September 25 - December 13, 2025
Curated by Jackie Im
Carmen Argote
Sky Hopinka
Kija Lucas
Aspen Mays
Bonnie Ora Sherk
your furtive excess open to bright disturbances in a world well past the limit
–Cecily Nicholson, “Crowd Source”
To Bright Disturbances explores land use, and in particular, the ways we utilize the land that can be at many times extractive, devastating, and yet also restorative. How do we reckon with what we have already done, and how do we move forward?
The title of the exhibition comes from the poem “Crowd Source” by Canadian poet and activist Cecily Nicholson. In the poem, Nicholson draws parallels between the movement and sociability of crows with that of humans. How the collective can share fear and danger, but also reclamation and possibility. The works in the exhibition similarly explore how we exist with the land and with nature—we can be harbingers of harm or of renewal.
The work to reconcile how we worked the land is bound or, to borrow a term from interdisciplinary scholar Banu Subramaniam, embrangled in the histories of colonialism, trade, and labor. In Botany of Empire, Subramaniam states, a true biological reckoning acknowledges that we are a damaged planet, all refugees of a ravaged naturecultural colonial past, seeking to salvage our naturecultural present and futures.
The story of colonialism is the story of exploitation and extraction, not only of the land, but of the flora and fauna, and the people who lived there. The legacies of colonialism and the resulting land use have irrevocably changed the environment; the shape of the future is determined by the choices made long ago and the choices we continue to make.
Sky Hopinka, The clouds are too dull this time of year. It’s late June and I’m full of anger and hate. They think we’re trash, they think we’re as useless as our garbage buried in their fields turned up under plow, exposed in heavy rain. It makes me angry to think about that. To feel like that. Under plow and over plowed and plowed over by machines dredging and weeding through the hills and the fields and my family and my home., 2020. Inkjet print, etching. AP 1, Edition of 3, 2 APs. Courtesy of the Artist and The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI.
There is a tension in our interactions with the environment, and the exhibition asks us how we can be more considered and more intentional with the world around us. The artists in the show explore different modes of communing with the landscape, thinking through the histories, mythmaking, and impulses behind our relationships with the land.
1. Aspen Mays, Hastings Barn (Blue), 2025. 124 cyanotype prints on Mohawk Superfine paper. Courtesy of the Artist.
2. (left to right) Sky Hopinka, Kará! Listen! This is part of the source, these waters and these currents carrying canoes and the ancestors, new and old., 2020. Inkjet print, etching. Edition 3 of 3, 2 APs; Sky Hopinka, The thunders have returned. From the north they came south as I was sitting outside on a porch visiting and laughing with an old friend who always tells me “welcome home” every time I come around. They say that this time of year, the thunders have returned. k’oiregišana., 2020. Inkjet print, etching. Edition 1 of 3, 2 APs. All works are courtesy of the Artist and The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI.
3. Carmen Argote, Exile III, 2023. Palm fronds, jute zip ties, clear gesso. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA.
4. Carmen Argote, Exile III, 2023 (detail). Palm fronds, jute zip ties, clear gesso. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA.
5. Carmen Argote, Exile II, 2023 (detail). Palm fronds, jute, zip ties, clear gesso. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA.
6. Installation view
7. Bonnie Ora Sherk and Howard Levine, Portable Parks Projects, 1970. Felt-tip pen and stickers on gelatin silver prints. Courtesy of Life Frames, Inc.
8. Bonnie Ora Sherk and Howard Levine, Portable Parks Projects, 1970 (detail). Felt-tip pen and stickers on gelatin silver prints. Courtesy of Life Frames, Inc.
9. Bonnie Ora Sherk and Howard Levine, Portable Parks I (Studies and Documentation), 1970. Ink and stickers on gelatin silver prints; (lower right in the grid) Bonnie Ora Sherk and Howard Levine, Portable Parks II, 1970. Gelatin silver print performance documentation: Sherk with Caltrans Officials and cow at the Mission Street and Van Ness Avenue off-ramp, June 26, 1970; Bonnie Ora Sherk and Howard Levine, Portable Park Projects: One Through Twelve (Original Portable Parks I-III), 1970. Typewriter ink and stickers on paper. All works courtesy of Life Frames, Inc.
10. (left to right) Bonnie Ora Sherk, Preliminary Suggested Conceptual Site Plan to Revitalize the San Francisco Civic Center and Create an “International Culture-Ecology Think Park” and “A Living Library”, 1995. Reproduction of a colored pencil on print proposal (not realized); Bonnie Ora Sherk, Proposal for Precita Park Site Renovation, San Francisco, 1995. Reproduction of a colored pencil on print proposal (not realized). All works courtesy of the Bonnie Ora Sherk Papers. Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California.
11. Installation view
12. Installation view
13. (left to right) Carmen Argote, Perimeter don’t mix to gray: a performance, 2025 (detail). Ink and oil on yupo paper, shaving cream, action; Carmen Argote, Perimeter crawl, 2025. Time-lapse movie/ interval shooting 0.5 seconds. Editing by Kara Leigh Kirk. TRT: 2:12 minutes. Both works courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA.
14. Carmen Argote, Perimeter don’t mix to gray: a performance, 2025 (detail). Ink and oil on yupo paper, shaving cream, action. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA.
15. Carmen Argote, Perimeter don’t mix to gray: a performance, 2025 (detail). Ink and oil on yupo paper, shaving cream, action. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA.
16. Kija Lucas, Untitled (tule grass), 2025. Latex inks on Arlon Matte vinyl. Courtesy of the Artist.
17. Bonnie Ora Sherk and Howard Levine, Portable Park Projects: One Through Twelve (Original Portable Parks I-III), 1970 (detail). Typewriter ink and stickers on paper. Courtesy of Life Frames, Inc.
Carmen Argote is a multidisciplinary artist who often points to the body, class, and economic structures in relation to architecture and personal history. Argote’s practice draws upon their immediate environment and the networks of labor and consumption that mark these spaces. She manifests these connections through drawings, paintings, site-specific sculpture, installation, and performance that directly reference the visual language of abstraction. Selected solo exhibitions include: the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2022); Visual Arts Center, University of Texas, Austin (2020); and New Museum, New York (2019).
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, CA, Portland, OR, and Milwaukee, WI. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape–designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal and non-fictional forms of media. Hopinka’s films have played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5 in 2021.
San Francisco Bay Area artist Kija Lucas uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage, and inheritance. She is interested in how ideas are passed down and seemingly inconsequential moments create changes that last generations. Lucas has exhibited her work at The Mills College Art Museum, The Palo Alto Art Center, The Guardhouse with For-Site, SF Camerawork, and The International Center for Photography. She has been an artist in residence at Montalvo Arts Center and Recology San Francisco.
Aspen Mays was raised in Charleston, South Carolina. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and a BA in Anthropology and Spanish from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2002. Mays joined the faculty of the California College of the Arts in 2015 where she is Associate Professor and Chair of Undergraduate Photography, Printmedia, and Painting and Drawing. Mays has had solo exhibitions at Higher Pictures, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago: Light Work in Syracuse; and The Center for Ongoing Projects and Research (COR&P) in Columbus OH. Honors include a Rotary Fellowship in 2006, where she studied photography in Cape Town while volunteering in a clinic for bead working artisans living with HIV. Mays was a 2009-2020 Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Chile where she spent time with astrophysicists using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the sky. She received the Purchase Prize Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters in 2021 Her publication (in collaboration with Dan Boardman) Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why? was shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation/Paris Photo First Photobook Award in 2016. Her artist book, Tengallon Sunflower was published in 2024 by Dais Books.
Bonnie Ora Sherk (American, born 1945, New Bedford, MA – died 2021, San Francisco) was a visionary, internationally recognized American artist, landscape architect, and environmental educator. Sherk founded The Farm, situated under a freeway interchange in San Francisco, which she directed from 1974 to 1980. In 1981, Sherk founded Life Frames, Inc., supporting her nonprofit educational work A Living Library (ALL). Currently, active locations of ALL projects are on Roosevelt Island, NYC (2001-present), and in San Francisco at the Bernal Heights Living Library & Think Park Nature Walk (2002-present) and OMI/Excelsior Living Library & Think Park (1998-present).
Sherk’s multidisciplinary work explored the interdependent relationships between humans, animals, and nature. She lectured and exhibited across the globe, with installations featured in the Venice Biennale 2017 and the Liverpool Biennial 2021. Other major group shows include Territories That Matter: Art, Gender And Ecology, Centro de Arte y Naturaleza-Fundación Beulas (CDAN) (Huesca, Spain; 2019); Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN; 2015); Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art (Chicago; 2012); State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film archive (BAM/ PFA) (Berkeley, CA; 2011); Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) (Los Angeles, 2011); and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MOCA (Los Angeles, 2007), among many others.
