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.
Anthony Discenza: Daemonomania
Et. al. etc., San Francisco, California
March 2 to April 13, 2024
When I walked through the book shop at Et. Al—which is one of the best places in the city for niche art books, science fiction, and 20th century classics—and into the first gallery, my eyes were drawn to a frozen beverage machine, like one you might find in a 7-Eleven, churning a dark, viscous mystery liquid that appears almost like a congealed coffee or motor oil. I continued through heavy, black vinyl strip curtains that separated one room from another.
Like a siren call, I followed the melodic yet ambiguously discordant sounds of a fragmented chamber choir to a room filled with a spillage of photographs, which remind me of the images of thrashed hoarder houses you might find on Tumblr back in the day. In the next and final room, 40lb bags of coal stacked high on a palette accompany a lone broom and a video displaying a grid of computer processors. This is Anthony Discenza’s Daemonomania.
Daemonomania, as an exhibition and an experience, embodies a kind of modern mythology. Icons of consumption, like the familiar slushie machine, are made strange. These same icons are captured in a state of disarray, chaos, apocalypse even, within the compositions of the scattered photographs on the floor. The exhibition feels like the bitter end of a failed spiritual quest for meaning, where everything you have encountered or worshiped along the way lays scattered at your feet.
Reflection: How can the uncanny disrupt the mundane? What purpose does it serve to make things strange?
Li Ming Wei: Rituals of Care
de Young Museum, San Francisco, California
February 17 to July 7, 2024
What is one letter you wanted to write, but never did? Who is it to? In Li Ming Wei’s Rituals of Care, currently on view at the de Young Museum, the artist invites visitors to sit in the space, and “write a letter they have always meant to send but never did.” I am haunted by this idea, of what I might say or not say, of what I have not said.
Writing is a unique form of intimacy and vulnerability for me where I am able to find the soft and slow words that fall to the wayside in my everyday life. This haunting feeling is perhaps precisely what the artist sought to invoke as a reminder of what little time we have, the ways we tend to ourselves and how what is said and unsaid lingers with us.
Beyond the interest in cultivating joy after trauma and pain, Lee Ming Wei masterfully taps into the personal and interpersonal. For me, some of the most effective art is that which affects me on a personal level, that carves about a space within me. Although I remain skeptical of how much art can really change anything, I do find that Li Ming Wei’s cultivations of interpersonal connection, introspection, and the connections between the two begin to incite a change from the inside-out.
Reflection: What is the function of care? How can focus on the individual serve the collective?
Stephanie Syjuco: Dodge + Burn, A Survey Exhibition Of Work From 2004 – Present
Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, California
March 9 to May 4, 2024
Last month Catharine Clark Gallery opened Dodge + Burn, A Survey Exhibition Of Work From 2004 – Present featuring Bay Area favorite, Stephanie Syjuco. Presented almost as the grand stage, Syjuco’s 2019 piece Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage) greeted me as they entered the gallery. The piece exposes the constructions of race through the likenesses of costume, props, and the stage structure––a fitting premise through which to enter the exhibition.
Through the language of photography, Syjuco questions the objectivity of cultural archives and historical narratives. Syjuco’s consistent engagements with the aesthetics and problematics of photographic construction and post-production resonate with similar ideas of how archives and histories are also subject to similar processes of construction and post-production. In pieces like RAIDERS (2011), where Syjuco reproduced pan-Asian objects in the Asian Art Museum’s digital archive on pieces of laser-cut wood, the objects’ material flatness and decontextualization remind us of an institutional archive’s similar effects.
Reflection: What are your investments in the propagation of colonial institutions? What are the minor ways in which you can subvert such institutions and institutional practices?