Sunday afternoon I made my way to the Headlands Center for the opening of their 2009/2010 Graduate Fellows exhibition, and it was exciting to see what the 8 artists (all MFA graduates hand-picked from our local art programs) had done with their year there. My brief notes on their work follow below, which I'm sure will not be the last time I write about these peeps:
- Tyson Washburn (SFSU) - Otherworldly black-and-white ink jet landscape images taken around the Headlands, one of which is pictured here. If you click the image to make it larger you might just be able to make out the length of string Washburn stretched along the crack in the structure before taking the picture, and he does similar "activations" in all of his images. Simple in concept, but really beautifully executed.
- Vera Kachouh (SFAI) - I remember being struck by Kachouh's collection of vintage found photographs of water when I saw them back at the the Fall '09 open house, and she has a large grid of them on display in this show. She also is presenting a new video she shot inside an abandoned house in Lebanon that she has married to an audio interview with her father in which he describes its significance to their family.
- Joshua Short (UC Davis) - A fully-functioning pirate radio station constructed out of wood, cardboard, and other assorted detritus that visitors are invited to interact with in any way they see fit. Short's structure is literally bursting with useful details like a coffee maker, a mobile transmitter, a sleeping bunk, a porn collection. A fantastical highway in a state of purposeful collapse hangs off one side of the building.
- Patrick Gillespie (CCA) - Gillespie spent a significant amount of time in the Middle East in the last year, and his work deals with everything from our presence in that part of the world to ideas around checkpoints and borders and military history (all of which I find incredibly interesting). He is also showing his Prosthetic For Public Space, a sheepskin suit that completely covers his body and that he wears in performances where he tries to navigate public streets in it solo.
- Aaron Maietta (UC Berkeley) - Maietta has sealed up a long loop of string into cracks in the very wall of the building and then has created a motorized device that very slowly pulls said string out again. The string twangs suddenly and sharply as it pulls loose, turning the building itself into an instrument, and plaster showers down onto the gallery floor as patterns reveal themselves in the wall. I could sit and watch that piece for hours.
- Andrew Witrak (Mills) - An oversize mattress constructed completely out of cocktail umbrellas, their stems pointing up and creating a prickly bed of nails. A huge drawing of Witrak drowning underwater, the blue of the water filled in so completely with colored pencil that it could be mistaken for paint. Another large drawing of a smashed lawn chair, its outline filled in with silver metal leaf. There is an element of obsession in Witrak's work I very much appreciate.
- Michael Arcega (Stanford) - Arcega's recent work includes tents he constructs out of modern camping materials like plastic tarp, mosquito netting, and tent poles, except they take unusual forms. The one in this show is a life-size toilet, entitled Rest Assured (which is also apparently the name of a line of toilet seat protectors). The "tent" is ostensibly functional, but you will be relieved to hear no one made a move to test it.
- Michael Namkung (SFSU) - A longtime devotee of ultimate frisbee, Namkung has unrolled a stretch of paper on the floor that records the pattern created by his bare feet during a practice exercise. When creating the piece he first stepped in a frisbee full of ink, and he is also showing a video documenting his process. The clever part is that to see it you peer into a box where the video is reflected into that same frisbee full of ink.