Kathrine Worel
Dear Anthropocene
For 2019 Photoville LA, OFFspace is proposing Dear Anthropocene, our first (but not last) venture to the southlands!
What does it mean to the human species to be confronted by a new paradigm of its own making?
“Dear Anthropocene” seeks to encapsulate tensions between the “removed” eye of the observer and the human desire to impose beauty and order on the tragic.
There is great suffering caused by greed with personal and universal impacts. The images chosen for this exhibition both document and transform the evidence of human folly into aesthetically compelling memoria.
“Dear Anthropocene” is a love letter, warning and gift from artists using the generosity of the medium.
Sketching out a few ideas for the design layout.
The Other Other
The other at its core points to polarizing dichotomies whether of race, religion, social class, gender, sexual preferences. To imagine the other one need not look far, perhaps there is someone standing next to you, and that person then is the other.
Conversely, the other can be as close as ones own reflection in a mirror. Throughout history the other has been a moving target as various cultures merge and blend through territorial expansion, war, and trade—today we can add to the list of factors television, trans-continental flight and the Internet. Our world is shrinking; people and ideas move over distances and through time in a way almost unimaginable twenty years ago. Yet we live in a world where cultural homogeneity as concrete fact has never been experienced. The lines of delineation are razor thin; we are all the other dealing … Read More »
Oh Maybe
On the evening of March 6, 2009 over 4,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area came to experience the Warhol phenomena through art, music, food and community, validating the Warhol prophecy in a double entendré of spectacle, reproduction and persona.
An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them. ~Andy Warhol
With oh, Maybe… OFFspace investigated key methodologies of Warhol’s practice, specifically reproduction, persona and spectacle; artists were chosen based on their ability to contemporize and expand upon these methodologies while the exhibition as a whole poses the questions; what might Warhol’s practice look like were he alive today? How might he have approached the explosion and accessibility of media? … Read More »
Altered: Looking Back/Going Forward at Minnesota St Project
Altered
Since our inception in 2007, OFFspace has staged a dozen exhibitions in unexpected spaces and host galleries. Featuring the work of over 100 artists from across the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Besides being pioneers of site specific curation in the Bay Area, OFFspace has singled itself out by creating shows with an wide range of artists and practices; bringing together emerging, mid-career and established artists, Bay Area and international art makers, as well as diverse genders and races.
To celebrate passing the 10-year mark OFFSpace proudly hosted Altered, a show part retrospective and part curatorial experiment. Altered evolved throughout the run being “re-curated” weekly by OFFSpace and invited partner curators, featuring a different theme and works with each iteration.
Over thirty artists who have shown with OFFspace throughout our 10+-year career will share work to create a physical library in one … Read More »
Pin Up
Featuring the work of Claudia Huenchuleo, Derek Cracco, Gillian O’Shea, Marie-Pier Frigon, Nina Wright, Victor Barbieri, Walter Aprile and Winnie van der Rijn
Inspired by the coyly adventurous calendar girl hanging on repair shop walls, we have brought together artists who explore representations and notions of femininity, feminism and gendered identity. Notions of whom or what is “ideal” are shifting along with standards of masculinity and the resultant imagery.
In an effort to embody the current debate in this charged landscape OFFspace presents “Pin Up!” with work alluding to, defying and epitomizing the new/post/disrupted ideal. Taking on fascination with weaponized sexuality, cheeky twists on the traditional supine, passive nude and the “candid” snapshot artists bring an array of views and perspectives to challenge and celebrate the idealized (fe)male form.
Gillian O’Shea re-examines the time-honored trope of the watercolor nude, her paintings are lush … Read More »
Pretty Baby
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
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 »
Ever After
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 »
Brave New World
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 »
Spread
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 »