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.
Oddkin
Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco, California
May 4 to May 25, 2024
Oddkin, an upcoming group exhibition at Hashimoto Contemporary—a gallery in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, as well as in Los Angeles and New York City-–features the work of 27 Bay Area-based artists exploring the nuances of multivalent kinship. Opening on May 4th, the show begins with Donna Harraway defining “oddkin” as a way “to see a part of ourselves in an unfamiliar other.” From there, the exhibition considers these ideas of relationality from a Bay Area perspective (Oddkin Press Release).
Oddkin curatorially echoes the idea of kinship by forging shared space for inter-artist dialogue. In the same vein, the exhibition also explores the kinship in local community and geographical proximity with the Bay Area. The Bay Area arts community is not only a tight-knit network, it is a deeply supportive community that extends beyond its physically small pool. This kind of celebration of the Bay Area’s kinship with itself and the world around us pulls inspiration directly from the spirit of the community. Across the material, stylistic choices, and a subjective diversity, a loose, textured shape of the Bay Area’s artists emerges from within Oddkin.
Reflection: How do we foster nonhuman kinship in our lives? How may we deepen our sense of kinship with animals, plants, the land, etc.?
Jen Liu: Ghost___World at / (Slash), screening of The Land at the Bottom of the Sea at California College of the Arts, and Ghost___World: a performance for 4 dancers
The Lab, San Francisco, California
April 13 to August 24, 2024
Where do bodies and machines intersect? How does art fail?
I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Jen Liu’s 2023 short film The Land at the Bottom of the Sea, originally commissioned by the Taipei Biennial, on April 15 on the California College of the Arts (CCA) campus. The film creatively translates Liu’s long-term research and political investment in the disappearances and incarceration of female labor activists in China, with a focus on the unseen labor within the technology factory and e-waste industries. Liquidation, colloquially known as the corporate process by which an entity is dissolved or brought to an end, acts as a metaphor for machinic failure symbolic cornerstone throughout.
One neighborhood over from CCA, Liu’s correlatory exhibition Ghost___World opened at / (Slash) Art. The exhibition compresses the digital realm and the real world through its incorporation of more traditional painterly and sculptural materials alongside AR technology. AR appendages and green viscera-like blobs of glass connected to thick, black electrical cords lay slouched on the gallery floor, evoking ghostly presences. At The Lab, Liu also held Ghost___World: a performance for 4 dancers—an extension of the / (Slash) exhibition—activated by the distinct movements of Chinese Lion dancing and Butoh. Each of these elements performed, exhibited, and screened in San Francisco emerge thematically from the artist’s larger long-term project Pink Slime Caesar Shift.
What is so special about Liu’s recent presence in San Francisco is not only its interdisciplinary reach or its cross-institutional sprawl, but how it pushes the boundaries of experimental and vast research forms. Throughout the project, the body goes missing across each of these forms—evoking ideas of disappearance and dis-remembering consistent with Liu’s ideas of unseen labor and the fragmentation between real and digital encounters. Liu’s practice emerges from the artist’s research subject(s), with the work not only embodying symbolic gestures towards themes of the research, but also making efforts to remain connected to those subjects through the evolution of the work. Although art’s tangible effects in the realm of activism remain limited, Liu makes strides towards continued support for her subjects through the profits of her sales through / (Slash).
Reflection: What does research look like?