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.
guide my hands, so i can see you at Recology Artist in Residence Program
May 17 to May 21, 2024
San Francisco, California
I was lucky enough to catch the exhibitions of one of the Bay’s beloved artist residencies at the Recology Artist in Residence program. The program itself welcomes artists to develop new work onsite at the city’s waste management facility. This cohort featured the work of Nicolaus Chaffin, Brian Keith Thomas, and collaborative duo Kelley Finley and Deena Qabazard for a 3-day exhibition run. This program is highly anticipated each year, having nurtured the creative practices of many renown Bay Area artists, such as Cathy Lu, Michael Arcega, Sahar Khoury, and Stephanie Syjuco to name a few.
By allowing artists access to the dump, they may implement a wealth of unconventional and/or ready-made materials into their work, as well as draw attention to environmental issues of reuse, waste, and material consumption.
I was struck by the poetic tension between intimacy and anonymity, withholding and release in Finley and Qabazard’s exhibition, guide my hands, so i can see you. Much of their primary source materials is repurposed vernacular photographs, reminiscent of a family album, and found furniture. A visual motif across the exhibited videos, sculptures, and photography is obstruction. Whether it be through carefully laced blue ribbon, the cropping of a video’s frame, or the layering of photographs on top of one another, faces and other identifying features always remained just out of view. One would only recognize the photograph or the subjects in it if it were their own family heirloom, or if they could identify the occasional, tender, handwritten cursive notes on the back of the photograph.
The concept of seeing and non-seeing continued in their collaborative performance accompanying the exhibition as the two performed, wearing full-face masks, on either side of a structure resembling the skeleton of a house, wrapped in blue satin ribbon. Chairs on either side of the divided structure rocked slowly melodically by the artists’ alternating pulling and releasing movements, each artists’ choreography ultimately relying on the other’s. From every angle, the artists remained obscured to some degree by the structure in front of them, furthering the visual tension between anonymity and interpersonal intimacy. The tenderness and care within Finley and Qabazard’s collaborative practice flows seamlessly into guide my hands, so i can see you, reminding us of the intimacy built into working with one another through the objects.
Reflection: How do we maintain ethical practices when working with other people’s archives, objects, or stories? What do they look like?
DD’s Hardware & More at Off Hours (at Gallery 16)
May 16 to August 17, 2024
San Francisco, CA
I remember loathing trips to Home Depot with my dad growing up. The endless and identical aisles of the most mundane items imaginable were mind-numbing—faucets, outlet covers, one hundred different types of screws, things I would otherwise never even think twice about.
To my own surprise, I have grown a strange interest in tools and hardware through my time working in a bike shop in high school and installing exhibitions in grad school. There is an allure to the way that things work, how each piece is built to perfectly fit one another. No piece of hardware goes unmatched by a tool, each pair becoming its own micro-collaboration.
This type of collaboration is one that is emphasized in the recent Off Hours exhibition at Gallery 16, DD’s Hardware & More, an exhibition of new collaborative work by Reniel del Rosario and Annie Duncan. On the same evening, Gallery 16 opened two other exhibitions—Jason Middlebrook, Night Divides the Day and Isn’t Life a Blast: Celebrating Real Time Residency.
Both artists share a background in ceramics and produced a larger-than-life display straight out of the hardware store, outfitted with giant hammers, nails, scissors, measuring tapes and the like, displayed against a peg board in the gallery’s window. Upon the opening, the artists, dressed in matching “DD’s Hardware” coverall uniforms, held a ribbon-cutting ceremony and were handing out ceramic cigarettes, bridging into the realm of performance. Each of the artist’s unique practices and aesthetics came to a perfect blend, shifting between distinct recognizability and fluid synthesis. Here, Duncan continues her longstanding critical engagement with traditionally “feminine” objects in the form of those pink, ready-to-go tool kits with flimsy measuring tapes and single flathead screwdrivers marketed for women. With relatively looser brushstrokes and rougher edges, del Rosario also pulls from popular and recognizable imagery of the hyper-masculine American storefront, embodied in items like the ceramic “Reserved Parking for San Francisco Giants Fans Only” sign, in order to call attention to such object’s humor and absurdity. By playing with scale, visibility, and recognizability, the artists move beyond their shared medium, and find shared points of reflection and unsettling.
Even their exhibition flier, printed and placed next to a gas station lollipop tree stand, matches the dedication to the show’s commitment to the bit with borderline tacky, oversaturated color and text reminiscent of any small-town local hardware store. The return to the window space as a place for advertisement and commercial display, DD’s Hardware & More also recalls the packed store fronts that have gone missing in the city over the last decade or so. del Rosario and Duncan’s impulse to recreate this feeling of community and liveliness is thus a welcome presence that reminds us of the way things were, and, perhaps, will be.
Reflection: How does humor and absurdity function as a tool for unsettling social issues? What are its limitations?