OFFSpace’s inaugural exhibition at Art Engine Gallery in San Francisco, CA featured three artists playing with dolls- making them, becoming them or just watching them.

Sara Harrell-Lai, Victor Barbieri, and Goody-B. Wiseman  explored the margins of this childish pre-occupation exhibit works both playful and alarming.

Victor Barbieri’s ultra slow motion videos of young girls sleeping capture in vivid detail the childish, doll-like perfection embodied in his passive subjects. Visceral and engrossing, innocent and disturbing, these pieces elicit strong reactions. The subversive power of these gorgeous images puts a twist on the age-old relationship between the artist/viewer and the model/subject. Derived from her museum of a fictitious colony of feral children, Pentegoet Park: The Terrible Ones, Goody-B. Wiseman’s small bronze sculptures conjure dark places we’d rather not acknowledge—The Beastly Baby meets Aesop’s Fables. The museum of feral children documents the terrifying voyage of … Read More »

Transience at Classic Car West Gallery in Oakland

Featuring the work of Christopher Burch, Marya Krogstad, Christopher McNulty, Karrie Hovey, MAP (Peter Foucault and Christopher Treggiari).

With all of the movement and upheaval in Oakland, the Bay Area and beyond it’s only fitting that OFFSpace located this, its 11th exhibition, in a car showroom in West Oakland—an epicenter of transformation and tumult with a rich cultural and political history.  The automobile is, after all, the quintessential American symbol of movement and “freedom”.

How then, does an exhibit explore transience, transience being after all an elusive state, a metaphorical place, a terrain fertile with yet unnamed trajectories, possibilities and ideas?

Reaching far beyond this primary symbol, and reflective of this space in flux the work presented in Transience shifts between the concrete and poetic. Embodying both concepts, Marya Krogstad’s Untitled is tangible yet evanescent, displaying shifting possibilities and repelling any … Read More »

The Chapel of the Chimes, aside from its historical importance and architectural beauty serves as a site of repose, contemplation, transcendence and remembrance. It is, on many levels, easy to draw comparisons of intent and use between the chapel and museums, as places where history, beauty and the sublime—the intuition that there is something powerfully beautiful and fearsome beyond our quotidian experience—coexist.

It is as impossible to consider the fact of death without memorials to the departed and the practice of rituals as it is impossible to contemplate contemporary art practices without the vitality of performance art. Using the idea of “the ever after” as a starting point, artists explore notions of observance, grief, longing and wonder. Poignancy, playfulness and sharp insights into the nature of the eternal are the common threads used to weave a series of site-specific mini-installations and … Read More »

Image courtesy of artist Michael Bianco

Brave New World, probed the issues, strident conversations and constant state of instability surrounding climate change with unconventional and even flippant responses

What is the role of the artist as citizen in this climate? How might we reclaim our choice, our connection, our social power when immersed in a deteriorating environment? Sixteen artists from around the globe addressed our hopes and fears for the future with objects, images and gestures that are poetic, irreverent and challenging. Ranging from direct actions with the public to meditative sound and video, photography and painting; these artists responded to our dismay, proposed solutions, offered support and tended to the soul with poignant métaphores.

Staged at Spare Change Artist Space in the vénérable offices of Rhodes & Fletcher, LLC. in the Merchants Exchange Building 465 California St Suite 838 in San … Read More »

It is not at all clear where the boundaries of ‘conceptual art’ are to be drawn, which artists and which works to include. Looked at in one way, conceptual art gets to be like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, dissolving away until nothing is left but a grin: a handful of works made over a few short years by a small number of artists… Then again, regarded under a different aspect, conceptual art can seem like nothing less than the hinge around which the past turned into the present. —Paul Wood

Artists image in order of appearance: Sharon Grace, Carissa Potter, Laetitia Sonami, Jacqueline Gordon, George LeGrady, Angus Forbes, Paul Kos, Julien Berthier, Tony Labat, and Guy Overfelt.

It is frequently said that “as goes California, so goes the nation” though this adage is often at odds with the image of San Francisco as artistically provincial or … Read More »

Shifting Margins included an international roster of artists and variety of opportunities (live cast presidential debates, artist and curator talks and receptions)  to engage in dialog around notions of marginalization.

Artists from Bangkok to San Francisco, Richmond to Istanbul and points between  shared their responses and reactions to hyperbole, brinkmanship, extremism, intolerance, xenophobia, and the social contract. Shifting Margins brought together works that inspire deliberation and argument in order to grapple with the significance and use of the edge, outsider-ness, privilege and what it means to be on the margin, whether by choice or force of circumstance.

Featuring work by Raquel Torres Arzola, ap-art-ment (Cathy Fairbanks & Laura Boles Faw), Victor Barbieri, Jeff Beekman, Jan Blythe, Gioj De Marco, Ellen Dicola, Moritz Fingerhut, Sean Fletcher & Isabel Reichert, Nathan Gorgen,  Elena Harvey, Çiğdem Kaya, Leejin Kim, David Leleu, Angela Pryor, Kat Schneck, Christie Ginanni Stepan, Jesse Walton, Brooke White and Michelle Wilson (with participants from Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center).

Shifting Margins embraced the center, the periphery and the bridge between … Read More »