Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Sam Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Ebti: Ma-kan مكان
SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA
March 12 to May 23, 2024
Among the many art-related events that take place at Fort Mason, SF Camerawork continues to impress and excite me, especially with their recent announcement of Ma-kan مكان, a solo exhibition of local multidisciplinary artist, self-taught photographer, and translator, Ebti.
This exhibition continues SF Camerawork’s expansion of the confines of photography through Ebti’s fluid slippages between mediums, including experimental photo-based installations, prints, and projections. A narrative is accumulated in Ma-kan مكان as narratives often are in life itself—through the collection of “images, stories, and objects.” Alongside the exhibition, beginning March 1, the artist will also host a series of open studios, wherein her work and process may continue to unfold, with the public as active witnesses.
The exhibition’s title holds tension within it—translating to mean “place,” as well as “it was” and “is not,” Ma-kan مكان begins to unpack the perpetual uncertainties of what “home” is to us. By promising material engagement with objects collected from the artist’s travels, her home here, and SF Camerawork’s physical site, Ebti’s exhibition reminds us of our inherently complicated relationships with place—always transitory to some extent, but irreparably influential to our lives.
Reflection: How is “home” a mutable thing? How do we make something/somewhere home among its changes?
P L A C E: Reckonings by Asian American Artists
ICA San Jose, San Jose, CA
March 23 to August 11, 2024
Following an incredible exhibition of Heesoo Kwon’s Leymusoom Garden, the ICA San Jose gears up for another promising exhibition of contemporary (and largely Bay Area-based) Asian American and Pacific Islander artists—all of whom have been artists-in-residence of the Lucas Artists Program at Montalvo Arts Center. P L A C E: Reckonings by Asian American Artists ponders how Asian and Pacific Islander artists have navigated infrastructural and institutional violence.
The title refers to the bestselling novel Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong. Often, the book is described as dismantling the “model minority myth,” but I personally read the book as more of an intra-community call to awareness of our own internal experiences of being Asian American, which is a reckoning in its own way.
To non-Asian American readers I wonder what that reckoning might be. An initial awareness to Asian American issues? A reckoning with racial bias? I wonder similar questions of this upcoming exhibition, and how the exhibition might address the idea of reckoning from both Asian American and non-Asian American visitors.
Reflection: How are you aware of and/or complicit in violence within the institutions you occupy? How do we move beyond reckoning and into repair?
Isaac Vazquez Avila: Como Siempre
pt. 2, Oakland, CA
February 24 to April 6, 2024
pt. 2, one of my favorite galleries in Oakland, consistently exhibits some of the most thought-provoking and resonant artists in the Bay Area. Como Siempre by Isaac Vazquez Avila is truly no exception. The title is a reference to a common response from the artist’s father when met with the casual greeting “¿como estas?”; “como siempre” represents the passive yet content acknowledgement of the consistency of things changing, as they always do. So it goes, like always.
Conversation, a back and forth exchange, is at the core of the exhibition’s curatorial ethos, and of the artist’s interplay between existent material nature and artistic intervention. The sounds, textures, colors, and images Vazquez Avila ushers into the gallery through re-arrangement and partial abstraction evoke the rich and distinct visual culture and language of San Francisco. Wood grain remains visible under the vibrant yet soft colors of his paintings, allowing the richness of the material to shine.
Central to Como Siempre is a sculpture made of a repurposed produce stand—reminiscent of local mercados—carefully holding objects that appear as though they’ve been pulled from the contents of Vazquez Avila’s paintings. Through this piece, I was allowed to make more intimate acquaintance with the figures and aesthetics of his two dimensional works. In the gallery space, the idea that conversation is at the core of exhibition-making and effective art is made cogent.
Reflection: In what ways are you in conversation with the place that surrounds you? What might that dialogue look like?