exhibit reviews:
Reconciling America, SFAC
San Francisco, CA
by Tonya Warner
Mark Titchner, BALTIC
Gateshead, England
by Rea Cris
Amidst the Ruins, Mission 17
San Francisco, CA
by Tonya Warner
Reconciling America: Miraculous Encounters with the Mundane
Featuring: JD Beltran & Sebastian Bachar, Dina Danish, Jennifer Durban, Richard Haley, Lynn Marie Kirby, Ellen Lake, Brendan Lott, Paul Mullins, Julia Page, Zefrey Throwell, & Tucker Nichols
San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
San Francisco, CA
18 January - 15 March 2008
by Tonya Warner
The title of this exhibition can be somewhat misleading - I was expecting a devil-in-the-details, kitschy look at the often overlooked. Instead, the curator asks "How does one reconcile their relationship with America?" and the answer is "In very mundane ways." All the works on show draw, in some way or another, upon Americans' urge to make sense of their lives through a documentation of their past. We do this through keeping photo albums - both real and virtual - making home movies, writing diaries and blogs and contributing to the many social networking sites, from goodbooks to the clusterfuck that is facebook. In the artworks in this exhibition, we are reminded that the range of what is considered mundane is so dependent upon one's location, socio-economic level and personal history. They range from an outsider's fascination with what is mundane to others, such as Ellen Lake's video featuring obsessive collectors, to the personal, such as Paul Mullins's memory drawings. Stained pages ripped from a sketchbook, Mullins's works feature unremarkable details culled from his memories of growing up in West Virginia.
And then there is the inevitable presence of technology (especially inevitable in the Bay Area); Brendan Lott took images of American teenagers he found online and had them photorealistically painted by artists in China. These draw both from a contemporary fascination with found photos and a search for identity. For who, we are taught, is more prone to identity crises than the American teen? Jennifer Durban also utilizes the mundane presence of electronically displayed personal information with her sound piece entitled "I met my dad on Friendster." An account of how she was contacted by her biological father through the "networking" site, this sounds more like something that should be on "This American Life." It is debatable whether the piece, which was not even working when I visited, is something for a gallery show, nevertheless, it seems quite fitting for this exhibition as it involves a sharing of history, a quest for identity, as well as a transformation of the mundane into the miraculous.
America, being a spicy goulash of cultures, has bread in many who have deep roots here a yearning for some kind of cultural identity. This is evidenced by our fixation on knowing someone's ethnic heritage - being, say, white, American and middle class is seen as lacking. Being a country so large and varied, it is hard to say there is much of a national identity outside of pop culture and fast food. For those of us who do not buy into this and, most likely, do not support the U.S.'s foreign policy, we find ourselves in somewhat of an existential crisis - how to be American without resorting to that flag waving, gun toting, truck driving, McDonald's eating stereotype. Even if you are not patriotic, if you have U.S. citizenship, you are American - something we must all come to terms with at some point. I think the more we analyze how we operate both as a society at large and as individuals - to seek out and preserve our own personal stories since, as a culture, we cannot help ourselves - the closer we will come to better understanding the rest of the world.
http://www.sfacgallery.org/exhibitions_detail.fsp?id=367281
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