EXTRA
ORDINARY
09.14.19 - 10.19.19 COVER IMAGE: Mason Hershenow, Boulevard Park, 2019. Archival pigment print.
EXTRA
ORDINARY Katie Curry, Kathryn Porter and Haley Toyama (SFAI) Mason Hershenow (SJSU) Mallory Kimmel (CCA) Natasha Loewy (SFSU) Harlee Mollenkopf (Mills) Beril Or (SFSU) Efe Ozmen (CCA) Sherwin Rio (SFAI) Stuart Robertson (Stanford)
Juried by Samantha Reynolds, Art Programs Director, Root Division
Extra Ordinary is a group exhibition highlighting the complexity of objects in relationship to memory, ritual, identity and the physical body. The work presented throughout the exhibition ranges in medium including installation, video, sculpture, performance and photography. Extra Ordinary creates an opportunity for viewers to reconsider their frequent interactions with the daily objects around them. This includes acknowledging the participation in their purchase of beauty and other consumer products to recognizing their vast browser and data history over just a single year period among other activities. Objects are also innately and intimately tied to identity. Many of the exhibiting artists work hint at the misconstruction of identity through either branded objects or objects that have the ability to contain or hold the body. Additionally, some of the artists question, what are the implications when objects become lost or are temporary? Can they still act as a physical vessel for memory? From a range of varying perspectives, exhibiting artists each address the relationship to the body in their work. Specifically, the photographic work on view emphasizes vantage points on how the body exists in space, as well as the remnant of objects that can be left behind on the body. In totality, this exhibition creates new connections for how we move through the world, choosing certain objects to carry with us, and how visible we allow these objects to be in our life and daily rituals.
Katie Curry, Kathryn Porter and Haley Toyama (SFAI) “Pink It and Shrink It is an ongoing immersive installation that expands the consciousness of hidden capitalist infrastructures that perpetuate inequity. The phrase “pink tax” refers to gender-based price discrimination on items that, without necessarily being pink, specifically advertise to whom is believed should be female identifying.
Pink It and Shrink It utilizes the art world’s White Cube and masculine structure of the grid to parallel ideologies that demarcate gender into distinct categories. This gender binary fuels western conceptions of beauty that are then appropriated by advertising agencies to market products towards women at higher rates, but is not limited to the undisclosed higher rates women are subjected to in health care, home buying, or customer service. Through interaction with the work the viewer is given the tools to decode and analyze real world transactional retail experiences, creating a chain of small, future disruptions.
Pink It and Shrink It, 2019. Laser cut acrylic, gender-colored cellophane, twine, paint, wood beams.
Mason Hershenow (SJSU)
“Between the ages of eight- and eleven-years-old, I had a series of four reconstructive surgeries to correct a serious birth defect in my feet. The operations were at the time experimental, and while they have indeed allowed me relatively normal mobility in adulthood, the operations also left with both chronic pain and some uncertainty about how long my ankles will hold out. Because of this reality and the sometimes limited walking range that comes with it, I have developed a particular appreciation for seating and its availability—or often lack thereof—in my environment. This collection of images considers how furniture which has been disposed of often highlights the lack of permanent seating in manmade environments.”
Clockwise from Left: San JosĂŠ State University, Pinnacles National Park, and R Street Corridor, 2019. Archival pigment prints.
Mallory Kimmel (CCA) “My practice hinges on reinterpreting objects by investigating alternative relationships through the production of body vessels. Alterations in linguistic terminology, rhetoric and curatorial handling of objects are necessary to distinguish them from a history of use and abuse. Objects are made to be objectified; object serves as the root word to collapse the space and perpetuate its fate. For this reason, I rename objects as, defixus anima. Defixus is Latin for motionless or still, and anima is Latin for soul, life, wind, air, breeze and living being.�
Cocoon, 2018. Ceramic.
Natasha Loewy (SFSU) “My practice is an integration of sculpture, painting, collage, and drawing. I am motivated by a love for color, form, and texture, as well as a desire to express emotion. I use a playful color palette and experiment with how scale, form, and materiality relate to the body. Through investigating the relationship between these formal elements and a viewer’s spacial experience, my pieces evoke a sense of wonder and curiosity. Inspired by the clarity of minimalism, I use a language that is structurally spare and embodies simple gestures that are theatrical, quirky, and human.”
Bulletin Board, 2019. Photo, vinyl, nicorette gum, clay, paper, pins, and my friend Nathan Kosta.
Molt, 1-3, 2019. Silver gelatin print. Photogram made from peels of face mask, applied by the artist to her entire body.
Harlee Mollenkopf (Mills) “How do we trace the nuanced surface of the body? Exuvia is inspired by both the intimacy and ubiquity of skin care ritual in American culture and its significance to feminized notions of self-care. I turned to a cool cucumber peel-off facemask as my tool of index. I began by coating my entire body in the glue like mask. The slow process of peeling the second skin body from revealed every detail on the surface of my body: each pore, wrinkle, mole, hair, pockmark, and zit. Like snake skin or a cicada shell, the peels could be reduced to a fistful. Using the peels as negatives, I made photograms to pick up the details of the peels.�
Beril Or (SFSU) “My latest series “Sleep” reflects the political situation in my home country, together with its impact in our everyday lives. To cope with the political situation in Turkey, people have to numb their awareness and create their own isolated spaces. I am using sleep as a metaphor for this isolated situation that people are in, a standby mode. Sleep is a singular state in which we can both be like ourselves or someone completely different altogether. Where we’re in many places at the same time or nowhere at all. A bizarre place that plays with our memories, where you can only see fragments of your subconscious and seal all of it before you wake up. I am using everyday objects like pillows and comforters to refer to sleep. By adding different elements such as concrete, sometimes sound and light, I am creating a sense of tension, which these objects of comfort usually don’t have.”
Weight of Memories // From Sleep Series, 2019. Pillow, concrete, found steel.
Self/portrait, 2018. 2 channel video installation.
Efe Ozmen (CCA)
“We live in a world that is becoming highly visual and aesthetics are utilized to connect with individuals’ desires. While computers are integrating into our daily lives, the perception of world is transforming with shortening of distances and durations. I investigate the fluidity our perception gains within this visually simulated world we navigate through – either it is a designed digital world or a physical world filled with logos, billboards and various other graphic elements. In my practice I explore concepts through finding the poetry in the mundane. Within the technologically connected routine of the daily, every individual is a profile. We cast a shadow that is a collection of data, whatever we see is the discourse of our world, we reach to any object, location and information with just a simple click and we keep on clicking. As in self/portrait (2018), I revisit my browsing history and take screen shots chronologically, to explore the self - formed through the visual elements and decisions.”
Sherwin Rio (SFAI) “BUHAY BUKO is a video work that uses store-bought VitaCoco-brand coconut water, its packaging, and a system of low-budget props to crack open the racist term “coconut” that’s often exchanged between members of a brown community — meaning to be “brown on the outside, white on the inside.” Through BUHAY BUKO I draw into relationship the coconut and the body and, more extensively, liquid water/juice produced from the coconut and sweat produced from the body. This relationship is an imposed one, projected (or poured) onto the subject like the pejorative “coconut” term. There is an absurdity— like the VitaCoco’s packaging advertisements that romantically portray the product as being like sticking a straw into a freshly-cut coconut on a beach— to the inflicted association of the coconut and the body. The racist slur “coconut” deceptively misrepresents complexity of identity. BUHAY BUKO reflects this illusory element by revealing a farcical system employed to imitate natural sweat caused by the sun and cooled by the wind but with store-bought coconut water, flood lights, fans, and an assistant. By also drawing into relationship the Latin word “vita” and the Tagalog word “buhay”, which both translate in English to “life”, the work positions possibility to reclaim the “coconut” slur while also calling out the VitaCoco brand’s aim to portray a product that is pure, life-giving, and good for the aim of sales. Therefore BUHAY BUKO incorporates VitaCoco packaging as a makeshift silver-screen, merging the gazes of advertisement, brown-on-brown colorism, the artist, and gallery viewership.”
BUHAY BUKO, 2019. Video projection, VitaCoco packaging, Manila rope, and fan. 3 min, 23 sec.
Monolith 4, 2018. Domestic debris on wood.
Stuart Robertson (Stanford) “I am a Jamaican born and raised mixed media artist with an interest in marginalized lives as they are lived, not hypothesized or parodied. ​To expand my visual vocabulary and storytelling without depending on representational painting, my newest works reclaim and transform discarded containers, packaging, technological hardware and urban debris in a series of abstract explorations. I clean, organize, deconstruct and reassemble cardboard, paper, plastic, rubber, fabric, copper, and aluminum into amorphous masses.
Monolith 2, 2018. Domestic debris on wood.
In Monolith 4 (opposite page), for example, plastic bottles, bicycle tubes, honeycomb cardboard and shopping bags are assembled and finished with a candy paint job reminiscent of costume jewelry, custom cars or Dancehall Queen nails. By altering and recontextualizing these everyday objects, I challenge viewers to engage their relationships and proximity to these semi-recognizable assemblages. I ask them to consider these combines as artifacts of their own narratives, attitudes, and beliefs in a society built on systems of production and consumption.�
Shirin Towfiq (Stanford) “I am a conceptual artist of Iranian descent.My work addreses cultural, communicative, and interpersonal relationships drawing from my experiences of being a daughter to immigrants forcibly removed from their homeland. My work playfully reimagines ideas around comfort, memory, family, and constructed identity. Since starting my MFA, I have been exploring intergenerational communication in the context of a specifically Iranian-American experience. Recent projects such as No, I Never Went Back, an installation made from old photographs, thinks about embodied archive, (dis)comfort, boundaries, immigration, movement, and home, as well as how culture and ideas have been passed down through history. Drawing from the limited archival family research available, I investigate both the materiality and mutability of the objects and ideas brought by my family as they crafted a new life. These objects recall loss of home and place, struggles to hold onto identity through migration, as well as expressions of my own displaced hybridity. This image of my father surveying landscape in Iran speaks to looking into an ever changing past while imagining a future.�
No, I Never Went Back (ghost print), 2019. Photographic print byproduct.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Lauren Dare Marcel Houtzager Matt Lopez Brooke Valentine Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture Sartle.com Thor, Zeus & Jasper
Embark Arts offers exhibition opportunities to graduate students of the Fine Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. We provide a space for an engaged community of artists, curators and scholars, and we aim to expand the audience for up and coming contemporary art. A non-profit gallery, Embark’s programming represents the diversity of the talented artists studying at eight local artinstitutions: San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Mills College, San Francisco State University, UC Davis, San Jose State University, and Stanford. The juried exhibitions are held at our gallery in San Francisco at the historic Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.
Tania Houtzager || Executive Director Angelica Jardini || Curatorial Director