May 29 – August 23, 2025
Salimatu Amabebe
Ricki Dwyer
Xandra Ibarra
Sasha Kelley
Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Autumn Wallace
Curated by Elena Gross and Leila Weefur
“May whomever needs to hear this—feel more, feel further.”
–Jenny Johnson, “Butch Blow Job”
Service Tension explores how abstraction mediates queer sexual dynamics and embodied experience. The exhibition interrogates the complex relationship between viewers and observed acts, positioning audience members as both witnesses and participants in scenes of desire. The title is a play on the concept of surface tension, the resistant relationship between liquid surfaces; a metaphor for how queer bodies navigate intimacy and power. By abstracting rather than directly depicting sexual acts, the exhibition explores the gap between observation and participation, between intellectual understanding and embodied experience. This strategic abstraction troubles fixed notions of masculinity and penetration while honoring the fundamental messiness of desire, sex, and the erotic.
Service Tension brings together six artists working across painting, photography, sculpture, and installation, playing with concepts and textures of fluidity, tightening, elasticity, pressure, and restraint. Together, these artists manifest what Jenny Johnson articulates in her groundbreaking essay “Butch Blow Job” (2023) as “the raw, messy reality of bodies in intimate contact” while maintaining crucial critical distance through an abstraction of feeling. Johnson’s exploration of shame, desire, and embodiment in the experience of queer penetration, as giver or receiver, provides a theoretical framework for understanding how these artists navigate similar terrain through visual and sensorial abstraction. As Johnson’s essay moves between explicit description and poetic metaphor to capture the complexities within queer sexuality, these artists likewise find ways to represent intimate and erotic acts while preserving their essential mystery.
Through abstraction, the works challenge conventional representations of masculinity and erotic encounter. Masculinity has often been heteronormatively coupled with the act of penetration, presuming the penetrator as the wielder of power over the penetrated. The works in Service Tension seek to confound these expectations by presenting penetration as a mutually constituted
Xandra Ibarra, Free To Those Who Deserve It, 2020 – ongoing. Silicone vinyl, pigment, jewelry, syringe needles, clarinet ligature, tent stake, and vise on medicine cabinet mirrors, folding cross bars, and steel tubes. Courtesy of the Artist.
exchange of agency and pleasure. Queering masculinity in this context means recognizing how power flows in multiple directions simultaneously, dissolving the rigid binary of active/passive to reveal more nuanced experiences of giving and receiving. Rather than intellectualizing sexuality through academic discourse, the exhibition aims to return to the raw, messy reality of bodies in intimate contact. This de-intellectualization paradoxically reveals deeper truths about power, consent, and human connection.
Through this collection of works, Service Tension suggests that the space between wanting to look and daring to touch and allowing oneself to feel is where the most profound explorations of queer sexuality and power can emerge. The viewing experience itself becomes a negotiation of power and consent. Audiences must navigate their role as observers, willing or unwilling participants in the exhibition. The works create layered modes of engagement that question traditional boundaries between viewer and artwork. As looking gives way to imagined touch, and touch transforms into embodied feeling, the erotic circuit completes itself—connecting artist, artwork, and audience in a continuous loop of desire and meaning-making. Like Johnson’s careful negotiation of visibility and vulnerability in her writing, these artists demonstrate how abstraction can paradoxically make these experiences more rather than less tangible, suggesting that service and tension are not fixed positions but constantly negotiated states of being.
Autumn Wallace (b. 1996, Philadelphia, PA) graduated from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2018. Wallace is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work examines myth, gender, sexuality and the black femme experience. Their work draws on a diverse range of material and research including early 90’s cartoons, Byzantine aesthetics, “low-quality adult materials”, anthropology and zoology, crafting unique stories and characters which reoccur and evolve throughout their practice. Through this eclectic methodology, Wallace creates alternative narratives which facilitate entryways for excluded voices.
Ricki Dwyer is an artist from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently working in Brooklyn. His practice considers the intersections of material, industry, and the somatic. His work acknowledges drapery as the negotiation that things never fall the same way twice. Dwyer has had solo exhibitions with Anglim/Trimble in San Francisco, Rupert in Lithuania, and Volume in Chicago. In 2022 he participated in the Biennale de Lyon in collaboration with Nicki Green. He has been artist in residence with Recology, Jupiter Woods Gallery in London, The Textile Arts Center in New York, ARTHAUS Havana, and most recently in the foundry of Kohler Co, in Wisconsin. In 2024 Dwyer was a Bronx Museum AIM Fellow. He received his undergraduate degree in Fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from UC Berkeley. Dwyer currently teaches with Parsons School of Design.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden [she/her] is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Most recently, her work has explored the themes of re-memory and narrative biomythography. Her works have been shown at Kunsthalle Basel, Guggenheim Museum in NY, the Institute of Contemporary Art-Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) ; the New Museum (New York); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) – Berlin; MOCA LA; MCA Chicago, and MoMA PS1. Most recently, she is the recipient of the 2021-2023 Princeton Arts Fellowship, a Bucksbaum Award for her work in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2019), among others. In 2017-18 she curated A Recollection. + Predicated. as a part of the multi-artist retrospective Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental at both the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia and The Kitchen in New York. Her writing has been featured on the Triple Canopy platform in Artforum, Cultured Magazine, ART 21 Magazine, and many other publications. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Tiona lives and works in North Philadelphia, PA, and is the Founder + Director of Philadelphia-based, Conceptual Fade, a micro-gallery and library space centering Black thought + artistic production.
Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based visual and performance artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/ Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects.
Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), The Broad Museum (LA), ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico), The Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC) and The Institute Contemporary Art (LA) to name a few. She has been awarded the UC President’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship and the Lucas Visual Arts and Eureka Fellowships. She is a Creative Capital awardee and received the Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, Eisner Film and Video Prize, Murphy and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award. Her work has been featured in Frieze Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, Paper Magazine, Hyperallergic, ArtNews and in various academic journals nationally and internationally.
Salimatu Amabebe (he/they), is a trans, Nigerian-American chef and multimedia artist, working in food, film, photography, sculpture and installation. His work focuses on the intersection of food and art while centering community activism, African diasporic culinary traditions and Black queer/ trans liberation.
Sasha Kelley is an Oakland based multidisciplinary artist using visual arts, publishing and social engagement to explore the topics of intimacy, collective archives and collaboration with black/brown/queer communities.
Sasha Kelley has exhibited at Sonoma County Museum, Somarts Cultural Center and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Their work is featured in the permanent collection at BAMPFA and has been published in Fader, Umber Magazine, The Black Aesthetic III and Black Futures.
1. (left to right) Salimatu Amabebe, River, 2025. Neoprene rubber, stainless steel, aluminum; Salimatu Amabebe, Rush, 2025. Neoprene rubber, stainless steel, aluminum. All works courtesy of the Artist.
2. Sasha Kelley, Portraits of Chocolate Chip, 2017. Photo printed on Photo Tex. Courtesy of the Artist.
3. (left to right) Tiona Nekkia McClodden, NEVER LET ME GO | XXII. only by special order, 2024. Black jute rope, leather, leather dye and Saphir shoe polish; Tiona Nekkia McClodden, NEVER LET ME GO | V. irrevocable, 2023. Black jute rope, leather, leather dye and Saphir shoe polish. All works courtesy of the Artist.
4. (left to right) Salimatu Amabebe, River, 2025. Neoprene rubber, stainless steel, aluminum; Salimatu Amabebe, Rush, 2025. Neoprene rubber, stainless steel, aluminum. All works courtesy of the Artist.
5. (Clockwise from the top right) Salimatu Amabebe, Power play (oru koro), 2025; Salimatu Amabebe, Power play (fangalamo), 2025; Salimatu Amabebe, Power play (toún), 2025; Salimatu Amabebe, Power play (tólu koro), 2025. All works polyurethane rubber. All works courtesy of the Artist.
6. Salimatu Amabebe, Power play (tólu koro), 2025. Polyurethane rubber. Courtesy of the Artist.
7. Salimatu Amabebe, Power play (toún), 2025. Polyurethane rubber. Courtesy of the Artist.
8. Salimatu Amabebe, Power play (fangalamo), 2025. Polyurethane rubber. Courtesy of the Artist.
9. Ricki Dwyer, Psychically Milked, 2023. Woven cottons and linen, chrome plated cast brass kisses. Courtesy of the Artist.
10. Ricki Dwyer, Psychically Milked, 2023. Woven cottons and linen, chrome plated cast brass kisses. Courtesy of the Artist.
11. Ricki Dwyer, Psychically Milked, 2023. Woven cottons and linen, chrome plated cast brass kisses. Courtesy of the Artist.
12. Installation view
13. Xandra Ibarra, Libidinal Mark-Making (Hickey Series), 2025 –ongoing. Leather, rubber, paper, steel, aluminum. Courtesy of the Artist.
14. Xandra Ibarra, Free To Those Who Deserve It, 2020 – ongoing. Silicone vinyl, pigment, jewelry, syringe needles, clarinet ligature, tent stake, and vise on medicine cabinet mirrors, folding cross bars, and steel tubes. Courtesy of the Artist.
15. Xandra Ibarra, Free To Those Who Deserve It, 2020 – ongoing. Silicone vinyl, pigment, jewelry, syringe needles, clarinet ligature, tent stake, and vise on medicine cabinet mirrors, folding cross bars, and steel tubes. Courtesy of the Artist.
16. Xandra Ibarra, Free To Those Who Deserve It, 2020 – ongoing. Silicone vinyl, pigment, jewelry, syringe needles, clarinet ligature, tent stake, and vise on medicine cabinet mirrors, folding cross bars, and steel tubes. Courtesy of the Artist.
17. Xandra Ibarra, Free To Those Who Deserve It, 2020 – ongoing. Silicone vinyl, pigment, jewelry, syringe needles, clarinet ligature, tent stake, and vise on medicine cabinet mirrors, folding cross bars, and steel tubes. Courtesy of the Artist.
18. Xandra Ibarra, Free To Those Who Deserve It, 2020 – ongoing. Silicone vinyl, pigment, jewelry, syringe needles, clarinet ligature, tent stake, and vise on medicine cabinet mirrors, folding cross bars, and steel tubes. Courtesy of the Artist.
All photography by Aaron Wojack.
Leila Weefur is a Liberian-American artist, writer, and curator whose work engages with film, architecture, and the archive to examine systems of belonging. Their research, across disciplines, explores environmental geographies, transnationalism, religion and queer worldmaking.
Weefur has worked internationally with institutions including Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, ICASF, CCA’s Wattis Institute, SLASH Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and The Kitchen. Weefur was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2024 and completed a residency with the Bemis Center for the Arts. Weefur’s writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more. Weefur is a member of curatorial film collective, The Black Aesthetic.
Elena Gross is an independent writer, curator, and culture critic living in Oakland, CA. She specializes in representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Her research has been centered around conceptual and material abstractions of the body in the work of Black modern and contemporary artists and most recently in queer artistic and literary histories of the late 20th century. Elena is the co-editor, along with Julie R. Enszer, of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture (Rutgers University Press), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Anthologies.
Service Tension
Salimatu Amabebe
Ricki Dwyer
Xandra Ibarra
Sasha Kelley
Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Autumn Wallace
Curated by Elena Gross and Leila Weefur
May 29 – August 23, 2025
San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries
401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 126
San Francisco, CA 94102
sfartscommission.org
Published by SFAC Galleries
Photography: Aaron Wojack
Design: ALTR Studio
San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries staff:
Ralph Remington, Director of Cultural Affairs
Ebon Glenn, Deputy Director of Programs
Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez, Director of Galleries & Public Programs
Jackie Im, Associate Curator
Maysoun Wazwaz, Manager of Education & Public Programs
Theo Lau, Program Associate
Matt McKinley, Lead Preparator
The artists and curator would like to thank Colin Dickson, Matt McKinley, Max Hashimoto Nihei, and Thi Phromratanapongse for their work on the exhibition.
