Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Hayashi Wilder, Emily Small, Jade Ichimura, and Renée Reizman pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
A Compromised Future, 2025
Lynn Hershamn Leeson: About Time
Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA
September 6 – October 11, 2025
September issues in a flurry of new exhibitions, signaling an end to summer. It’s back-to-school season, and the recent losses of arts schools like the San Francisco Arts Institute are felt a bit more deeply here. I arrived at Altman Siegel’s newest exhibition deep in conversation with two friends following an event commemorating KADIST’s closure of their long-time, mission-based, brick-and-mortar, wondering what the future of avant-garde spaces for our city will look like. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s About Time provides a fresh perspective.
Working with technology and new media, Hershman Leeson is known for her feminist investigations into surveillance, race, and the construction of identity. In Keeping Time, she applies her method of absurdity and direct address, fabricating an antibody developed in labs overseas that is said to reverse aging. Digital prints, works on paper, and a small fridge containing some of the very subject antibodies make up the show. It is serious—we treat aging like something to be cured in this country. But it’s also so funny. Unsure where the fiction ends and reality begins, it is bizarre, and it made the three of us not just laugh but leave feeling like the experimentation and critical inquiry we were anxious over prior was still here.
Reflection: What is it with this urge to “solve” aging in the United States? What does that say about how our cities and spaces age themselves?
Joshua Moreno in residence at The Davenport Jail
Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Davenport Jailhouse
Every second Saturday from August 9, 2025 – 2026
I have yet to visit one of the open Saturdays at the Davenport Jail to see Joshua Moreno’s year-long work, but I plan to very soon. The Davenport Jail is a decommissioned two-room jailhouse built in 1914 in Davenport, California, and one of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art’s historic locations. Moreno’s practice is often a devotion to the essence of a place and its histories—illustrating how vast time is, the many ways we hope it bends to us, and the aching impossibility of achieving just that.
Using graphite, he is tracing the outline of the sun as it pours into the jail’s windows, doors, and crevices, moving throughout the day, month, and year. I have been fortunate to see other architectural works of his that seem to trace containment itself. Like the repetition of a prayer, these pieces are all-encompassing, spiritual, and laborious. If you are drawn to the work of, say, Felix Gonzales Torres’ artwork—artworks whose ephemerality illustrates their very complex politics—Moreno’s work is surely for you.
Reflection: How do you animate a shadow?
Ishan Clemenco: Calipers [2008/2025]
Climate Control, San Francisco, CA
September 11–November 1, 2025
Calipers is a methodical presentation of sculptures and sound art by artist and composer Ishan Clemenco. In the front gallery space, a line of metal gasoline canisters is affixed to an I-beam through metal rods. Clusters of calipers, a precision measuring tool, whirl up and down them. In the back gallery, a baby grand piano stands on its side, undone and re-articulated as a new kind of spatial instrument. Along the walls of the gallery, you’ll find a large blue painting with precise chalk lines, the back tail lights of a ’66 International Harvester 1100 series connected to a Venetian doorbell, 25 International Air Force roundel vinyl stickers, and a small video on an iPhone 6 playing inside a wooden box. Ishan began installation on the 80th anniversary of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The work seeks to locate resonant frequencies of war. It doesn’t say so explicitly, but it reminds me that contaminated radioactive waste following World War II was left in the Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco, to which its residents have yet to see fully cleaned. The work is done with a level of dedication and intimacy that I find so refreshing. In the Great After of installing such an ambitious project, the residue is not just that of processing global traumas, but also that of love.
Reflection: Do you believe that places hold memory?
Like a City
Slash Art, San Francisco, CA
September 13–December 13, 2025
LA is here, in San Francisco! It is fun when our two poles collide, allowing us to see our similarities and differences connected by the long and deeply important em dash of the Central Valley. Like a City is a group exhibition featuring Los Angeles artists who work across mediums in reflection of constructing the “urban.” I was particularly excited by the works of Anais Franco: a ceramic tiled suitcase ornamented with strawberries and a crow sitting above the entry doorway, tracing a sort of migrant history of Japanese strawberry farmers and Japanese internment in the state of California during World War II.
A city is something that is always becoming. It’s a scaffolding of dependencies we have on one another, through labor systems, complex infrastructure, happenstance made into sediment, and a mythical disposition towards the bowling importance of sharing space and resources among diverse and expansive groups. In a fun way, this show is equally cobbled together. Thinking about these interdependencies and being together in difference seems very timely.
Reflection: What’s something in your city that you really love?