Reception: Thursday, February 4, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Infix: The Grammar of Insertion revolves around the linguistic concept of the infix, and looks at the works of six Bay Area artists as infixes inserted within the language of the global art market. The show explores how these works and artists are changing the way we talk and think about art.

Organized by guest curator, Rico J. Reyes the show features the works of artists Renée Billingslea, E.G. Crichton, Lisa R. Gould, Willie Little, Lewis Watts and the artist collaboration, BARRIONICS (Lily Anne Perez, Johanna Poethig, and Rico Reyes). Including photography, installation, sculpture, prints, video, and performance, Infix assembles some of the Bay Area’s most dynamic artists working in these media and engaging in themes such as identity and gender, perception and humor, place and spectres, packaging and the grotesque, residue and culture.

Reyes challenges the beholders to spend time to think about how the arts in the Bay Area are articulated. Most often, Bay Area art is narrowly defined by its historical contributions to Abstract Expressionism, figurative painting, ceramics, and photography, or hyped by its surfacing underground scene; but mostly Bay Area art is confined to its perceived eccentric nature. From Thomas Albright’s, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980, to Johnstone and Holzman’s, Epicenter: San Francisco Bay Area Art Now, to Sidra Stich’s, art-SITES San Francisco, the grand narratives that describe the San Francisco Bay Area art hinge on the intersection of eccentricity and its sporadic contributions to past art movements, creating a set language, a fixed notion, that affects the continual development of Bay Area art and its articulation.

By using the concept of infix, an affix inserted within a word, Reyes creates a parallel between the linguistic function of an infix in changing the tense, subject/object relationship of a word, with the function of the art object or practice being inserted in the panorama of the global art scene in asserting its contemporaneity, shifting the subject/object relationship of the work of art, and pondering the function and processes of artists. Reyes writes, “The boundaries have been set, there is nothing to do but insert.” Bay Area art has a way of inserting itself within the language of contemporary art, expanding the current vocabulary. If the Bay Area art scene acts like an infix, inserting itself within the word, then New York and Europe acts like a prefix, seeing itself before the word, and unlike Los Angeles, Chicago or Berlin, a suffix, an addition after the word.

The works presented in this exhibition are infixes within the language of Bay Area art. Renée Billingslea’s work continues to address the artist’s relationship to issues of race. Working from archival images of lynching, Billingslea turns her attention to the lynch mob and questions the mentality of the witnesses of these witnesses. Lewis Watts also has worked with archival photographs. This experience alludes to the way he photographs the landscape: as an archive of cultural imprints. Whether it is the gentrification of Harlem, or the washing away of New Orleans, Watts registers these disappearances and recovers them in the facades of buildings or in the faces of its inhabitants. The collaboration, BARRIONICS, redefines the archive by sourcing data from everyday experience. As sound archeologists, BARRIONICS undergoes a journey to excavate from different landscapes the sounds of the past. Wood-carved walking sticks are tools of sojourning that have been imprinted in Willie Little’s imagination. His walking stick series uses this form but they are adorned with cockleburs, beads, glass, and glitter transforming a tool for storytelling into a storyteller. Indeed, stories may be extracted from various objects like walking sticks to household chemicals. E.G. Crichton places samples of household chemicals onto a glass plate and digitally scans them. The results are views of fantastical worlds, a solution to mundane domesticity. Domesticity is repackaged in Lisa R. Gould’s photographs as she documents the detritus of daily domestic consumption. Emerging from her observations of consumption and consumerism, Gould captures the instances before consumption, the instances before they disappear; either discarded as refuse or consumed as commodity.

About the Curator:
Rico J. Reyes, artist/curator/academic, received his BA in Studio Art at UC Berkeley, and his MFA in New Genres from UCLA. Working in video, installation, and performance, Rico creates work that focuses on the intersection of race, sexuality, and post-colonialism. As curator, Reyes curated Post Gay/Ante Asian, a visual arts exhibit by, for, and about Gay Asian Pacific Islanders, launched online in May 2000. More recently, he was curator for Overmapped: Filipino American Visual Arts, presented in April 2007 at SOMArts Gallery; and From Hedonopolis, To Melancolony, presented September 2007 at University of San Francisco Thacher Gallery. Reyes is currently a PhD candidate at the University of London, Goldsmiths College. He lives and works in London, UK; Tempe, AZ; and San Francisco, CA.


ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Renée Billingslea is a visual artist who combines her talents in photography with textile and mixed media with her interest in humanity to create environments and art that address historical, racial and social issues. Her artwork provides a tactical experience with parts of parts of American history that have been intentionally ignored. Her installation " The Fabric of Race: Lynching in America" preserves the names of lynching victims, and examines the crowds and perpetrators who were involved in lynchings. Bilingslea creates a new form of literature through mixed media with and serves as visual storyteller. Her installations have been seen in many academic galleries and libraries, and have been used for pedagogical purposes. Her artwork has also been exhibited in London, UK and Florence, Italy.

Art critic, Marisa Nakasone of the San Francisco Examiner recently has this to say about her solo exhibit at the Michael Rosenthal Gallery.

“Billingslea’s works are simultaneously bold and subtle--she brings poignant issues to the fore through her dialogic and engaging pieces. Her work could not be more timely as we sit on the cusp of a new chapter in American history--we are weaving together new histories as we speak. Billingslea’s work reminds us to look back and consider who we are as people and as a collective culture and to remember our history even as we eagerly look forward to the future.”

Renee Billingslea teaches photography and mixed media at Santa Clara University. She received an MFA in Photography in 2003 from San Jose State University after earning a BFA in Photography from Southern Oregon University, and serving two years in the Peace Corps, in the country of Kiribati.

E.G. Crichton uses a range of art strategies to explore social issues, history, and site-specific subject matter. She often works within community settings and collaborates across disciplines with performers, writers, scientists and composers, to name a few. Her work has been exhibited in art institutions and as public installations in Europe, Japan, Australia and across the U.S. She is an Associate Professor of Art at UCSC and currently the first Artist-in-Residence for the GLBT Historical Society.

Matter Out of Place is a series of digital images that take on the appearance of microscopic, cosmic and aerial mapping. The product of experiments with ordinary household products, these images are created first as chemical reactions and later as digital apparitions.

Lisa R. Gould is a photographer and installation artist. Originally from Washington D.C., she has been working in San Francisco for the last fifteen years.

Gould's work investigates society's relationship to what it eats. The resulting imagery emerges from her observations of contemporary culture and its avid consumption and consumerism. Her images capture the insidious and banal consumption that begins in the home, called eating. The preparation that leads to an act of eating leaves a trail of wrappers, packaging, and trimmings that are often discarded and forgotten. It is this residue on which Gould focuses her work, with her photographs becoming another form of residue that is consumed.

This body of work has been shown nationwide. The work has been on view at San Francisco Camerawork and at Southern Exposure in San Francisco. Because of this work, Gould was invited to participate with Dining Haul #4: Unpacked, an exhibition located in two meat lockers temporarily re-functioned into art galleries in the Meat Packing district of New York City.

Gould received her BFA from Syracuse University and her MFA from San Jose State University. She is currently an adjunct professor in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This ongoing series of photographic work addresses an important, and often missed, observation -- the instant before something disappears. It’s a meditation on the fleeting nature of memory and the gap between memory and desire. The work focuses on an instant in process, when the object of desire has been created, if not consumed, and its evidence soon to be repudiated.

Re-Packaged focuses on an endless stream of consumer packaging before it is to be discarded. The thumbprint of what each package held is then repackaged through the photographic form. In working with the surplus from what was, as it is now left behind, I create a time capsule. The resulting photographs give us a glimpse into a tactile moment before something disappears and is out of our recollection forever.

This series focuses on the visceral qualities of food, which can lead to abstract thought. The resulting imagery creates a temporary portal for the sublime, through something that is common to all of us, eating. Consumption has evolved into fashion, reflecting our style, taste, and refinement. Our needs and dreams to eat, consume, and possess whatever and whenever we want it, is what prevails. And what remains is a moment in our memory.

Multimedia installation artist and storyteller Willie Little received his Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been featured on National Public Radio and numerous television programs. His work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and in many other cities including Philadelphia, Detroit, Dallas, Kansas City, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Santa Fe to name a few. He has also exhibited overseas in numerous countries including Germany, Belgium, and South Africa.

Little was born and raised in rural North Carolina. Understandably, many of his works are rooted in the Southern traditions of his upbringing. Little has vivid memories of the characters and scenes at his father’s illegal liquor house that functioned “during the day” as grocery store. In an incredibly lucid manner, he has translated this living texture in both figurative and abstract ways. His work enlivens all of our senses and emotions. Little "sees beauty in history and decay". His work also seems to point to another chapter in the story, which centers on hope, restoration, discovery, and triumph.

This installation explores my rural NC childhood and urban adult relationship to a paradoxical tale, the parable of the black curse. Evincing the poignancy of intra-racial “unspeakables”, the parable reveals how the Black Man supposedly received “the curse” of his nappy hair.

I contemplate these barriers as I transform the barriers of the fence into a forest of fourteen six-foot tall, African-inspired, wood -carved walking sticks, wrapped, bejeweled, and adorned in cockleburs reminiscent of the celebratory defiance of African hair. Ironically, the walking sticks, in opposition to fences’ and barriers’ tendencies to erode the spirit, serve as icons of strength, resilience, and support for the renewal our collective humanity.

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist and an Associate Professor of Art at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is co-author of “Harlem of the West, The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” which consists of found photographs and oral histories of an African American Community that sprang up as a result of the migration west during World War II and that was urban renewed out of existence in the late 1960s.

His photography has been exhibited and is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Art, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art New Orleans, The Neuberger Museum of Art Purchase NY, Smithsonian Institution Washington D.C., The Oakland Museum of California, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the California Historical Society among other places.

Watts is interested in the narrative that comes from observations of the cultural landscape and the inhabitants of that landscape. He is drawn to evidence of time, experience, belief, and display as found on façades and in body language and expression. The work for this exhibit comes from New Orleans and Harlem, two communities that have a strong connection to the past and a vivid cultural and racial history.

Gallery hours are 11:30 to 5:30 Tue. thru Sat.

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