian Doreen Gamboa Fernandez’s (1934-2002) cites that Filipinos sprinkle patis (fermented fish sauce) on foreign dishes or carry with them when they travel to “‘tame’ the alien.” Artists in Super Sarap play with these definitions and mutate symbols, making them both strange and familiar, challenging the expectations of cultural norms.

Accompanying Culinary Events:

Thursday, November 15th, 6 PM - Artist Talk & Exhibition Walk Through, 7 PM - 4 Course Dinner with Chef Ross Pangilinan

Sunday, December 9th, 5 PM - Artist Talk & Exhibition Walk Through, 6 PM - 4 Course Dinner with Chef Ryan Garlitos

Press

Ada Tseng, LA Times, “‘Super Sarap’ Merges Art And Food While Examining The Filipino American Experience,” November 21, 2018, https://lat.ms/3cj5yAt

On view from August 18-September 18, 2015

Artist reception will be on September 4, 6PM Artist talk September 12, 11AM

Valdez was selected as one of the four curators to participate in the 2x2 Solos Program series at Pro Arts in Oakland, CA. She worked with Samuel Levi Jones to commission new work for his upcoming solo show entitled, Talk to Me.

Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. -James Baldwin, “The Crusade of Indignation,” The Price of the Ticket.

 For 2 x 2 Solos, Samuel Levi Jones presents Talk to Me, a large site-specific installation of deconstructed law books. These texts, which are usually found neatly organized in law firms or law school libraries, archive federal and state laws that are applied and interpreted by the courts. Through an intense physical process, Jones pulls, rips, and tears apart the leather from its cardboard covers revealing the books’ underside of flesh-toned yellows, reds, and browns. Behind the privacy of his studio, these actions—akin to protest—shift. Jones begins the focused effort to delicately sew the softened material together, thereby building a new structure.

At the Pro Arts gallery, the enveloping installation of Talk to Me appears in the same sight line  as Oakland City Hall. The juxtaposition of the exhibition against the center for civic engagement elicits a tension between the law and one’s position in the larger society. Talk to Me interrogates the limits of our legal system by rendering these books exposed and unbound. At its essence, Talk to Me is an invitation for dialogue about the structure that governs our bodies and lives. This very dialogue—as Baldwin underscores—is the necessary work individuals must endeavor to establish respect, recognition, and understanding.

Public Program: Artist talk with Dr. Leigh Raiford, Chair of African American Studies at UC Berkeley

Press: Daily Serving, Curiously Direct,  and Art Practical

On view April 11-May 2, 2015
Artist Talk May 1
Burnt Oak Gallery

OFF
adverb: Away from place; to a state of discontinuance or suspension
preposition: used to indicate separation, distance, or removal from someone or something
adjective: not operating, functioning, or flowing not entirely sane
verb: to go away

The title of Channing Morgan’s exhibition Off the Surface is a peculiar one; it asks, what is off the surface? What does it mean to be off? 

In thinking about the series of paintings, site-specific installation, and prints at Burnt Oak Gallery, there is something curious about Channing’s works–at first, it appears jarring, yet soon after, when one considers the work beyond face value, an intriguing undertone arises. 

Channing’s pieces interrogate our immediate assumptions and challenge our understandings of societal norms, expectations, and stereotypes. Why are these our norms and why do we think this way? Channing’s works encourage us to feel awkward and uneasy. 

Off the Surface puts forth necessary and uncomfortable questions about privilege, power, perceptions of one another, and one’s self.

Channing Morgan is an artist based in San Francisco where she is currently an MFA candidate at the California College of the Arts. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, she received her BFA in Printmaking from the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. She utilizes text-based work, installation, and performance to negotiate her perspective on race, recognition, and the presumption of their stability. Her work has been shown across Georgia and more recently across the Bay Area in San Francisco and Oakland.

On view March 14- April 11, 2015
Artist Talk April 3
Burnt Oak Gallery

Navigating the commercial “Art World” is no fun—it’s a hot mess of ego, money, and plenty of awkward schmoozing. In Lil' Painty Goes to Market, Kate Rhoades satirizes this tired cliche by illustrating Lil’ Painty’s life as it passes through the strata of the commercialized art world.

In the end, we lose focus on our rectangular, oily friend, and we are left asking: Where else can/may/should Lil’ Painty go? 

Burnt Oak is proud to present Rhoades’s first solo exhibition.

Kate Rhoades is an Oakland-based multimedia artist. Influenced by a background in comic books and YouTube videos, Rhoades uses paint, video, and miscellaneous methods to probe the absurdity of the art world in all its social and institutional facets. She received a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design, and an MFA from Mills College. She has attended an unsanctioned residency at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, and her work has been exhibited in art venues, alleys, and hotel rooms across the United States and Canada.
 

PMx (Post Meridiem) is a collaborative curatorial project created by Patricia Cariño and Marie Martraire that explores the intersections of contemporary arts and social media through research, writings, exhibitions, and other programs.

April 17 - July 12, 2014
At the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA

Group exhibition featuring works by Martin Soto Climent, Rana Hamadeh, Li Ran, Cinthia Marcelle, William Powhida, Ian Wallace, and Real Time and Space.

Decades after the “post-studio turn” announced by Conceptual art and Minimalism, this exhibition seeks to reconsider the status of the artist’s studio. Many contemporary artists eschew the traditional studio, producing work on their computers, or directly at the site of exhibition. Some struggle, in an era of eviction and dislocations, to carve out the actual space and time—with its attendant forms of reflection and creativity—that the studio once promised. Others retain a bounded, physical space for making, but one that is transformed by the web, social media, and contemporary conditions of labor. No longer solely a notional interior space of individualistic thought and craft-based making, sovereign and separate from the world, today the studio has become externally focused: a networked media center, a factory, a storage zone, a semi-public showroom.

Many Places at Once presents new commissions and existing works by six international artists and one artist community. The exhibition provides new insights into the nature of contemporary artistic production and the spaces in which it takes place. Taken individually, each work represents a site: a hotel, a notebook, an archive, a network, an event, a community, or a stage. Some works symbolize the studio as a site of private reflection. Others manifest as temporary constellations of objects or people, and yet others operate in the exhibition itself as studios, or as theatrical stages. Together, the works embody the “many places”—both physical and conceptual—that “at once” constitute the reimagined artist’s studio.

Many Places at Once is an exhibition curated by the graduating class of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts with the support of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.

Exhibition catalogue available for download. Press: Art Business Review; SFAQ Pick; Art & Education; and Dutch Art Institute