OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, February 19, 3-5pm
PERFORMANCE: SOUND SURFACING, Chris Brown and Laetitia Sonami: March 13, 4-5 pm
SUBMARINE: sound by Chris Brown, elements by Peter Richards, passengers by Joyce Hsu
Death in life, human/nature, entanglements, facts and frictions are the stream of consciousness that produced this work by Johanna Poethig. In the last weeks of her father’s life, he hovered in between states of sharply conscious and revelatory subconscious. How many hideouts do you have? Where are the escape hatches? One afternoon he drifted up out of sleep on a submarine.
Poethig’s paintings and drawings are portals or escape hatches into the cosmopolitan Terrestrial. Mychorrhizal networks, interspecies transmissions, mathematically precise patterns and mutualism inspire this work. Algorithmic plant patterns float in abstracted compositions. Landscapes mix plants out of season and geographic location. Acacia thorns provide protection. Fire, water and air compose a split screen. Plants, fungi and lichen perform the metabolic songs of networks through wired telephones, old cans, and vintage microphones. Large drawings of phytomorphs or people in plant forms suggest a fabulist future. These works surround a submarine along the center of the floor, a whale from the human subconscious forming a rubble pile of archeological tile forms, art objects, passenger dolls and periscopes that survey the vista through mammalian senses. A current of sound runs through the Submarine of war, of work, of stealth, of humor, submerged, sub-colonial, subliminal, sublime, surging, streaming, sinking and surfacing from our dark waters.
Johanna Poethig is a Bay Area visual, public and performance artist whose work includes murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations. She has split her practice between public art, gallery and performance that mix idealism, satire, feminism and cultural critique. Poethig’s wide-ranging gallery and performance art investigates issues involving colonization, identity, glamour and consumerism. In recent work, Poethig explores predictive practices in a culture of media overload, entanglement in terrestrial life systems and extraterrestrial non-repeating patterns. Poethig has created public art projects and exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Karvasla Artisterium in Tblisi, Magnet Gallery in Manila, YBCA, Luggage Store Gallery, Headlands Center for the Arts in the Bay Area, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Boston Center for the Arts. She received the California Arts Council Individual Artist Legacy Award for 2022.
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, February 19, 3-5pm