Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Samantha Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
shitty gods
Off Hours Collective at Gallery 16, San Francisco, CA
January 19 to February 22, 2024
In his first solo gallery exhibition, shitty gods, Joseph Blake deifies the absolutely mundane and the definitively strange. In a kind of personal magnum opus, Blake culminates all facets of his creative practice, including printmaking, sculpture, and low-fidelity, anonymous images in one of the windows of Gallery 16.
Blake pulls on a range of conceptual threads—glitch theory, mythology, classical and Renaissance aesthetics, cyborg theory, data languages—that remains conceptually accessible. Shitty gods, while conceptually rich, maintains the power to provoke people on the street into stopping and attempting to make sense of the piece.
I think the art market’s devotion to “originality” is a deification of the hand of the artist, of the artist as genius, and of primary material. Print media has eternally complicated the fetishization of the original as a concept, particularly with reproducibility. shitty gods might just be the epitome of contemporary sacrilege in its blind union between something as mundane as receipts with the highly gatekept world of “fine arts.”
Reflection: What things do we worship? To what extent do we deify them through imagination and projection? How shitty are they in actuality?
The Big Softie
Soft Times Gallery, San Francisco, CA
February 1 to February 29, 2024
At the time of writing this, Soft Times Gallery recently announced that they are sunsetting their gallery. Nevertheless, they guaranteed to go out with a bang. Their final exhibition, The Big Softie, promises the work of 70 emerging artists.
The show centers visual and conceptual representations of softness. In my own practice, softness as a means of resistance has been one of a few central foci. While my interest in softness as a concept is narrower than that of The Big Softie, I am interested to see how the works might push my own ideas of what softness can be, look, or feel like. Perhaps, my own boundaries of interpretation may become softer.
I have known this gallery through my many friends and peers who have had the chance to show there and I am saddened by their closure. I am excited for this final show and wish the best for the gallery directors.
Reflection: How do we cultivate softness? When is it hard to become soft?
Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Mother, San Francisco, CA
via Queer Exposure (ongoing, monthly photography slideshow program)
As a part of their ongoing Queer Exposure series, Mother—a queer, femme bar in San Francisco’s Mission District—hosted a viewing of a slideshow of Nan Goldin’s iconic series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979–1986). Queer Exposure is a monthly slideshow program that features the work of queer photographers.
Nan Goldin’s most well-known images felt right at home within the warm space of Mother. Goldin often employs slideshows in the presentation of her work. She and her friends would view her works in cramped New York apartments and bars, just like the method used at Queer Exposure.
Seeing the photographs in the context in which they were originally displayed felt like bridging a gap between the work and my own relationship to queer space. It made me reflect on how I had predominantly seen Goldin’s work in sterile white cubes and how strained it felt in those spaces. Now, there, amongst my own queer community, I could see her legacy within my own life.
Mother has been one of my little havens that I have found in the city. This bar is not only a rarity for its perpetually welcoming environment, but also for being one of 30 or fewer lesbian, queer femme bars in the United States.
Reflection: What does a safe space feel like? How can art or art spaces foster that feeling?