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 »

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 »

In speaking to this era of both limitless and very limited possibilities, the artists in Proliferations I + II reflect upon and inspire strategies for understanding our present realities; reifying the plethora of voices and generating discussion from babble. This exhibition brought together artists who both critically and formally addressed the idea of Proliferations through examination of the body, history, bounty and waste, life and death.

OFF-Space presented Proliferations in two segments and at two sites; at the Wealth Management offices of Rhodes and Fletcher, LLC, and in a rented storage unit in the mainly blue-collar, industrial area of Hunter’s Point in San Francisco. These sites were chosen specifically to bring into focus the financial, social and cultural paradoxes of our time and the constantly shifting polarities of globalization and global citizenry.

Proliferations featured works by: Walter Aprile, Erica Gangsei, Ray Guillete, Michael Kerbow, Ruth Santee, Justin Hoover, Jessica Westbrook, Alicia Escott, Jennifer Weigel, David Stein, Michal Gavish, Peter Foucault, Steven Elliott, Alexis … 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 »